Stuck In Customs

I spent that afternoon and evening with Leslie out at her farm and her animals in Brady. She has a bunch of animals that she lightly calls pets. Featured in this menagerie are about 50 goats. I never thought about how a goats head is exactly at crotch level until I walked amongst them.

Leslie has many creative pursuits going on, including but not limited to: acting (see her IMDB (see the IMDB ink here), photography, writing, and a swath of other creative activities that come in handy on a farm in a pinch.

Someone sent me a message that photos are up from my recent talk at the CapMac meeting here in Austin. Thanks to the little Twitter swarm that showed up! It was fun… I wish I could have been in the middle of the Twitter chatting myself! But I couldn’t multitask like that… ! You can follow this link to CapMac if you want to see some photos from the event.

Below, I will show the final versions of the two photos that I edited during the tutorial portion of the talk.

Also, a small warning… I am off backpacking in the wiles of Patagonia for a few days. I did schedule a few posts (including this one), but I may drop my promise of “One Photo Per Day” yet again until I get back online! 🙂

After a four-hour plane ride deeper into the Andes, we started to get further into the wilds of Patagonia. Perhaps I should explain that I was on this trip with a very good Russian friend named Dima, who is also a photographer. He brought four other Russians with him. Despite our friendship, he had given me a non-English-speaking roommate named Yuri that never ceased to amaze. Within five minutes of dropping him off in my room, Yuri was in his underwear and I noticed his approximate size to be that of a smallish beluga whale. This ended up propagating many other problems For example, on the flight to El Calafate, our small plane had a bit of a hard landing because I was not sure the pilot was fully informed of Yuri’s weight.

After setting up camp in El Calafate, we went out to the edge of Lago Argentino tonight to shoot the sunset to shoot the Perito Moreno glacier. Every few minutes, you could hear giant shards of ice cleave off and drop into the lake below.

See all of the dark bits of ice floating in the water? Those are actually the clear bottoms that were once underwater, but recently flipped over. In the midst of all this, and from out of nowhere, Yuri produced a giant bottle of cognac, which seemed to keep the Russians happy in the freezing cold. When I posted this photo on the blog and across the various social networks, many of my Facebook and Twitter friends requested a photo of Yuri. That night, while he slumbered, I endeavored to take a panorama of him. I considered the glacier as practice, since it was also big, white, and cracked.

This was shot with the Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 lens. The second of the five exposures (the -1 EV shot) was at f/8.0 with a shutter speed of 0.033 secs and a 250 ISO. As for the coal length, I think I had it cranked all the way to 14mm to take this shot. I’m always flummoxed as to whether or not I should take a panorama of these places, which essentially means I’d have to map out an invisible grid and then take a photo in each cell for later stitching using post-processing software. For this photo, I did use a Nikon D3X, which already has a 24 megapixel sensor, making the final product a fairly detailed 6000 pixels across or so. There is some invisible point when enough is enough, and I never quite know what it is. One limiting factor is time-of-processing. Panos take a long time to both shoot and post-process, so that comes into the decision making tree fairly early on.

This is one of the many dead city blocks in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. This place was filled with ornate mausoleums which ranged in style from the gothic to Victorian, each as macabre as the next.

The graveyard hosts some of the most famous people from Argentina, including Eva Perón. I spent about an hour walking down narrow alleys and broad boulevards of this eerie city. I could have spent many more hours, and I have an idea to sneak in one night after dark and bring my own lighting equipment. Any takers? Let’s do it… what’s the worst that can happen? (These kind of questions often get me in trouble).

In other news… I was taking a siesta today and in barged two Russians. One, my friend Dima, announced, “This is new roommate Yuri. He does not speak English.” Yuri is the size of a smallish Beluga and he is currently in his underwear.

This is an old temple near the main complex of Angkor Wat that sits high on a hill.  At the bottom, a man gave me an option of riding an elephant to the top.  I don’t know why I didn’t!  I think I might have been in a hurry to see the sunset and the elephant looked old and ponderous.

It was a bit sketchy up there with the storm, but there was nothing metal so I didn’t feel like there was much danger of lightning.  I was used to Texas thunderstorms with big lightning, but maybe they didn’t have those sorts in Cambodia – who knows?  Not me.  Anyway, it was too cool to stay up there and watch the storm as it rolled in…

Ahh… another adventure!  This time I’ll be hiking with four Russians through the wiles of the edges of South America.

