Here’s the first photo I took at Burning Man in 2013, I think, and it’s still one of my favorites. It features a sculpture by Marco Cochrane. When the occasional sandstorms come, a lot of people go take cover, but that’s when I go out to take cool photos! It adds all the depth and mystery that is really there, I think.
Here’s a new podcast I was just featured in. What’s it about? Here, let them tell you…
“Arash catches internationally renowned photographer Trey Ratcliff in Hollywood on one of his recent visits to the United States. Trey’s iconic travel photos have made a lasting impact on the international photography community and his images of Black Rock City and the desert have served as pillars of the storytelling around Burning Man. A pioneer in HDR photography and a multi-disciplinary artist making waves in the NFT space, in this episode we delve into Trey’s unique perspective on photography and art, as well as his journey to becoming a self realized artist in conjunction with his exploration of Burning Man. After the interview we are treated to a sunrise DJ set from The Scumfrog, recorded live at Robot Heart in 2015. This electrifying mix includes a track that was used in Trey’s Machine Elf 98, making this episode a super fun one for those interested in the intersection of photography and dance music.”
Here’s another one of the images from my 1000 Stories from 1000 Places NFT drop. It sold out in minutes, but they are now available to trade on OpenSea and X2Y2, etc so be sure to check them out.
This is yet another epic sculpture out there, and it gets even more epic when the sandstorms roll in. They had fun plan here to burn it down. As I recall, they handed out hundreds of tiny little mirrors to people on the clearest, hottest, sunniest day. We all took the mirrors and aimed them at the head, trying to make it erupt in flame, but it never really worked.
It did give me a great idea for a big wooden ant sculpture with a huge steampunk magnifying glass. The magnifying glass would slowly rotate every day until Saturday when it would be at the perfect angle to catch the sun and burn the ant…
Here’s another one of the images from my 1000 Stories from 1000 Places NFT drop. It sold out in minutes, but they are now available to trade on OpenSea and X2Y2, etc so be sure to check them out.
This was one of my most difficult photos of 2017.
This amazing sculpture from Burning Man is the brilliant work of Peter Hudson. You may remember this scene from your mythology, where Charon rows the dead across the river Styx.
The sculpture requires at least six spectators to pull a series of ropes in a certain manner. Once the wheel starts spinning fast enough, strobes start flashing, animating the skeletons. Each of them was animated by a Pixar artist and there was a magical effect. Capturing the motion and the strobe all at once was extremely difficult. I thought about it for four days before finally taking the shot. I’m sure my Burning-Man-Buds Tom Anderson and Cliff Baise tired of me speculating about the shot!
Burning Man, Nevada
In every lifetime, I will find you by Michael Benisty.
Who will you find in every lifetime? This is the last photo I took at Burning Man in 2018. You probably won’t believe me, but I had a transcendent vision of this four nights prior, two days before I even discovered this place. If I were to try to describe either what I saw or how I was in a state to envision it, you would probably think I am crazy. But I told my roommates the next morning what I saw, and then I emailed them this photo a few days later and they were like HOLY CRAP. If I ever meet you in person, I can try to describe the whole experience. I’m not sure I can, but I know it was real.
A version of this image as an NFT is available, in very limited quantities, in the secondary market on Nifty Gateway.
Here’s another one of the images from my 1000 Stories from 1000 Places NFT drop. It sold out in minutes, but they are now available to trade on OpenSea and X2Y2, etc so be sure to check them out.
I often hear an interesting piece of advice for artists, and, well for anyone. Don’t be boring. Well, this is definitely not boring.
However, not being boring also means you take a lot of risks. Some of these risks push the edges of “polite society” or what is proper. So, yes, I occasionally get in trouble, but that doesn’t really stop me from trying new things.
