Paris Tutorial Videos Now Available!

Want to learn more about my post-processing and follow me around on a shoot in Paris? Even better, you get to see the same thing from Miss Aniela! Pop over to the Midnight In Paris video in the new store… I think you’ll love it – especially the post-processing bit. And, as always, if you don’t mega-love it, you can have all your money back – no worries

Daily Photo – The Ceiling of the Paris Opera House

I stole this photo-taking idea from Matt Knisely! At first, I would lay down on my back and try to get the shot. But that was frustrating and bothersome. Then I saw Matt just put his camera on the ground with a timer then run away! So that’s what I did to get this shot… although it took a few takes to get it to line up right…

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris, Travel

New HDR and Post-processing Video Available!

We finally have everything wrapped up in a neat little package for you! Check it out here! As always, we will give you all your money back if you don’t learn a ton about HDR, post-processing, and creating amazing images. I’ve linked you there to the bonus version, which costs $4 more, but contains all the bonus stuff, in addition to all the standard items below! Tutorial Includes Part 1 – Trey Ratcliff Photoshoot (823 MB) Part 2 – Trey Ratcliff Post-processing (2.7 GB) Part 3 – Miss Aniela Photoshoot (2 GB) Part 4 – Miss Aniela Post-processing (1.2 GB) Bonus Video – Photo Composition (955 MB) Bonus Video – Miss Aniela Tiger Photo (2.7 GB) Sample Working Files Part 1 (640 MB) Sample Working Files Part 2 (811 MB) Sample Working Files Part 3 (645 MB) Access to Private Clubhouse Community

Daily Photo – Afternoon at the Chateau

Here is one of the many images created during the workshop. I decided I liked this slightly off-center version rather than right down the middle. I loved the one right down the middle too, of course, but just was giving the situation a bit of a curve-ball. The tree branches seemed so interesting to me, and I wanted to accentuate them in post processing so they felt like one hundred little arrows, all pointing at the chateau.

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris

Any of you on Reddit?

Here’s my reddit account (treyratcliff)… if you are on there too, drop it below in the comments! I spend a bit of time over there every day! It’s wonderfully distracting!

Daily Photo – Under the Basilica of St. Thérèse, Lisieux

After the adventure with so many great people in Paris, Tom and I rented a car and started a little road trip through Normandy. We ended up here in Lesieux, thanks to sweet sweet Stuck On Earth. The cathedral is quite amazing, and, if you go, don’t forget to go look at this extremely ornate chapel underneath the larger one. The intricate tilework must have take ages…

Filed under the categories: France, Lisieux, Travel

Watch me edit this live

I decided to throw in a bonus for Day 2 of the online class that starts this weekend on the Midnight In Paris page! Each day you’ll learn a lot about photography from me and Miss Aniela. You’ll learn landscape, HDR, post-processing tricks, and even the special tricks that Miss Aniela employs with her models.

At the end of the Q&A session for day 2, I’ll be editing this photo below from beginning to end!

Daily Photo – The Colors of the Museum

Right before the in-person Midnight In Paris event, we took the class on a private photowalk to my favorite museum in the world! We ended up spending several hours here. I didn’t even get in trouble for my tripod this time!

I have soooooo many photos of this place. I’m trying to hold back and not post them all, even though I want to! We’ll just both have to wait, I guess…

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris, Travel

How-to

I have more about the how-to of this photo in the Part 1 of the upcoming Midnight in Paris video! Both Miss Aniela and I are really looking forward to this thing!

Daily Photo – Triangle of Fauna

Sorry for the dumb name of this photo. I was feeling VERY lame when I made it up. Even here, into my third sentence, I still can’t come up with anything better. Either way, I hope you enjoy the photo!

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris, Travel

No Bathroom Selfies

I notice a growing trend online in “Bathrooom Selfies.” You can have some peace in knowing you won’t be seeing any from me in the future. But I do notice that I used the word “Selfie” in the title today. Now that I write that, it feels like the kind of word a female would use when she takes a photo of herself. There should be a male-version of this word. Until then, I guess I’ll just use it in the amorphous manner.

