The Azure Blue Indoor Pool at Hearst Castle I was able to get a private tour throughout Hearst - so that made for an amazing and long day!Thank goodness I had a mass of memory cards... I got so much footage it was crazy!I could have picked a bunch of shots to be the "first", but I thought this one was particularly wonderful. There are two enormous pools at Hearst Castle, and this is the indoor one. This is a nice vantage point because this spot is actually quite difficult to reach! There is no door behind me... so I had to "shimmy" along that edge you see... It was NARROW... the shimmy was like a video game, except while holding a $10,000 camera! Sketchy! But I just had to get over here because I could visualize the shot before it happened...Here's a cool fact about this pool. Nearby, there is a huge room that was intended for a gymnasium that Hearst never constructed. The State then made it usable for IT and Archive area, so the water cools the computers... wild, eh?- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog. - Trey Ratcliff | Stuck In Customs

Thank you again for all the comments and feedback - much appreciated and I read them all! A lot of requests come in for my tutorial about how I do these shots - you can find it here: HDR Tutorial

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StuckInCustoms > The Open Road I had a long lonely weekend in Iceland, so I took my rental Jeep out into the wild. I drove all over the country from dawn till dusk seeing what I could find. The sky and landscape was an ever changing palette of colors and clouds.The sun is so low on the horizon during the winter that it is almost like a 5-hour sunrise followed by a 5-hour sunset. I drove up and down one of these highways to the next, listening to all kinds of strange and eclectic music on my iPod, occasionally jumping out to take a shot of something like this... it was a perfect weekend.In the distance, you can see the snowy mountains which always seem to be just a few songs away.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Your Favorites - Enjoy! photo

StuckInCustoms > The Beginning of Time I spent most of a weekend working on this photo. One common question is, "How long do these photos take?" They take me anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. It's not contiguous work, of course, but some are so challenging that I have to keep returning to them time and time again.This spot in northern central Iceland is a bit perilous to reach. It's so perilous here at Godafoss, in fact, that I am glad my mom didn't see me getting into position. Is the water cold? Yes, yes it is.- Trey RatcliffRead the rest here at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Mountains Forever During the Yosemite PhotoWalk, the sky was beyond belief for the first few nights. The second half of the trip had fairly mundane skies. So, I was happy I went out there and got a lot of shots in the beginning!I’m often optimistic about the “future” of the trip, assuming that the sunsets will always get better and better. This rarely is the case, so I don’t know why I’m consistently optimistic about the prospects.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Sleeping In Driving from Reykjavik to Isafjordur is just about one of the longest possible drives you can make in Iceland in a day if you have a reasonable level of sanity. There comes a point when you feel like you're getting close, when you start weaving in and out of fjords. They are huge and each one seems to take over half an hour to drive around.In the midst of one of these, I espied an old house up the side of one of the valleys. It was partially obscured by a hand-built stone wall. I stopped the car and started hiking up the side of the valley to investigate. Once I got up there, I began to think that maybe this place was actually occupied! There were new lace curtains hanging in the windows and everything seemed to be in pretty good repair.So then, I felt like I was intruding, and not just exploring an old ruin. But, it was 3 AM in the morning, and I figured if anyone was indeed inside, they must be fast asleep. So I set up for a shot and then made a hasty elf-like egress.Read more here at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > The Chinese Mothership Look at this magical place in Beijing... it's on the edge of belief.I could hardly fathom the nature of this place. I expected the lights to appear on the grid with melodic tones a mystical, alien language, like in Close Encounters. But none of that happened... So I just stood there for a long time, thinking about how incredible this place was... and took my time, setting up my system for a fitting photograph.Remember when we were kids, and we never finished our food, even under the threat of starving children in China? Now, I say to my kids, you better eat your food, or else Chinese children will grow up and create an economic powerhouse. Well too late for that!This is the amazing National Centre for the Performing Arts, or as I like to say, the 国家大剧院 -- I find that rolls of the tongue a bit easier.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > The Amazing Eiffel Tower in Romantic Paris I shot this just recently with Tom Anderson. We almost didn’t leave the hotel because it was so stormy, but we had been watching the clouds all day. We started out with Miss Aniela at the Paris Opera before exploring the rest of the city. Sunset comes early here around this time of the year (about 5 PM or so), and it always sneaks up on us.Some of the best sunsets come right after storms… so it’s always worth a little adventure if you don’t mind getting a little wet… - Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Across the Line I found this guy in the Batu Caves just outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Batu Caves are enormous caverns that hold various Hindu temples and plenty of fruit for monkeys. This was shot after a quarter-mile spelunk through the cave and an emergence into a geological oddity – a shaft of sunlight shining downwards through an open chamber that had been carved through the limestone after centuries of rainfall.The day was bright and sunny, and the monkey sat alone in front of the inky blackness of the cave entrance. This was shot as a single RAW photo. It only had minor HDR adjustments, to get the texture in the wall and the details in his fur.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Swallowing the Ruins - Trey Ratcliff I made it to the heart of Ta Prohm, an undisturbed Bayon ruin out the outskirts of Angkor Wat. It was late in the day and there was a break in the afternoon summer showers.To me, the best thing about these temples and ruins is that you can go anywhere, high or low, safe or not. There are hundreds of tiny nooks, old broken stone doors, lost hallways, and mysterious carvings peeking out of the overgrowth. There are no tort-related legal signs barring you from going anywhere... explorer beware. Besides, if you got injured, the jungle and insects would eat you alive before the night was over.As soon as I walked into Ta Prohm, the thunder started rumbling around and dappled clouds rolled in. The rain started and stopped several times, so I would take refuge in crumbling crypts and hallways until the rain let up. I took some wrong turns, but I eventually ended up here with a break in the storm. I popped out with the 10 mm get this shot.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > The Solstice This came from one of my favorite nights in Iceland! This was shot around 2 AM, right when I started feeling loopy.I was on the edge of some precipitous volcanic rock, and there was a waterfall behind me. It fed this little area of rapids that emptied out into one of the fjords. There had been a light rain for a few hours, but the setting sun cut underneath the clouds to unleash some godly colors.About 10-20% of my HDRs are in portrait mode. I am just usually in landscape mode for some reason. Part of it has to do with the way people consume these things -- on monitors. I don't like making people scroll up and down to see a photo. That's kind of a drag. That's another reason I don't like those super-wide panoramas. They are so difficult to pan around, even though there are a lot of slick tools. It's just not a "viewing" experience while you are busy using a tool to manipulate the photo itself. Do you know what I mean?- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Hay for the Winter You may remember this photo from the New Zealand Landscape tutorial video I released. I’m glad everyone is enjoying those videos btw!This is my first Autumn in Queenstown. I watched these fields grow all summer long, and it’s cool to watch them all be cut down and rolled into these nice bales of hay. I notice that most farmers seem to wrap them up in plastic to protect them from the water… they are not as pretty then, so I was happy to get this photo before they were wrapped up!- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > Approaching Mount Fuji from the Old Village What a perfect place this is!I’ve been to Japan many times, but I never had the chance to visit Mt. Fuji! This time, Tom and I made a point to do it, and this was one of our fist stops. You can see much more about it in the video above!- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > What Does The Road Look Like on the Way to Mount Cook? It looks like this. :)- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

