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Trey Ratcliff

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Fourth on Lake Austin

<h2>A Neo-Rockwellian Christmas</h2> <br/>When dad is a photographer, then there is a major degree of pressure to deliver photos on all the requisite holidays and celebrations! So, I decided to try to re-invent the family Christmas photo with HDR. Please note that many of my inventions go down in flames, but, as Winston Churchill said, “success is the ability to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm”.<br/><br/>Christmas scenes have a lot of light levels. The lights on the tree, the deep greens withn the branches, a roaring fire, lights in the room, reflections off the ornaments, and the like. It’s wild! I’m pretty sure this is why people like Christmas scenes so much - a wonderful treat for the eyes that is rich in texture and rich in light. Traditionally, it’s been very difficult to capture so much richness in a single photo, saving a lucky and heroic combination of shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and lenses.<br/><br/>The tree lights made the faces of my three stunt-children (who are also my real children) glow perfectly. No flash could have achieved this, unless you are the kind of Rambo-flash guy that would go bury one inside the tree to hit their faces from the left. But, let’s face it. That’s hard.<br/><br/>This was a 5-exposure HDR. You will notice that I often use 5 exposures, but note I could have done it with 3 exposures at -2, 0, and +2. Some silly Nikon cameras, like the D3X I use, will not let you step by twos, so I had to take 5 at -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2. The middle exposure, from which the kid’s faces were masked in and perfectly lit, was shot at f/4 aperture, shutter speed of 1/250, 100 ISO, and at 28mm.<br/><br/>- Trey Ratcliff<br/><br/><a href="http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2008/12/25/merry-d3xmas-from-trey-and-stuck-in-customs/" rel="nofollow">Click here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.</a>

<h2>Hay for the Winter</h2> <br/>You may remember this photo from the New Zealand Landscape tutorial video I released. I’m glad everyone is enjoying those videos btw!<br/><br/>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!<br/><br/>- Trey Ratcliff<br/><br/><a href="http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2013/04/21/hay-for-the-winter/" rel="nofollow">Click here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.</a>