Daily Photo – Shadow Selfie

Out behind the chateau, there was an extremely powerful light. It kept getting in my way, so I decided just to go ahead and use it! I like shadow-photos, but they always make you look a bit bottom-heavy.

BTW, if you want to get strange colors in night photography, try setting your white-balance to “cloudy” — this will do some funky stuff to the coloring! Remember, if you shoot in RAW, you can always change the white balance later!

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris, Travel

Awesome Melbourne PhotoWalk!

I’ll get some more photos up soon, but you can see many photos from the Melbourne PhotoWalkers here! Melbourne has one of the most vibrant photowalk communities I’ve ever come across!

January 26 is the day!

Of the big event at Midnight in Paris! Even if you can’t watch live, you can still get it later. This photo below of the bookcase is part of the video… there is a pretty funny scene in episode 1 that you’ll enjoy around this… because I never even saw this shot myself!

Nik Silver Efex Pro

I processed this photo using Nik Software Silver Efex Pro. I recommend it!

Daily Photo – The Fantasy Bookcase

I suppose bookcases will become more an antique in the near future. It’s hard for me to imagine my kids having a lot of bookcases when they get older… the vast majority of everything they read now is on a tablet. I suppose they can have a bookcase with a few tablets in it, but that’s kind of like having a buggy-whip case full of lightsabers.

Filed under the categories: France, Paris, Travel

Want the info on any of my shots?

Every day, I upload the max rez image along with all the EXIF info to SmugMug. To see the EXIF for yourself, just click through the image to the SmugMug page where you can see a little “i” when you hover over the image. Click that to get the info!

Daily Photo – The Cemetery in the Monastery Castle

I know that purists tend to call this place more of a monastery, but I call it more of a castle! To me, after all, it just looks like an almighty castle (said in Bob-Ross-voice), doesn’t it?

For this one, I got down pretty low with the Nikon 14-24 lens. I had the engines pushed to Warp 10 at 14mm! The rest of the EXIF is ISO 100, f/8, 15 seconds for one of the exposures.

Filed under the categories: France, Mont Saint Michel, Nikon D800, Travel

Join us for the Online Class – it quickly approaches!

In a few weeks, we’ll be having this great online photography training event called Midnight in Paris. You’ll notice today’s daily photo is one of the ones in this little video-teaser below!

Daily Photo – The Royal Stairs

I imagine all sorts of royalty going up and down these stairs. I wonder what it was like, back in the day, when people would come over to the chateau… arriving on horse-drawn carriages and the like… coming in to ascend these stairs… I wish we had video footage from back then. It would be so interesting.

Maybe someone will invent a quantum-time video capture device. Then we could set it up on the stairs and dial it back to the mid 1800′s to see who went up and down the stairs.

This reminds me a little of what my little 7-year-old girl said. She was looking at some old photos from the 20′s. She said, “You know dad? Like in the olden days? Like when everyone used to dress in black and white?”

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris, Travel

Rankings in NZ

This is a funny post from New Zealand photographer Jason Law: NZ Photographers more popular than our Prime Minister on Google+… Pretty funny to see that myself and a few other close photographer friends here in Queenstown/Central Otago are more popular than our Prime Minister.. Perhaps +Todd Sisson or +Stefan Haworth should run for Prime Minister next term?.. Check out www.circlecount.com for some interesting stats.. http://www.circlecount.com/nz/profileslist/

Daily Photo – Exploring the Medieval Mont Saint Michel

I think if you ever go to Mont Saint Michel that you should really try to stay up on the island. Hotel space is extremely limited, but it gives you the chance to walk around the old walled city deep into the night. All the tourists are gone, and the only people around are the supposed 46 people that live there, according to Wikipedia.

Here, an old man walks home after a day at work.

