Freelance Photographer Chris Ridley | Blog » News & Recent Events

Portrait: Will Giles – Botanical Expert at the Exotic Garden Co. Norwich

Chris Ridley — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:51:46 +0000

I finally managed to get Will Giles (of the fabulous Exotic Garden in Norwich) to sit still for a few minutes so I could take a quick portrait photograph of him. I’ve been wanting to photograph Will for a while now, so it’s awesome we finally made it happen. He has an incredible home, his lounge looks like a custom made studio set so it was great to be able to photograph him there. A wonderful chap, I recommend you go and check out his amazing tropical garden out too. If you are interested in having your portrait taken, please get in touch.

Advertising & Hair stylist photo shoot – American Crew

Chris Ridley — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 08:28:57 +0000

Recent photoshoot for a client of the male grooming / hair product manufacturers American Crew, great fun on the shoot, awesome model and excellent hair styling. Thanks to Hannah for the hairstyling, Jamie for the modelling, and Siobhan for her studio assistance, much appreciated as ever. I’ll have a few more portraits online in the next month or so – they all seem to have come at once! Photographs taken on location in Norwich, Norfolk UK with my trusty Elinchrom setup.

For the techies – photo people:
I was totally blown away with the sharpness in this photo from the Canon 24-70mm 2.8L (Combined with the Canon 5Dmk2) – Cracking lens it really is, especially for a workhorse lens! Click on the thumbnail pic to have a look at photo at 100%. Love it.

A free $5 Zinio Digital Magazine discount code for my readers!

Chris Ridley — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:37:50 +0000

I’ve got a little something to all my many awesome blog readers, facebook fans and twitter followers, courtesy of Find Digital Magazines and Zinio. So as you probably know I’m a massive fan of reading digital magazines on my iPad & Mac, and have managed to secure some $5 Zinio discount vouchers JUST for you guys, these aren’t universal codes, they are specifically for you. I’ve only got a limited number and when they are gone they are gone.

These $5 discount voucher can be used to purchase or get money off ANY digital magazine and digital magazine subscription, whether you’re in the UK or the US it doesn’t matter. If you’ve not tried reading digital magazines before here’s your chance! You don’t have to buy a photography magazine, you can buy anything from the 20,000+ magazine selection. You can download magazines to your Mac, PC, iPad or Android.

How do I get my voucher?!

1. Sign up to my photography mailing list below

2. Either ‘Like’ or ‘Follow’ me:

‘Like’ me on facebook here: Chris Ridley Photography
or: Follow me on twitter: www.twitter.com/SquidleyRidley

3. Wait for your code to be emailed to you and then go spend it!

As soon as I’ve received notification that you have signed up and ‘liked’ or followed me on twitter, I’ll email you your personalised $5 discount code as soon as I can. Then all you have to do is follow the steps in the email I’ll send you to get your discount. Bear in mind I’m personally sending these emails so bear with me! The vouchers expire by th end of the year.

There are squillions of magazine available in pretty much every category you can think of. You can use them on your iPad, Mac, Pc or Android.

New travel photography albums ready for your veiwing

Chris Ridley — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:11:48 +0000

I’ve been adding new photographs very sporadically to my archives over the last few months whilst away, so I thought I would take just a minute to show you some of my new travel photography galleries. The most recent gallery is the Cambodia album, followed by Vietnam, then Bali, then Qamea, then Vanuatu. I hope you like the albums so far. I’d love to hear which images you like, it’s great to hear which you think stand out. I do hope you enjoy. All other travel photography albums can be found here, on the travel photography archive page. All of these travel photographs are available as prints, and also available for rights managed license.

Underwater photography with a Poseidon rebreather – Testing kit

Chris Ridley — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:59:28 +0000

We had the opportunity to test out a new scuba diving rebreather courtesy of Poseidon UK and my local scuba diving centre in Norwich, Norfolk. This Poseidon Diving Systems MkVI Discovery rebreather is the first truly recreational closed circuit rebreathers, perfect for the professional underwater scuba diving photographer.

Without boring you with the details they allow you to spend a lot longer underwater, and you expel no bubbles whatsoever, thus giving you a massive advantage by allowing you to get much closer to the underwater world that you would normally get with a standard scuba diving setup. This was my first time on a closed circuit system like this, and it was pretty enjoyable – I can definitely see the advantages to this kind of system for underwater photography. I only tried this new Poseidon MkVI Discovery rebreather in a swimming pool – so apart from a few rogue plasters there was little life to be scared away… not an adequate test.. but maybe next time I’ll be using it properly.

It was an interesting feeling breathing through a rebreather, once I got my buoyancy sorted it was incredibly easy to use (within reason – it is a piece of mega tech!)
Getting my head around the fact the air is just going round and round and being injected and mixed, cleaned and pumped to make it fresh again was a weird feeling! They retail around £5000, with around £20 per scrubber replacement every 3hrs.. a mere snip! Found some cool scuba diving t shirts whilst looking for scuba kit though…

My View of Lindos, Rhodes. A walk along the streets..

