Every child born with a cleft anywhere in the world has the opportunity to live a full, productive life.

Clefts are a major problem in developing countries where there are millions of children who are suffering with unrepaired clefts. Most cannot eat or speak properly. Aren’t allowed to attend school or hold a job. And face very difficult lives filled with shame and isolation, pain and heartache. Their clefts usually go untreated because they are poor – too poor to pay for a simple surgery that has been around for decades.

Unrepaired Clefts

Clefts are a major problem in developing countries where there are millions of children who are suffering with unrepaired clefts. Most cannot eat or speak properly, aren’t allowed to attend school or hold a job.

Shame & Isolation

Being born with a cleft in a developing country is truly a curse. Every baby born in Uganda with a cleft is given the name Ajok which means literally, “cursed by God.” Some newborns are killed or abandoned right after birth.

The Good News

The good news is that every single child with a cleft can be helped with surgery that costs as little as £150. It’s a true modern-day medical miracle that gives a child back their life.

Beijing, China, – Smile Train has reached an amazing milestone: the 250,000th cleft surgery was performed in China on January 6th. This huge achievement was marked by 3 simultaneous surgeries: a primary cleft lip, a primary cleft palate, and a secondary surgery were all performed in General Coal Hospital in Beijing.

Let me go backwards slightly here and explain why I have a separate site away from www.richpearsondesigner.me, it’s simple really I have literally thousands of images taken over the years, even narrowed down to 500 for this site there was no way I could display and fit them into www.richpearsondesigner, hence this site dedicated purely to all my favourite images.

The template for this website and www.richpearsondesigner.me is identical and they both use a custom CMS and are driven by mySQL databases, however the brand is a different colour, the beauty of my new brand logo is that it just works in any colour thrown at it, therefore changing it to fit this site was easy.

I have also added a basic numbering system to the galleries and a Paypal cart for anyone who wishes to purchase any images, you know im not expecting to sell any that’s not what this site was for, but hey you gotta try someone somewhere out there might be looking for something specific and I may just have it

Anyway enough babbling, please have a good look around and enjoy the site, ohh yeah and one last important thing, to make this a success for me, please comment as much as you like on the images, I have added commenting not only on this blog but on each gallery area.

Lastly before I go, don’t forget I’m available for hire at any time, just fill in the form on the website or email me/call me direct and we can discuss your requirements

After spending a lot of time, researching, designing and changing my mind so many times, I finally settled on a design I was really happy with.

I lot of time and effort has gone into this new site to get it right, and being happy with the brand was the first stepping stone to get over once I had settled on my logo then everything else just seemed to glide into place.

The site itself is built on a content management system backend with a PHP template and mySQ: database, this allows me to update the site very easily and quickly, built to modern standards and using the latest JQuery plugins the site is smooth and fast and works in all modern browsers without a problem.

Over the years I have doen so much work that when trying to add it to this site I didn’t know where to begin, it’s not just accumilating all your work to display it’s designing the graphics and writing about each item that is the hardest part of designing a portfolio site. This is why I took the decision not to display everything I have ever done but to be more subjective and try and choose more recent work. It’s hard when it’s your own work to actually decide what is the best bit of work you have done.

I have used a lot of apple vector graphics in my design, simply because they are beautiful products, I use them everyday and they show the work off I have done in a much better way than a standard image put on a page, plus I love apple products they may be overpriced but when you use them you can see why.

I hope you enjoy looking around the site and viewing my work, don’t forget to drop me a line and feel free to ask any questions you like.

Enjoy

The age old problem has always been the identity, I have had many a logo over the years that I initially like and then 2 days later dislike and get shot of.

After looking for inspiration (yes google is your friend) I finally stumbled across a logo idea that I really liked, I thought to myself yes this could work for me, re-drawing the basic design and adapting it to fit my name I came up with the logo you see today on this website. Round is really in at the moment, clean simple modern and fresh it will never get tired or feel out of date.

Logo done, I set about deciding what I was going to do with the website itself, after spending hours looking at theme forest a particular theme jumped out at me again and again, I couldn’t help but keep going back to it. So that was it purchased and installed, however as much as everyone would like to believe themes from theme forest don’t just work out of the bag, a lot of minor/major changes have to take place to get it the way you want, without the knowledge I have of design, servers, code and graphic layout this site would not have worked out of the box. The design is now complete (as you can see) but boy did it take a long time to get it how I wanted it.

I have taken thousands and thousands of photos and although with all the best intentions I have catigorized and folderised the images I have never gotten round to building a dedicated website for them. It was this frustration that let me to the conclusion that I couldn’t possibly fit all my life experices through the lens on my portfolio website, and hence Rich Pearson Photography was born.

The massive process of sorting through my images took place and having narrowed it down to 1400 images I am now down to a mear 400, these 400 will soon take pride and place on my new website, the building process has began and will soon be finished, stay tuned for the official go live date.

As a young lad mountains have always interested me, the sheer size and dramatic way they dominate the landscape, the summer months, the winter months, the snow, weather conditions and the beauty of them has kept me intrigued. I was lucky enough last year to walk to the summit of Snowdon in Wales, taking lots of pictures along the way and generally enjoying the experience it was something I had wanted to do for sometime and when the opportunity arose then the wife and me jumped at it. Armed with poles, walking boots and a decent weather forcast we managed the feet.

So when DrekTrek came to me asking whether I could help them build a new website for there forthcoming trek to Everest Base Camp I agreed without hesitation.

The website is built around a content management system to allow the trek(ees) to post blogs and submit images whilst there are in nepal, this was an important factor for the owners as they want to make sure the site is kept upto date on a daily/weekly basis. Many a website doesn’t get updated until after the event, visions thoughts and experiences are often missed and not portrayed correctly after the moment has passed.

This website hopes to address the social networking aspect of modern webdesign and should allow all those magic moments to be captured via twitter, blogs and flickr for images.

I wish the crew and trek(ees) of the expedition the very best of luck and hope to see all the amazing content filter though on a daily basis courtesy of the latest and greatest smart phones.

Who knows one day I may even make it myself to Nepal.