Filed under the categories: France, Mont Saint Michel, Nikon D800, Travel

My collected thoughts on Star Trek, especially the movies

I don’t know why you would care… but, if you like Star Trek too, then I know why!

- Star Trek V, somehow, has worse special effects than the first four.

- Star Trek III has some of the worst writing of any of them. I wonder if George Lucas used it as a model for Episode 1.

- Even-numbered Star Trek movies are generally better. This is, at least, until the average age of the original crew was 80+.

- There is no way a bloated captain Kirk could scale El Capitan freehanded like in Assassin’s Creed.

- Now that I know the truth, it’s easy to see the hints in the mannerisms of Sulu. Oh my.

- Picard is a great ENTJ. Did you know I spent several hours with Patrick Stewart on stage with two other theater students while he recited The Merchant of Venice? It was amazing… I’ll tell you the whole story some time.

- Uhura jumped the shark when she did that dance atop the sand dune. Those hips don’t lie.

- Scotty is too one-dimensional of a character.

- Klingons in silhouette while Birds of Prey blow up always look like an 80′s hair band on stage.

- While showing these movies to my son, I have to pause the movie for 10 minutes for a cold-war history lesson to explain why it is funny that Chekov says “Nuclear Wessels” on the streets of San Francisco.

- I need to show my son all the ST:TNGs, but I may start with season 2 or 3 when the Beard is in full force.

- Wesley Crusher did not annoy me as much as he seemed to annoy other people. He was my everyman, my Frodo, my me-aged-me on a starship and I thought he was over-achieving, Type-A, and likable. (I did!)

- Amazing that I originally watched all the TNGs without a laptop on my lap. I rarely watch anything any more without also having 15 tabs open in a browser.

- I think Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn is still one of the best, and it holds up pretty well.

- I thank Star Trek for first getting me into sci fi… if you’re also into it and want something really advanced (and much more sophisticated, by a factor of 100), try Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained, and The Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Oh, and watch Firefly.

- I heard when Gene Roddenberry was alive that he refused to ever allow The Enterprise to be shown upside down. When JJ Abrams got ahold of it, he flipped that motha all ova the place. (sweet sweet JJ Abrams – thank you for saving Star Trek for all of us – we can’t wait for the next one!)

Funny TNG Videos!

That Jean-Luc Picard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf9oD_xl8mI

Bridge Buffoonery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8aEhtJ-sgg&feature=relmfu

A Fistful of Explosions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnPIPOaRUFg&feature=relmfu

Uneventful Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGvYIZppmQc&feature=relmfu

Beard on Beard (almost NSFW) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck-VIA1GUCY&feature=relmfu

Daily Photo – The Glowing Louvre

Here’s another photo from the amazing PhotoWalk in Paris. This was supposed to be the end of the walk, but it ended up being the halfway point!

In post-processing this one, I made the Louvre feel a little more warm and inviting, while the outside stayed a bit more cold and foreboding. I edited this one in front of a live class in Christchuch… I hope people enjoyed that bit ! Not all of my edits were successful that day, but I think this one turned out alright.

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris, Travel

Great Sales Through the Holidays!

Many people have gotten the upcoming Midnight in Paris Class Video for Christmas as gifts, and others are getting gifts for themselves! That’s great – I am very excited to do this live event… and if you miss the live bit, you can watch it later, at your convenience. I just checked the comments on the page and saw this nice one from Eamonn Phillopson (thx Eamonn!):

If anyone comes back to this page, after the event, I have to tell you it was the most wonderful, challenging, motivating two days “training” I have ever done. Worth the money – even for an amateur? Oh yes. ‘Nuf said.

Daily Photo – The Macabre Mysteries

What a great room!

When Miss Aniela and I first walked into this room, we knew it was a winner! We began by rearranging the macabre taxidermy and figuring out the best angles for a shot. I was looking at it from a pure HDR view, and she was looking at it by adding a human element. Anyway, as you can see, this room was all kinds of awesome.

Filed under the categories: France, Nikon D800, Paris