Photography has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember.  I bought my first digital camera in 1997 (an incredible 1 mega pixels!) and have been taking photographs ever since.

I have been lucky enough to take photographs in some amazing places all around the world including Africa, the USA, Europe and of course, sunny Manchester!  During this time I have taken many photographs which I am very proud of.

I have always enjoyed sharing my favourite shots with others and  I am now pleased to announce that many of my favourite personal collection photographs are now available to purchase in a new online gallery.  I have tried to be quite selective in choosing which photographs I make available to buy and have only included what I consider to be my very best work to date.

To view the online gallery (currently split in to two galleries, ‘Wildlife‘ and ‘Landscape‘) and purchase prints, please click on the link below:

http://neilredfern.zenfolio.com/personal

I hope you enjoy looking at the photographs as much as I have enjoyed taking them Photographs can be purchased as prints and canvases as well as many other items such as keyrings and t-shirts.

Here are a selection of shots which I have now made available to purchase:

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who entered my first Facebook competition, the prize for which was a 30″ x 20″ canvas print of one of my recent safari photographs.

To enter the competition I invited members of my Facebook page to post a comment against their favourite photograph in this Facebook gallery, with the best comment being the winner.  The comment could be funny or serious.

In the week that the competition was open I received over 60 comments, which is fantastic!

What I hadn’t envisaged beforehand though was how hard it would be to actually choose a winner!  So many people left comments which were worthy of winning that I felt very guilty for only choosing one comment to win… so I’m choosing two!

The first winner is Richard’s B’s comment “Snobby monkey mimics The Thinker by Auguste Rodin” which really made me laugh!  Richard is right – the pose is uncanny – click here to see The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

The second winner is Richard W’s comment “I would love to win this picture as this is the one you had just had printed when we visited you to discuss our wedding, and it is absolutely stunning! It would be a wonderful memory of the fun we had planning our wedding.” Apart from it being a lovely comment, I was both surprised and proud that Richard had remembered I’d shown him this photograph when he booked me to photograph his wedding.

Congratulations to both winners!

Most of all though, thank you to everyone who enetered I wish I could have chosen more winners but I’m not sure I could afford it!

Please keep an eye on my Facebook page as I plan to hold more photography competitions in the future, but I think I will try and incorporate a voting system next time so I don’t have to choose the winner myself as I just feel too much guilt!

To celebrate my Manchester wedding photographer Facebook page reaching 1,000 members, I am holding a competition to give away a free 30″ x 20″ canvas print of one of the photographs I took on my recent safari in Kenya to one member of my Facebook page.

To enter all you have to do is go to my Facebook page, become a fan (unless you have already done so) and, in the album called “Canvas Competition – January 2010″, leave a comment underneath the photograph which you would like to win stating why you would like that photograph as a canvas.

The album can be accessed here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=141033&id=102456937975&ref=mf

The winner will be the person who in my leaves the best comment. The comment can be funny, serious, complimentary, short or long – I will leave it up to you!

All comments must be made by Wednesday 27th January 2010 – so one week today. Once this date passes I will choose a winner. People may comment on more than one photograph but no more than one comment per photograph please. Unfortunately the competition is only open to UK residents.

If you would like to invite your Facebook friends to enter the competition please click on the ‘suggest to friends’ link on the left hand side of my Facebook page, select all your friends (or those you wish to invite) and click send.

Thank you again to everybody who has already joined my Facebook page, I am very grateful.

Good luck to you all!

Regular visitors to my blog may remember that I got married in August at the Cragwood Hotel in Windermere and, for our honeymoon, we went on safari in Kenya.

Michelle and I had an amazing time on Safari, Africa is just awe-inspiring. Our week long safari in Kenya was fantastic, a really great experience. It was also great to be able to photograph so many animals in their natural habitat.

I have already made a couple of posts about our safari, which include some of my photographs from our safari, but I thought it would be nice to make a slideshow of some of my favourite photographs – so here it is!

Following my earlier post, here are some more photographs I took on our recent safari honeymoon in Kenya.

This selection contains some of my favourites from the trip, I am especially pleased with shot of the two monkeys putting their heads together and the photograph of the family of rhinos as the sun is setting.

A number of people have asked if they can buy prints of my safari photographs, which is great. To make this possible I have set up a professional gallery on Photobox, so should we wish to purchase prints of any of the photographs I have added to my blog, please visit: http://www.photoboxgallery.com/NeilRedfern

Apologies for not posting for a while, for those that don’t know I got married on 22nd August and have only just got home from honeymoon!

Michelle and I got married at the Cragwood Hotel in the Lake District and we had an amazing day, it literally couldn’t have gone any better. We were very lucky with the weather as it had been raining all week but on the Saturday (our wedding day) the sun was out for the whole day – some of our guests even got sunburnt!

For our honeymoon, Michelle and I went on Safari in Kenya for a week followed by a week in Zanzibar.  We had an fantastic time, the safari especially was an amazing experience.

During our safari we visited three parks in Kenya; the Masai Mara, Lake Nakuru and Amboseli. Each park was very different – The Masai Mara, my favourite, was very green and quite hilly whilst Amboseli, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, was very arid and flat and many of the animals there looked quite unhealthy due to a lack of rain earlier this year.

We were extremely lucky as we managed to see every animal we wanted to, mainly thanks to our brilliant driver Paul, who knew the parks inside out and seemed to instinctively know where the animals would be. We saw lions, leopards, elephants, cheetahs, giraffes, wilderbeast, zebras, baboons, black rhinos, white rhinos and hippos. We also went on a balloon flight over the Masai Mara which is something I will always remember.

I took a LOT of photographs on safari and will add some of my favourites here in sections rather than in one go. So, in no particular order, here is the first set:

And this is me at Lake Nakuru….