They May Look Like Paintings, But These Are Actual Photos; Welcome to Trey Ratcliff's Stunning World of HDR Photography

The artwork below may look like a computer-generated graphic from a "Star Wars" movie, but it's actually a night shot of downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, made beautifully dramatic by the photographer, Trey Ratcliff, an Austin-based head of a video game company whose photographs have caught the eye of both art directors and fans of his young web site.  Ratcliff has married a love of travel with a keen interest in photography and already has an impressive gallery of shots from around the world.

He's a practitioner of HDR, or "high dynamic range" photography, a photo-enhancing technique that allows a photographer to oversaturate colors and manipulate lighting to create stunning digital photos.  Using a sophisticated single-lens reflex camera, Ratcliff takes several pictures of the same scene in rapid succession at different apertures, giving him a dark, light, and normal version of that scene.  Then, using a program called Adobe Lightroom, he groups his photos together and processes them with Photomatrix Pro.  Using Photoshop, he can adjust brightness, crop the photos, and fine-tune specific parts of a photograph.  He uploads his photos to Flickr.com, where he has thousands of fans, and posts many on his blog with the catchy name, stuckincustoms.com. 

Photographers are welcome to access his tutorial.  While Ratcliff uses a very expensive Nikon, he says almost any SLR camera now that sells in the $400+ range can capture the large amount of lighting data needed to create high resolution photos. 

I met Ratcliff last week for dessert in Brooklyn--he'd met my daughter the night before when she was buying rice pudding after her meditation class.  (I know that sounds a lot more like an LA experience than a NYC one, but there you go.)  Turns out Ratcliff runs a gaming company based in Austin, TX, as well as Malaysia, but nine months ago, he started experimenting with photography and HDR techniques.  Since then, his blog has been a big hit, receiving more than 250,000 visitors and 3 million page views in February.  Kodak and ad agencies looking for startling images for clients have used his pictures.  A couple of his photos just won a Smithsonian photo competition--look for two of them in a future issue of Smithsonian magazine. 

Meanwhile, here's one more of his shots--this one from Iceland.  And you'll find three more on the continuation of this post as well as a whole, new visual world at his web site.

From cathedrals to Dutch windmills . . . Ratcliff does not use the HDR technique on portraits of people, saying that faces do not lend themselves to such sharp changes in lighting.  I'm a fan not just because of his ability to use the HDR software, but because even without the manipulation of light, it's obvious he has an photographer's eye for composition and subjects.  Don't miss his portraits, as well.  All photos are posted here courtesy of Trey Ratcliff.  To see many, many more, check out www.stuckincustoms.com.

And, finally, here's Ratcliff's take on New York City's Times Square . . .

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