Either way this was definitely not boring. You can’t quite see it from this angle, but two freight trains crashed together and exploded. This used to be a common spectacle in the olden days,
Burning Man, Nevada
This was described as “Visually the installation represents a giant diabolical clockwork bacteriophage infecting the playa or planet. Symbolically the installation represents the connection between people, technology, and the environment”. What i can tell you is that it was absolutely mesmerising watching people interact with it, making it twist and turn to their will.
Well, I’ve been going a little crazy with this unusual form of “photography” where I sit behind a computer without a lens rather than a computer with a lens. I’ve always thought about my high-end cameras as computers that just happen to have a lens attached. Most of the smarts are inside the camera, and most of the “visions” of the photo come from my mind. The only shortcoming to that is I actually have to get my body to a location in a time and place to make it happen. Please note I still love regular photography, and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. But I do quite like the idea of just visualizing very interesting images and communicating with an artificial intelligence to describe the kind of shot I’d like to see.
I went through a similar thought process when I started drone photography. I was basically holding a computer in my hands with a screen, and I would tell the drone where to go. The lens did not have to be a few inches from my head. That opened up a 180 degree hemisphere of 2-4km around me where I could take almost any photo I wanted. Now, with AI, it’s kind of the next-level, where the lens is actually inside the computer.
I’m a very visual person (in my head too), so I spent a long time doing a “dance” with an AI so that we could understand one another better. Before I share these new AI creations, perhaps you’d like to see some of my recent AI thematic creations. Enjoy!
– 40 Street Photos From 4,000 Years of Time Travel
– 60 Stills from a Wes Anderson Sci-Fi Film That Doesn’t Exist
– 20 Entities I Encountered And Inspirations From DMT Reality
– 27 Tribes From Remote Villages In Papua New Guinea That No One Has Ever Seen
– 31 Burning Man art installations at Burning Man that do not exist
– How Artificial Intelligence Interprets Bible Verses – 35 Holiest Of Holy Creations Of Artificial Intelligent-Design
BTW, I started up a new AI Instagram @Trairatcliff account so I could keep my main Instagram more with traditional photography. Be one of the first to join! And tell your friends, but only the cool ones… not the energy vampire friends you are trying to get rid of. 🙂
After those initial mini-projects, mentioned in the post above, I am finally figuring out how to get realistic-looking people at Burning Man wearing rather amazing costumes.
I’m using Midjourney version 4 for these, although I play with all the AI tools. It’s a command-line interface via Discord to communicate with the AI. Here is a sample query for one of the photos. If you haven’t used Discord, this will look confusing. Even if you are an expert at Discord (like me!), well, it still takes a while to get the hang of it. I should make a tutorial or something. Anyway, here is the sample query:
And here are 32 of my favorite creations so far. Note that some of the costumes are a bit over the top, but I kinda like that. I did photos in all sorts of different weather situations, day, night, males, females, many moods and temperatures. It was great fun to experiment with. Enjoy!
Before I get started, a quick note that I’ve created a new Instagram account for my AI adventure. You can check it out over here.
Also, perhaps you’d like to see some of my other recent AI thematic creations. Enjoy!
– 40 Street Photos From 4,000 Years of Time Travel
– 32 Nonexistent People At Burning Man
– 60 Stills from a Wes Anderson Sci-Fi Film That Doesn’t Exist
– 20 Entities I Encountered And Inspirations From DMT Reality
– 27 Tribes From Remote Villages In Papua New Guinea That No One Has Ever Seen
– How Artificial Intelligence Interprets Bible Verses – 35 Holiest Of Holy Creations Of Artificial Intelligent-Design
My ever-evolving theory on artists using AI groweth! I’ll make a bigger article soon… but you can read my one from only 7 days ago AND you can look at the differences between those images and these images. It’s amazing how much progress can be made in just a week! The article focuses on how artists can team up with an AI to make some pretty amazing stuff.
Here are a few snippets from the previous article:
I have an interesting theory on AI in this arena – I believe a very interesting future for all artists is to “team up” with AIs to form an UberArtist.
