>>Trey Ratcliff: I love to use technology to make beautiful
things. Today, you know, what I'm going to talk about, I'm going to give you the story
about how I stumbled across this new kind of photography, how it changed my life and
how I believe it can change your life, too. Maybe you're like me and you came to this
haunting realization that you've only got one shot at life, so you might as well make
it awesome. I believe that a life worth living is a life worth recording.
So here's a few examples of this new kind of photography. There's a quote about me,
not a good one, that I have done more to damage the integrity of photography than anyone else
in the world, end quote. What is this evil thing that I've done, I
hear you wondering? Well, basically, I've given permission to millions of people around
the world, and I give permission to you today to -- to break all of these hallowed rules
of photography and go ahead and post-process the hell out of your photos. Because I think
this is really kind of fun. I give you permission to have fun and find your own childlike sense
of creativity. I think that photography is something that you can easily add into your
life, whatever you have to be doing, you can augment what you are currently doing with
photography. You can kind of find this elusive right brain that's kind of been there along
with you the whole time. I don't think that post-processing is evil. In fact, I think
that the use of artifice in your craft is virtuous. So here I am, this is the spawn
of evil. This is me as a kid. [ Laughter ]
>>Trey Ratcliff: You can see me there on the big wheel, I was pretty awesome. And I'll
talk about this one in the middle, me with my Atari 2600. I loved that thing. There was
this chess game, I don't know if you remember it, but when the computer would think, the
screen would go blank and it would do a random RGB color, every few seconds it would change
colors. I would just sit there and stare at it. I would look for patterns. And I was mesmerized.
And I caught something that ended up accidentally informing my photography in much later years.
I'll -- file that away, I'll get to that when we get to the tutorial section, because I'm
also going to show you how you can do this kind of photography, too. Then just past that
picture of my dad and I on a rock, you can see me over there, I'm cross-eyed.
And like he said, I was born blind in one eye. I still am. And so I see the whole world
in 2D. This turned out to be sort of a weird thing but actually a tremendous advantage.
Because we all kind of see the world in 2D now, don't we? With flat screens? We look
at screens all day. We actually see a 3D world in a 2D device. So this has been a fun challenge
for me, one that I kind of keep examining, how do you take a 3D world and present it
in 2D? Because the brain loves to see Z depth, it likes to know how far away opportunities
and challenges are and paths and all of these kind of things that are very deep inside our
brains. So -- so fast forward a few years, I go to
university and I fall in love with algorithms, I major in computer science. And this is another
vector along with the 2D that came to inform this style of photography that I stumbled
into. The question is about light. So if you are in a given situation, you want to try
to capture it, how it really feels while you're there. Maybe you go into places and you take
photos, they come out flat, you are just disappointed, like, ah, what a bummer. But actually there's
a disconnect that's happening. Your camera, even a good camera, can probably
only capture three stops of light. So what's a stop? A stop is a little measurable segment
of light. Whereas your eye, the human eye can see about 11 stops of light. That's a
huge disconnect. Three stops of light versus 11 stops of light. In any given situation
into which you might find yourself, there can be anywhere from 8 to 15 stops of light.
So the philosophy behind this method, before I get to practically how it's done -- the
philosophy is you are taking your camera, you are using it to sweep through all of the
available light. You capture it, you go back, you dump all of that light back on your computer
and then you bend the light to your will. That's the idea behind it.
So I believe that an artist creates for the sake of creation. And he shares as his means
of connecting with the world. And I think that you guys can probably -- probably really
benefit from adding this kind of stuff. Because you go on -- you go to cool places, you see
neat things. Maybe you're like me, you experience them in kind of a cinematic way and you want
to be able to capture them in this sort of evocative way, and you can easily add this
to your life with some of these techniques. As sort of a side note, you can find that
there's a creative part inside of you that's been lurking there all along, and you can
softly nurture it with this style of photography. So here's a case study for you of someone
that's done this. This is Tom Anderson. You guys might know him. He's the guy that started
and sold Myspace many years ago. We met on Google+ just over a year ago. I think it's
just coincidental that we happened to be right there in the rankings, and we kind of started
this bromance, totally straight bromance, by the way.