I’ve never been to South America.  How is this possible?  I don’t know… but I am now remedying that.  In fact, I’ve never been south of Costa Rica, and I have posted a favorite from there today.  That is of a volcano up near the border of Nicaragua.

Anyway, I’ll be spending a few days in Buenos Aires, Argentina before heading up into the Andes and edging into Peru.  There will be a lot of hiking, camping, and waking up at sunrise to shoot the glaciers.

Here’s a bit of a funny story about this trip.  So, I have a good Libertarian Kenyan friend who hooked me up with some of her simpatico friends in Argentina.  I mentioned that I was going to be doing some hiking in the Andes and I might pick up a sleeping bag while there, so I would not have to check one with my luggage.  They, in turn, hooked me up with one of the world’s top mountain climbers who was very nice.  He sent me an email saying he has the perfect sleeping bag for me in Buenos Aires and it would cost $700.  I thought “Jeez!”  And so then I got myself embroiled in this international chain of emails trying to figure out why a sleeping bag costs so much… like I am Buzz Aldrin camping on the moon or something.

Anyway, this chain of Libertarians has been very nice, but I decided to make it easy on everyone, so I just went to REI here in Austin to get something that should keep me and my camera gear cozy as I wait for the sunrise…

A Texas sunset settled on the farm as we patiently waited for the sky to repaint itself every few minutes.

It was a very relaxing hour, watching the sun slowly descend through the clouds, interrupted on occasion by a stressful swapping of lenses.  I hate to get dust in the chamber, so the changing of lenses is always a high-anxiety event!  But the anxiety faded away pretty quick as we started watching the sunset again.

My friend Leslie had invited me out to her parent’s farm near Brady.  She’s an actress, a model, a photographer, and a bunch of other creative things…  so I had told her I would spend equal amounts of time shooting the farm, her animals, and her. It’s the old 33/33/33 rule of farm-shooting.    Anyway, I am sure some of you would rather see photos of her…  and still others of her animals…  but I can’t make everyone happy at once, so you’ll just have to wait a few weeks for me to sprinkle those in!  Until then, I hope you enjoy the sunset.

The Crimson Lounge sits behind some ornate doors in the lobby of the Hotel Sax in Chicago. I was lucky enough to get a private tour of this beautiful and secret place. It would be callously gauche to call this a hotel bar, because it is so much more.

There are about a dozen little rooms, enclaves, and velvet-curtained grottos that make up a textured complex of rooms that are just waiting around for me to lounge in while drinking something with an absurd name.

I collected a variety of other shots from this little gem of a place that I will be sprinkling into the blog over the next few months and years…

I jumped over the ranch-style fence to get closer to this barn. It was one of those perfect barns that needed to be looked at from every angle! From above, I would have liked to see my zig-zag pattern as I moved around to look at it from various vantage points… Surely some nearby vultures must have thought my erratic movements were signs of the last gasps of life.

Last time I posted a photo of a barn, my good friend, Dr. David Sands, was inspired to write me this poem below. He is both a microbiologist and a poet… who says you have to be one thing in life? Hehe… He’s a great guy, and the one responsible for making me read countless books on genetics… probably only so I can get quirky references to the Hox genes in his poems!

Seeing

if you see what you see
and i too see
and we are but engines of innovation
then doubtful we will construct
the same landscapes
or the same mindscapes
for a barn to me is a static recycled tree
without photosynthesis
and a tree is the result of a packaged genome
and a camera is an eye without wiring
and the hox box came from efficiency
and genomes have lots of space to memorize
where occam’s razor trims the fat like frying bacon
so fried that even some of the meat is lost
and has to be reseeded by infusion
and this confusion at the edge of chaos
both fuels us and carries us
away from a darker bit of certainty

linear poem by Dave Sands
non linear barn by Trey Ratcliff

South by Southwest is a huge music, film, and interactive festival down here in Austin. People from all over the world come here to what has become known as the music capitol of the world. Many streets shut down for all kinds of interesting activity. I went out an evening ago to get some shots of some of the action on the streets to share with you all. I usually don’t do these sorts of shots, but I wanted to mix it up a little so you could see a local slice of life right here in my hometown! 🙂