Although Trey Ratcliff got his first digital SLR camera only 10 months ago, his photography has blown up across the internet and around the world. His blog www.stuckincustoms.com has been nominated for the 2007 Bloggies and gets over 3 million page views per month. Two of his photos won this year’s Americana and Natural World categories at the Smithsonian Photography Contest.

Trey calls photography “my right brain activity to keep myself balanced.” As the founder and CEO of John Galt Games (www.johngaltgames.com) he travels all over the world. “On the weekends while traveling," he writes, "I usually grab my iPod and go get lost to find interesting adventures with my camera.”

Trey specializes in a new trend called HDR or High Dynamic Range photography. By taking several exposures of a scene, then blending and processing them through various programs, multiple light levels are represented in one final image. The result is a hyper-realistic, almost dreamlike picture.

“A well-executed HDR image is evocative of the actual scene itself,” Trey writes. “When a human eye is actually on location, it is constantly moving, adjusting the pupil size, allowing in more light in some areas, less in others, and the visual cortex actually works to build a patch-like vision of the scene. That is what we remember in our mind’s eye: an idealized super-realistic memory of the scene. HDR appeals to those people that actually see the world like this.”

Here are a few comments Trey made on travel, photography, and HDR:

When did you first get interested in photography?

I got serious about 10 months ago when I got my DSLR. I am sure that is disappointing for people to hear... that they want to hear that this is a lifelong affair and I have been working to perfect my art for every one of my 35 years. I know for a fact that this angers other photographers, many of whom are inherently jealous people. But all my photographer friends are very cool, so I got that goin' for me.

How do you plan for / prepare to travel?  Read More...