[ Laughter ] >>Trey Ratcliff: We got together, I found
out he was photo curious. [ Laughter ]
>>Trey Ratcliff: So we -- we started taking photos together. We kind of have this master
and apprentice relationship. Not a master-servant relationship. It's very different. And so
anyway, we end up going all over the world taking photos and you can see how much progress
he's made in just one year. And he didn't even have a camera over a year
ago. And I think this is really cool that this is -- you know, meant something to his
life and it's kind of added to it. He's finding new ways to express himself because I think
that self-expression is one of the most natural and uniquely human things about all of us.
So -- so what's going on here? Well, this all falls largely within the magisterium of
something called HDR, which is an acronym for high dynamic range. The HDR version is
over there. I have a full tutorial on my website, which is called Stuckincustoms.com. You can
go there and figure out this stuff step-by-step. But it's really easy. You can be up and running
in less than half an hour. Basically, instead of just taking one photo
like that, you take -- multiple photos. All right? At different shutter speeds. So you
have many levels of light. And then you take all of that and you run it through another
program on your computer. And then this algorithm takes over and if you are wondering how the
algorithm really works, what happens is it analyzes the photo on a pixel-by-pixel basis,
it goes through and looks at the nearest neighbor, and it maps the tone of the color according
to a set of coefficients. Those coefficients you get to slide around using really fun little
sliders and tools and stuff like this. That's basically how it works.
So HDR photography, the style largely it's still hated by a lot of old-school photographers,
but as far as I can tell, the public seems to love it.
[ Laughter ] >>Trey Ratcliff: The -- which is fine. I never
find any need to -- to impress my peers. So anyway, this photo was the first HDR photo
to hang in the Smithsonian. I made my mom proud. This one over here is, I uploaded that
to Google+ about a year ago. It already has over 35 million views. Altogether these kinds
of photos have hundreds and hundreds and millions of views and there's lots of people that are
doing all kinds of weird post-processing. I hope you join with us because we're having
a great time. In a way we're kind of going through this neorenaissance, and we're fighting
the same kind of system that the impressionists had to fight at the end of the 19th century,
the Manets, the Monets, Renoirs, Caillebotte you had to get it hung in the salon in Paris
and you had to pass this panel of octogenarians. And the only way to get past them was if you
could have your style be like the greats that they considered like the Maisonniers and these
sorts of things. Well, luckily, back then, the -- the center
of the art world was Paris, but now the Internet seems to be the locus. So let's talk a little
bit about the color that's happening inside these photos. How -- how -- what's going on
here exactly? What you'll notice is that color groupings
make different amounts of sense based on their nearest neighbors. There is a fiction that's
been going on in your mind for a number of years. We saw this cube earlier today. I love
it. And it reminds you that, okay, yellow and brown are supposed to be two different
colors, but maybe sometimes they're the exact same color. Same thing with every other color
that you think you know. You have this wonderful perceived fiction in your brain that's -- that's
made up your whole life so far. But really none of it is true. And colors make most sense
within the context of other colors that they are nearby. You can see that you can reuse
certain color groupings and they have very different meanings in different ways. If you
think back to when I was talking about the chess screen changing color. Well, this requires
great cognitive focus and I'm sure you guys can handle it in this crowd. So if you look
at something that's green, let's say, okay, then your eyes move over to something that's
black. Well, when you look at the black, you are actually seeing the inverse of green through
a thin film on top of that black and it dissipates as a function over time.
But this is actually happening, you know, dozens of times per second as your eye starts
to dart around a photo. Because you might look at -- at like one color. And then you
move to another color, but you are actually seeing the next color through a thin film
of the opposite color that you just looked at. So there's this wild symphony of colors
and sensation that's going on as you look at photos.