Chris Ridley — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:47:23 +0000

Walking around the pretty whitewashed streets of Lindos both in the early morning and late evening when the sun was at it’s coolest and before the tourists got in the way. The fourth image down is my favourite in this selection, the contrast between the two sides and textures makes for an interesting image.

Photos of the wedding chapel at St Pauls Bay, Lindos on Rhodes island – Greece

Chris Ridley — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:04:12 +0000

In the pretty town of Lindos, on the South coast of Rhodes sits the little chapel at St Paul’s Bay, where we attended a great wedding a couple of weeks ago. Out for a stroll in the evening to take a few photographs of the bay, having been sheltering from the heat for most of the day – well, since laying in the sun a few hours earlier… The wedding went really well and was very enjoyable to be there, a pretty place to have your wedding. Thanks Kerry & Chris!

I’ll hopefully be putting some of my other images of Rhodes up in the next few days, I have a few more photographs I would like to add on my blog assuming I remember. It was a great 10 day little escape from the grey skies here in England, and miss the glorious Rhodes sunshine already!

Welcome to Rhodes, now where’s the plug socket?

Chris Ridley — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:51:15 +0000

We arrived in Rhodes early yesterday morning, to a beautiful blue sky and wonderful heat. We had arranged to meet the owners of the rented accommodation in the town square at 7:30am, as supposedly the place was hidden away somewhere in the back streets of Lindos. We grabbed the first taxi we saw, “all prices fixed and in book” was the answer to the question to the extortionate fee on the taxi rank at the airport. The classic line: “we must get petrol” mid journey didn’t help when the obligaory timer is tick-tocking away.

After the somwhat scary taxi ride from airport to Lindos, we arrived at the beautiful central square, bathed in golden morning light and under a massive sweeping tree acting as the local roundabout. So we sat, as arranged, for the owners of of little self catering villa/flat to come and find us, very few people around apart from the street cleaner and a couple of old boys. Half an hour passed, still no sign of them. Decided it was probably a good idea to try and find some information about the location of this place and maybe get to it ourselves. We only had a number and a name, no one answering the phone, still asleep perhaps. Eventually asked a couple of locals who were sitting around, and after much gesticulating back and forth, they managed to get in contact with a man who knew someone who knew someone else… either which way “2 minutes and woman will come” sounded like an epic solution. 10 minutes later an old woman appeared out of a side street, shorty followed by our man, Stavros.

The man, Stavros

Arriving in a small moped, back modified to allow a case or two to be lashed to the back, I lifted our small suitcases onto the rear and watched him tie them up with some old cord. Foot to the metal his moped was travelling at just over 2mph, and easy stroll behind him as he weaved through the paved, worn smooth and winding backstreets, with white walls and cane shading over most sections woven with vines of some kind – to shield from the already baking morning sunshine.

On reaching our accommodation we were pleased to be able to stare out of our veranda onto the beautiful blue green bay. Lovely little room, small sink, hob and saucepan, just the one, or 2 if you account for the metal teapot. Metal teapot, probably perfect for boiling rice I guessed.

Starting to unpack, phone battery almost dead, best send the relevant people a message to keep them in the loop, charger found.. Just need to find the plug socket. Hmmm. Nowhere. Surely you can’t have a room somewhere as developed as this and have no plug sockets? Surely. Searching high and low, found nothing. Hmnn. Here for photography and a wedding and nowhere conveniently obvious to charge the plethora of electronics I seem to stuff my bag with. Gave up, decided I would think about it in the morning.
Ah right, ‘that’ plug socket. Literally the three random non symmetrical holes in the wall. If only i had realized. I had thought they were, well, holes. Nervously plugging in our travel adapter it was soon evident that there was infact some form of power from these magical holes. Perfect.

Time to taste the local hummus and halloumi, beer and cocktails. Wonderful.

Some iPhone images of our first day:
[nggallery id=7]

Using TinEye to check if your images have been used online – I found one!

Chris Ridley — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:19:09 +0000

A great result from TinEye reverse image search today, a recommendation to anyone who may have images online that they want to try and keep track of, especially if they are not watermarked.

A little about TinEye: “TinEye is a reverse image search engine. TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.”

I have spent a fair amount of time on TinEye in the last couple of years, I was one of the early users of this software back when it was only just out of it’s beta stage, and loved the idea. It its early stages, it struggled finding images, as it still hadn’t indexed some of the bigger search engines and image libraries, and I seem to remember telling them about loads of image libraries that hadn’t yet been indexed. A couple of years on and they are really starting to get involved, it seems the search engine has now indexed over a billion images, a fair feat for a company that is still running on donations only.

