Highton-Ridley's photostream

New!
I've opened a Zazzle store to sell my art on gifts, t-shirts and cards. See some of my best work on gear in my store



Fellow Zazzlers can add my Zazzlit Google gadget to their blogs or web pages. It displays just the product lines they choose, from their own store or from across the marketplace, and they earn the commission from any resulting product sales.

Learn how in my tutorial here....
Lots of screen shots and exampes!



I was born in Edinburgh and my family moved to Plymouth when I was a child. I've been interested in photography since I was a teenager... aaah, the delights of the school darkroom and those wonderful chemical smells of developer and fixer.

I started to take photography seriously in 2005, quickly going from happy snapper to semi-pro fine art photographer by 2008.

People tell me that I have an eye for the unusual in the everyday, that I help them see everyday objects and scenes through fresh eyes, things so often overlooked because of their very familiarity.

I work entirely digitally now and primarily in monochrome, preferring the simple and subtle complexity of that medium.

Visual and word play appeals to me a lot and I often mix the two in my work, sometimes punning dreadfully but sometimes striking a title / image combination that speaks on many levels. I’ll leave you to decide which :)

My blog
I do my blogging on blogger - Musings in Monochrome.

Achievements
I completed volume one of a photo essay, full title “Urban Decay, Lost Spaces and Industrial Ugliness”, in early 2008 - to much acclaim, the BBC doing a feature article on it that they entitled “Urban Ugly”.

Subsequently the BBC commissioned a photo essay from me, Plymouth - Intimate glimpses of a hidden and changing character.

I was interviewed for BBC Radio in Summer of 2009

I’ve been a featured Hot Shot photographer in Digital Camera Magazine, had work featured in adverts (one with Warner Holidays), used on music CDs and in in-house publications (as far afield as Hong Kong).

My work is available on canvas or as matted paper prints via my website Highton-Ridley Fine Art Photography or on notelets / cards and other wares at my Zazzle store.

Workflow
Video Tutorial (starts to play after 10% is loaded)
If you’re interested in my workflow, I pretty much always shoot in RAW, making the exposure adjustments first. If needed for the style I’m looking for I’ll make a handful of exposures of the same image, combining them in high dynamic range software first. It’s then into photoshop where I do some initial sharpening (I use TLR Capture Sharpening) and then the mono conversion – nearly always using the b&w filter. After tweaks to curves, levels and some dodging and burning where needed I save this as a PSD file. For final production, I flatten the layers and after a final application of the unsharp mask I have a completed jpeg image.