Chess Grandmasters who routinely get destroyed by AIs sometimes team up with an AI in competitions against other teams. Anyway, with photography and pretty much all other forms of art (and soon video), it’s clear to me that AI will be able to make some extremely interesting creations, often surpassing what the most creative humans can produce. And it’s only going to get better. So, rather than “fight” the system, it only makes sense to join forces as artists curate and coax their AI into creating things they think are interesting.
…
After you do a little mind-flip on the benefits of AI, it’s like having a very creative assistant around you all the time, making wild suggestions that you may never think of. It’s like having a coach in a way… or the way Tiger Woods has a caddy to make suggestions… Many great people out there have coaches and listen to ideas and thoughts that may never have occurred to them.
I use about five different AI tools, and my new favorite is Midjourney Version 4. It doesn’t have much of a user interface, and you use Discord and command-line language with switches to create the images. I’m a Computer Science nerd, so I’m all into this stuff, but it may be a bit esoteric to others. Basically, you tell the AI what you want. I’ll give you a sample prompt I used for one of the images below:
“A huge semi-buried Burning Man sculpture in an inhospitable white desert, night time, dystopian, awe-inspiring, Trey Ratcliff style, lonely feeling, hyper-realistic, ultra-detailed, ultra-realistic, UHD, insanely beautiful, 32k, unreal engine, high octane, perfect composition, cinematic lighting, lonely feeling, minimalist, humbling scene, Joseph Campbell quest, a feeling of Rumi’s the cave you fear holds the treasure you seek –v 4 –q 2 –uplight –ar 1:1”
You may notice that I used the words “Trey Ratcliff Style” in the command line. This was an unexpected joy! The AI actually has gone out and seen all my Burning Man photos (and other photos – see my Full Portfolio) that I’ve been uploading to the internet for the last 15+ years. This makes the final render look quite similar to the sort of photo I might actually take. So, it turns out I’ve been accidentally training the AI for the last 15 years! Enjoy the photos, and I’ll have another series of articles and sample images in future posts… in the meantime, feel free to follow me on Instagram or Twitter.
Also, at the bottom after all the Burning Man works, I added some different sorts of creations I have made with this AI. I’ll post another article soon that explores all of these innovative ways to use AI to make visually interesting creations. I know I get quite a bit of negative feedback from photographers (or other visual artists) on this stuff because it is not hand-crafted, but that’s okay. I already got through over a decade of HDR hate and stuff. 🙂
Below is a sampling of other fun creations I’ve created. I’ll post a longer article later that really does an analysis of what is going on here and some fun implications for the art world.
I’ll give you the prompts here for the first couple… and you can have fun trying to guess the next ones. I’m not keeping secrets, I’m just toooo lazy now to copy and paste all the prompts.
Below:
“a stunning interpretation of a leopard Human girl hybrid, highly detailed and intricate, hypermaximalist, blonde, big blue intense eyes, mouth slightly open, ornate, luxury, elite, welcoming, loving, matte painting, cinematic, cgsociety, James jean, Brian froud, ross tran, fantasy forest background -v 4 –q 2 –uplight”
Below:
“insanely detailed photorealistic Japanese treehouse in a tall cherry blossom tree, hybrid, highly detailed and intricate, mysterious foggy night, closeup of treehouse, glowing treehouse, many cherry blossoms around treehouse, treehouse in focus, dark green forest in background out of focus, tiny glowing fairies in the background, Miyazaki style, 4k, octane render, Rembrandt lighting -v 4 –q 2 –uplight”
Below (yes the whole thing is created by AI – quite meta, hey? I borrowed this idea!):
“a bookish redditor shows off her painting in a niche subreddit.”
More soon!
Here is Marco Cochrane’s amazing “Gaia” – I wonder where it is now! I know some famous artists like Michael end up selling their pieces to private collectors or to cities to put on display…
