It looks like this blog was mentioned in This Week in Photography, which is a most excellent podcast, whether or not they mention this site. I always pick up a few good tidbits on there.

In honor of them, I have had to make a cut to my top 10 shots. I took one of the new ones from Glacier and put it in there, and one had to fall… it was a tough pick, but here is the one, going down in flames in the Duomo… You had a great ride in the top 10 old friend…

I was inspired to do this photo of my son.

This was appropriately shot on the “Going to the Sun” road, above waterfalls and snowy peaks, sprinkled around Glacier National Park.

I get email all the time and I hardly ever look at it all because it is just physically impossible. As of today, there are over 17,700 unreads in my Flickr box and countless more buried in Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, etc etc. But every now and then I see an interesting subject that I click on.

This one is probably gonna make you cry, so get ready… no two ways about it.

Tom Aellis emailed me and told me just a little bit – enough to make me go spend some time exploring his story. He has been diagnosed with MS, and he wanted one lasting photograph of him with his son. Tom apparently reads Stuck in Customs as well as several others, including the blog of Joe McNally, who recently wrote a book called “The Moment it Clicks”. Tom emailed McNally to tell him about the situation, and McNally is such a class act that he mustered his crew and went out to Tom’s home for a special photo shoot.

The following is from Tom:

Now, after three years of being a warrior fighting MS, I was losing. This was impossible for me to accept, as I have a 12 year old son to raise and teach all the things that he needs to know about being a good man. I want to show him how to treat people fairly , how to have passion for what he chooses (no matter what it is) and most of all, how to have kindness in his heart.

I’ll gladly link over to Joe’s blog so you can read the whole story for yourself and see the results.

So, Tom has inspired this shot below and probably tens of thousands of other dads out there this weekend that are going to be doing the same thing. Even though you do not see me in the picture with Ethan, I am in the picture with him.

There was an article today over at the Austin-American Statesman that mentioned me and this blog. I haven’t seen it yet (I am out of town), but I remember Omar wanting to look at this shot that appeared on the cover of some annual report from one of those big fives… So here it is below!

I’m back in Montana for a few days!

We were graciously invited by Jack Horner up to northern Montana to join him on a dinosaur dig, My 7-year-old son (and the 7-year-old in me) is excited as can be by this once in a lifetime experience. We are not sure yet, but we think there is a special kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex that has been uncovered near Rudyard, Montana. Jack has his dig team out there, so we are going to camp out with them for a while and help with the dig… we are mega excited.

For a few nights before the dig, I took the family unit here to nearby Glacier National Park. We stayed at the Many Glacier Inn, which is this 1930’s Swiss-style chalet on a beautiful lake looking out at Mount Grinnell and several glaciers.

I woke up early in the morning to get this shot, while the rest of my family and the inn was still asleep. As usual, I had my ipod on full blast while I took in the scene and snapped away.

If you look down at the bottom, you can see all the rocks through the crystal-clear glacial lake.

Why was I walking around at midnight in the middle of a snowfall in Ukraine with my tripod shooting? I just can’t remember. I don’t remember much about the Ukraine and those cold nights. I can’t decide if I repressed them or have selectively forgotten or some delightful combination thereof.

And Ukraine taught me a new level of cold that I thought was reserved somewhere in the nether Dante regions…

…treywiki disambiguity warning incoming… note this is not to be confused with the ACTUAL portfolio site at www.TreyRatcliff.com. Be warned that it’s one of those vindictive sites that takes over your screen, plays music, demands your full attention, etc etc. That seems kind of rude and presumptive these days, to do something like that to your browser, a newcomer I hardly know, but maybe you will forgive me if you actually enjoy the art and the music as one. I don’t know.

But there is a new artistic community that has the strange name of the Behance Network. I put together a collection of 20 of my most experimental digital art pieces there. I’ve put a few of them beneath. If you also have an artistic side and want to give that network a try, I think it might be worth a try. They have everything from illustration to graphic arts to motion graphics… It’s quite possible I will tire of it in a few months and never go back… I’ve very open-minded about my web 2.0 abandonment issues.

I was dog tired after a long week at that ranch, so I took a 45 minute cat nap at Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone just as it started to rain. I woke up as the storm had passed and a rainbow came out in the distance. So I quickly put together my capsula camera set and shot this!

You can see the sun clearly shining down in the foreground on the travertine and the bright orange of the bacteria floating in the steaming expulsions.

After that bright and sunny cathedral yesterday, I thought I would post some of the darker shots from some various cathedrals around Europe. I like how they are all somewhat scary and intimidating, no doubt doing their job very well.

I just read this hilarious line in Dawkins’ book on religion. It was mentioned in relation to the visible light spectrum to all the various waves that are out there. He took the analogy a little further and talked about how insects have their "burka slit" a little higher up to see the ultraviolet waves. I’m sure it was the only time a noted scientist has used religious garb to make a point about how species consume waves.

Seeing all the colors in this shot, while being in a famous cathedral in Holland, seemed to make a good occasion for that title.

As you all know, my work is Creative Commons, no commercial use without permission, so it ends up everywhere. I freely let people use it for their blogs, backgrounds, news stories, etc etc. I notice that the following photo from Amsterdam shows up all over the place! It shows up as credited to me, which is another part of the Creative Commons thing, along with a link back to this page.

The second one to show up a lot is the one from the Red Light district, which is a rather sketchy place to take my camera…

Another California sunset on a summer night…  Rarely is there a bad place to stand to watch it!

I was working on this photo this evening with a friend to show him some of the techniques that have evolved since HDR started getting popular. I find my methodology changes and evolves about every two months or so. I look back at my old stuff in horror!

Ah yes… the wet streets of Paris here… Seems like an idyllic place for this little store called Cartier, eh?

Because my photography is Creative Commons (no commercial use without permission), I open it up to be used by other artists to create derivative works. I get all kinds of emails from all over the world to see amazingly interesting and great things. One such email I got recently from Katey, whose cool website I invite you all to visit, who has taken my photograph of Valeria’s afghan and turned it into a painting.

I’ve put the these below, followed by to owner of the Afghan herself, Katerina of Siberia. Note she does not go by that name in public, but I think it would be cool if she did.

I did not fully realize I was entered into a competition and then I ended up winning! That was nice after I got past about 10 minutes of confusion about the contest… and then I think I remembered, but not as well as I did 10 years ago.

But I do remember this shot - it was a lone swan on a lake in the famous Stanley Park of Vancouver. I shot this when I went up there to speak at the Canadian Cato Institute to a bunch of Libertarians about online gaming economies being their last great hope.

You can get a link to the contest, the webpage, and find out more about the sponsoring website at this link.

I think about all the sunsets I miss. I always seem to be out and about somewhere, noticing a great sunset and noticing that I am not even close to my camera and tripod. It’s just unacceptable!

This day and evening I was in Yellowstone alone. I had just seen a grizzly bear and a black bear about 30 minutes before this shot, crossing the road in front of me. They went on their way and I was left in the middle of this area with just a few elk meandering a few hundred feet from me.

The fire burned through about a third of the park about 20 years ago. There are still several areas where all the trees stand alone like charred corpses under the burning sun.