About

I often find that when I travel, the memories I bring home with me often seem fantastical and unreal.  Maybe they are, as I have always tended towards an active imagination and exaggeration.  But since I have started to travel as a photographer, this is the aspect of travel I strive to capture.

When people look at my images, I want them, at least in a small way, to be able to feel what it is like to watch the sun go down behind the Pyramids, or to eat lunch with a Mongolian herdsman with nothing but the endless steppe stretching to the horizon.  I want them to feel the heat, the cold, the sounds, the smells.  I want them to feel the breathlessness of stepping from a plane onto sun baked earth in a strange place on the other side of the world.

It may not be the most accurate record of a place, more like an attempt to distill into what is, in the end, a two dimensional picture, the experience of being there.

—————————-

Before I ever knew what an f-stop was, before I even picked up a camera with any sincerity, I traveled.

On my first trip, overland from the ancient ruins of Egypt, hitch-hiking through a Middle East at the onset of war, the open expanse of Siberia from the warmth of one of the worlds greatest train journeys, to the skyscrapers and electronics stores of Hong Kong, a camera was the last thing on my mind.  The nights I slept out rough in deserts and train stations outnumbered the number of rolls of film I shot during that entire year.

It was in one of those electronics stores on the appropriately named Nathan Road that I brought one of the early crop of compact digital cameras.  And soon after I fell in love.

Not long after returning home, and not wanting to return to the office work I had left behind, I made the rash to decision quit it all, combine my two loves, and become a travel photographer.  I brought my first film SLR (a Nikon F60) and set out to learn all I could about the black art (and science) of photography.

Now several years, a lot of work, many hours of shooting, unknown amounts of film, and a switch back to digital later, I feel that I can call myself a photographer.

I still travel in much the same fashion as I used to, a backpacker at heart, although a few creature comforts have crept in over the years, and the bag of only the bare necessities replaced with a bag full of heavy glass.

My name is Nathan Richardson and I am a freelance travel photographer.  I supply high quality travel imagery for editorial, commercial, and promotional use.  I am available for commissioned work anywhere in the world.

I travel rough, and I travel cheap.  I take inspiration from cinema and TV more than I do the old masters.   I don’t believe that correct exposure or perfect composition are the most important thing in making a great image (although they do certainly help).  I believe that being there, first and foremost is  the making of an image.  I like an image to have impact and drama, and if a little discomfort and a few hours of missed sleep are the price to pay, so be it.