The family behind your wedding photos.

The founder

D. Ravinder Reddy, press photographer.

Ravinder garu studied science at Kakatiya University, Warangal, took an MA in English from Vikram University, Ujjain, and completed a diploma in photography at the College of Fine Arts and Architecture, Hyderabad. His first camera, an Agfa Isoly, was a gift from his father. He began his photography career at a local newspaper in 1988 and went on to freelance for publications such as Deccan Chronicle, News Time and India Today.

His news work took him to some of the hardest stories of the time. In December 1992 he photographed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, kept his film rolls from being confiscated, and supplied his pictures in Delhi the next day. TIME ran his photograph, credited to him, in its 21 December 1992 report “The Unholy War”, and his Ayodhya pictures were published in India Today; one was later included in Prashant Panjiar’s anthology The Definitive Images. He covered the 1993 Latur earthquake, and his pictures from there were widely published. He documented the Naxalite movement in Telangana, interviewed and photographed the Naxal leader Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, and has called the police firing at Basheerbagh in 2000 the most challenging assignment of his career.

In 1994 he set up his own agency, Ravi Press Photo, and went on photographing political life, from Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s years as Chief Minister to national leaders such as Amit Shah. After an accident in 1996 he turned towards film, portrait and wedding work: he was the stills photographer on Ram Gopal Varma’s Daud (1997) and took some of the earliest photo shoots of Allu Arjun and Mahesh Babu. His assignments have included work for Reuters, AFP, UNICEF India, The Week and The Indian Express.

His books include India – Andhra Pradesh (2002), Hyderabad: Portrait of a City (2005) and Threads of Hope (2011), which won the National Tourism Award 2010–11 for excellence in publishing. In 2011 he co-edited YSR: Man of the People with Raghu Rai and K. Prabhakar, and opened Ravi Gallery, a photography gallery in Somajiguda. His panoramic GigaPan image of the Charminar was selected for Millennium House’s Earth Platinum, the record-holding largest atlas in the world. His Daud stills were shown in Heat, a 2003 group exhibition in New York reviewed by The New York Times, and in 2023 the Indian Photo Festival held a retrospective of his work at the State Gallery of Art, Hyderabad. More recently, as honorary adviser to a Telangana heritage research group, he has reported Mesolithic rock paintings and Satavahana-era inscriptions.

Weddings sit alongside all of this. He brings the same journalistic approach to them, and it has earned him the trust of business families in India and abroad, many of whom he photographs regularly. He still leads every Ravi Studios wedding himself — the planning, the crew, and the eye on what a family will want to see again in twenty years.