So I randomly did a check on a couple of images on one of my blog posts, I chose my blog post with an image of some french shutters (Image 3)- I chose this one because looking at Google Analytics the night before I was getting search traffic for ‘french shutter photos’ and as I remembered that this image for some reason had slipped through my watermarking process.. and may be a easy target. I loaded up TinEye and pasted the URL of the actual image on my website, clicked the search button and let it chug away for literally only a couple of seconds.. and it returned an interesting result. (Image 1)

Tineye found a reference to one of my images, and showed that it had searched 1.6 billion images, and had picked up a usage of my image on quite a large blogging website, so I checked the URL provided by TinEye and had a scout around the site until I found it. Nothing sinister about the usage, they were just talking about choosing the right image to represent your blog post, but even so – they didn’t ask for permission to use this image, so I was justified in contacting them. Due to the positive nature of the image within this blog post, I spoke to the lady in charge of the website who apologised for the error, and I agreed that she could continue using the image as long as she linked to my website from the image. She changed it straight away, what an excellent result.

So thanks TinEye, a great outcome, and I suggest that you should do the same with your images. It’s a long process, but perhaps a random check now and again doesn’t hurt.. you never know, you might just find one..

For more information have a look at TinEye here.

Time for an epic adventure, South Pacific and round the world!

Chris Ridley — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:23:06 +0000

So we’ve decided, finally that thing we need more than anything right now is a mega round the world trip. Just like that. It’s been a long time coming, and the timing has always not been quite right, but it seems, come October this year we may have the opportunity for an adventure. Watch this space! I think there may be some awesome photographic opportunities along the way too..

iPhone photograph

Finally here, my iPad…

Chris Ridley — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:00:07 +0000

About time… I took the plunge and bought a 32Gb WIFI iPad last week, loaded it with photos and showed my photos to a few people, great feedback – leading to one person going to buy one for themselves the next day. I’m not going to bang on about how good it is but rather put it to the test over the next few months, and if it’s honestly just sitting on the shelf unused after a couple of months I’ll stick it up for sale… (yeah right!)

So I bought it primarily for promotional purposes, it’s a great device to just have me to show prospective clients new work, but also as well as for me just to have a device that I can keep a huge amount of photographs on for just myself! I hardly print any images at all these days, and viewing them on the iPad feels as good as actually printed.

Putting an X in the box, it’s voting time again.

Chris Ridley — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:55:09 +0000

I got my vote in on this beautiful morning in Norwich South, weird feeling when you put an X in the box and hope you can actually make a difference, even though I still don’t feel I know all the issues and all the outcomes of every candidate – so it’s always a bit odd hoping you’re backing the right side…when you don’t know all the facts, especially when you look at policies that affect photography / photographers / arts & culture. Although I have voted before, for some reason this election seems to mean more to me than any of the others… perhaps it’s just what getting older does? or maybe because it’s been on all media for so long now almost forces you to engage with it that much more, it’s all good surely?

Either way, the deed is done, let’s see what happens tonight… and the next few years…

Architecture & skyline of Hong Kong | Photographs

Chris Ridley — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:13:10 +0000

Nine photographs of the architecture and the skyline of Hong Kong from my recent trip.. all these images are represented by the Malaysian stock photography agency: Photo Asia, to see them here please visit photoasia or here if you want to license straight from me via my photoshelter archive.

The jagged tooth like tower blocks, looking up from the Happy Valley Racetrack.

Looking over Hong Kong Park:

The Lippo building, designed to look like Koalas climbing trees!

Looking out from the traditional Star ferry, looking towards Central and Wan Chai.

The neon Hong Kong skyline:

All my images are represented by the Malaysian stock photography agency: Photo Asia, to see them here please visit photoasia or here if you want to license straight from me via my photoshelter archive.

One of my images featured on the Photo Asia agency homepage

Chris Ridley — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:31:02 +0000

Photoasia, a Malaysian photography stock agency expressed an interest in representing my recent photographs of Hong Kong from my trip in January, and pleased to mention that they were kind enough to use one of my images of the Hong Kong skyline on the front page on their website which was a pleasant surprise, thanks PhotoAsia!

Link: My portfolio on Photoasia
Link: Photoasia website

Photography sessions with DJ Janette Slack | London

Chris Ridley — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:11:18 +0000

I had the opportunity to photograph Janette Slack, an talented DJ based in London, and jumped at the chance to spend some time with her at the opening night of a new night at a venue in Reading.

From Janette’s website: Janette Slack – from breakthrough young spark to fully fledged rising star.
In a very short space of time, Janette Slack has established herself as one of the hottest artists around. Based in London, her sound is rooted in electro, house and breaks which she delivers with an infectious energy. This year alone, Janette’s played Global Gathering, rocked clubs from Australia to Croatia, been featured in The Observer, presented for Channel V (Asia’s MTV equivalent), appeared in multi-page fashion shoots, and featured a guest mix and interview on Radio 1. Most excitingly she’s returned to the studio, and come up trumps with her new single for Air Recordings, ‘Take It/’Around The Block’. More here

The next day we took the opportunity to get some more personal shots, Janette is constantly on her own wheels, so we felt this would be a great chance to get some images away from the DJ image, so we found a few locations around central London to get some great movement photographs.

An enjoyable weekend, thanks Janette.

Links to Janette:
Myspace page & Website & Facebook Fanpage