StuckInCustoms > An Icelandic Horse in the Wild If you want to see how I made this (and how you can too!), visit my HDR Tutorial. I hope it gives you some new tricks! I consider myself very lucky to have a network of great photographers around the world. I met most of them through Flickr, where we are constantly commenting and giving feedback on one another's photos. This has enabled me to meet up with great photographers wherever I travel, and they are great people to hang out with because they already know the prettiest places around where they live!One of the people I was lucky to shoot with was Rebekka in Iceland. We met at a coffee shop in Reykjavik and talked about where to go shoot. We jumped in her car and drove a while until we reached a fjord. Nearby were these horses running around like wild beasts. They have no fear of humans, and we were able to go right up to them. Their hair is very long, and I'm sure it evolved from the hyper-cold whipping winds around the edges of the sea.I don't shoot a lot of animals, because I find it hard to improve upon what other great animal photographers have done in the past. However, here is a tip for shooting animals. It's kind of a lame trick, but it always works. Use a wide-angle lens and get in close. It always makes the head look really big and cute. Humans love big-headed animals and it always makes them smile. Why this is, I have no idea... Note this trick also kinda works with babies.Seriously, thanks to Rebekka for a great day tooling around the fjords of Iceland.Oh, and yes.... I have pictures of Rebekka coming up at some point wearing her green-thing ... nothing too salacious for public consumption, I assure you... but in more of a "photographer in her milieu" milieu.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

The Azure Blue Indoor Pool at Hearst Castle

I was able to get a private tour throughout Hearst - so that made for an amazing and long day!Thank goodness I had a mass of memory cards... I got so much footage it was crazy!

I could have picked a bunch of shots to be the "first", but I thought this one was particularly wonderful. There are two enormous pools at Hearst Castle, and this is the indoor one. This is a nice vantage point because this spot is actually quite difficult to reach! There is no door behind me... so I had to "shimmy" along that edge you see... It was NARROW... the shimmy was like a video game, except while holding a $10,000 camera! Sketchy! But I just had to get over here because I could visualize the shot before it happened...

Here's a cool fact about this pool. Nearby, there is a huge room that was intended for a gymnasium that Hearst never constructed. The State then made it usable for IT and Archive area, so the water cools the computers... wild, eh?

- Trey Ratcliff

Click here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

The Azure Blue Indoor Pool at Hearst Castle

Camera: Nikon Corporation (Nikon D3x) |

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original size: 3976px x 5232px |

Current: 342px x 450px |

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