As you start to explore photography, you really start to appreciate light and you see all
of these gentle truths through life. So fast forward. Quite a bit. About six years ago,
I started a website called Stuckincustoms.com. It's become the world's number one travel
photography blog. And along with that, I do all of this social media stuff, too. I think
with Google+ and Pinterest and FaceBook and Twitter and all of this stuff, I'm about -- I've
got about seven million followers, something crazy. Every day I share a bunch of different
photos. I talk about the adventure behind them, I talk about how they were made. The
technology behind them. I do all kinds of like tech reviews of cool tech and cool software
that kind of help your right brain life. We started a website called flatbooks.com, which
has about a couple of dozen different authors that write eBooks to kinda help you down your
own right brain path. And I feel kinda like we are all going through this discovery together,
so you guys are welcome to join up and have fun and we can experience this kind of new-age
of art together. I think it's a great time. So ... I love spaceships. I love taking photos
of spaceships. Grab me later at the conference, I've got a good story about this space shuttle
going up into the cloud if you are into spaceship stories. As long as I'm up here, I'm going
to use this as my own personal thinly veiled plea because I know some of you guys in the
audience also like spaceships and you have spaceships -- I'm talking to you, you know,
Branson and Sergey and Bethos. I would love to come take photos of your spaceships, your
space ports, I will make them look awesome. I'm waiting on your call. Okay, next.
[ Laughter ] >>Trey Ratcliff: So I love this idea, too,
that -- that we have -- that we have -- the human brain seems to try to maximize the amount
of beauty and interestingness that we can see in any given day. Doesn't it? Seems like
we orient our day so that we can have as much beauty as possible jammed into our skulls.
And this is one reason that photographers love Google+. It's because our images are
big and bold and wide and people can scroll through and it's a very efficient, nice interface
for people to -- to have the highest level of beauty per second that goes into their
eyes. We did something similar over on Pinterest
where I cropped my stuff. I hated to crop it so tight. But I'm very interested in that
form factor, too, because I think that the way an image is displayed it's dependent upon
the medium in which it's enjoyed, so that seems to be another method where people jam
a lot of beauty into their skulls. There's also this idea that's emerging right
underneath us that the way humans are starting to communicate with each other is really changing.
For hundreds of years we've been using the written word to communicate concepts on a
global scale. But now that there's over a billion people with cameras and connections
to the Internet, I think the way we are telling stories is starting to change. Because in
a way you can say photos are easier and superior to words. Not always superior. Not better,
worse, just different. But certainly an image is universal. And a Paul Ekmanesque face makes
sense in every culture across the world. I think that's what's happening right underneath
us is that there's a new visual literacy that's coming online as we all learn to tell stories
through a photo or series of photos. So I think it's a very interesting time to
be part of this image-making world. So I'll end my talk here, this is -- this
is New Zealand. This is where I've just moved with my wife and my three kids. And -- and
it's -- it's really thanks to, you know, all of you guys. You guys have built up a -- a
-- services and infrastructure and all kinds of things that have -- that have made my life
possible and Stuck In Customs grow and this sort of thing. So I don't take any of it for
granted. I don't take any of you for granted. And the last thing that you can think about
is as you start to add photography to your life, you will be able to reuse this conjurer's
bag of tricks for photos of those most important to you in your life. These cinematic moments
that you feel very deeply, you can add these tricks to the photos of these people, your
loved ones. These are some of my -- mine. Over there this is from New Zealand, that's
my daughter on a little miniature horse. Seems like a very hobbit-like thing to do in New
Zealand. [ Laughter ]
>>Trey Ratcliff: This is my son and my youngest daughter. Here's my kids with a little neo-Rockwellian
Christmas. That's my youngest daughter, my lovely life who is sitting out there probably
embarrassed. There's me and my son that reminds me of my dad holding my hand on the rock.
Thank you for your time. [ Applause ]