The Glorious Church at Stanford During our amazingly fun Stanford photowalk, our entire unit crashed into into the church like the Allies setting up barracks inside a French cathedral.Right before we went in, as I climbed the stairs, one of the more nervous-types that was on the photowalk said, "Uhhh, I don't know if they will let us in because they are about to close." I said something to the effect of, "Who cares, we're going in anyway until they come tell us to leave!" And with that, we blew in through the front doors and spread out far and wide. I set up my camera and gave a little talk about my settings for the shot. I mentioned that in dark situations, you don't want your multiple exposures to all be 30 seconds. You need to widen your aperture and increase the ISO so that your all your exposures get finished, with the final one at 30 seconds. In this situation, I shot 5 exposures at 1 step increments with my 5 respective shutter speeds at 2 seconds, 4 s, 8s, 15s, and 30s.Oh, btw, now that I am one with sweet sweet SmugMug, click on the photo below to see it big and bold and proper. At the top, you can select whatever size you wish.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

Finding Dinner in the Alleys of Kyoto After exploring an area (and era!) of ancient temples in Kyoto, I was absolutely starving. I tend to get in a "shooting mode" where I do not undertake basic human necessities like eating, sleeping, and making regular bathroom breaks. In fact, Nikon makes this great set of diapers you should try. They're Japanese so there are little buttons that dispose of everything and leave you fresh as a daisy. Anyway, after shooting, I headed down into the old part of Kyoto to find a traditional Japanese dinner. I sat there for a long time, enjoying myself thoroughly.- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.

Building 43 at Google Wow I had a great time at Google! The guys and gals there I met were very nice and cool... After my Authors@Google talk, I stayed around for a while to take photos while waiting on the workshop to begin. There are sensitive areas of Google, of course, and I didn't even try to take pictures of any of that stuff... Building 43 is the central building of the whole Googleplex. It houses the offices of Marissa Mayer (who did not show up for my talk *ahem*), Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. I wanted to pop into their offices and make unique photos of their offices for fun, but I did not want to ask on my first visit. Wouldn't that be one of the most interesting things in the world? To see the offices of all these people? They don't have to be awesome and all James-Bondy -- even something mundane would be interesting, if captured in the right way. But I do picture Sergey stroking a white cat...- Trey RatcliffClick here to read the rest of this post at the Stuck in Customs blog.