Trey Ratcliff — Stuck in Customs Controversy

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 12. January 2012 - 6:20

Nikon announced their Nikon D4 in January 2012. The next day, Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in customs wrote the following blog post DSLRs are a dying breed – 3rd Gen Cameras are the Future in which he slams Nikon/Canon and the big/standard dSLRs.

Please note that:

  • Stuck in customs has 1+ million visitors per month
  • Trey Ratcliff sales were in the 7 figures in 2011
  • Trey Ratcliff employs 11 part and full-time people (that's what he mentioned in Feb-2011 in an interview)

Trey announced that:

  • He was not going to buy the new Nikon D4
  • He praised Sony for all the electronics of the Sony A77
  • He praised the new generation of micro 4/3rd and the “mini APS-C” cameras

That's when the “shit” hit the fan. A few people in the blogosphere agreed but most didn't. How could he say that? What's wrong with him? He must be either smoking something or being bribed by Sony… Now that last part was dirty. He's expressing his opinion, many people didn't like it. He must be a crook or a liar or … These people should start wearing a bag over their head in shame, that's his opinion and he's entitled to it.

People need to recognize where he comes from and why?

  1. What's Trey Ratcliff's business? Most of his sales are licensing fees, in other words, we are talking rights managed stock. He sells some prints through Smugmug and he sells training videos, iPhone/iPad apps.
  2. Trey Ratcliff currently uses a Nikon D3x with 24 megapixels and mostly uses a Nikon 12-24mm f/2.8 for his photos.
  3. He travels around the world and have to carry around 35 pounds because of his “big” cameras. A micro-4/3rd would cut the weight in less than half with a smaller tripod/head combo.
  4. That's his opinion, why should he hide it?
  5. When he writes something controversial, he gets more links to his website and he goes up in the Bing/Google world.

So why should he downgrade from a 24 megapixels to a 16 megapixels? It's significant enough. By the way, that the problem that Canon is facing by going from 21 megapixels on the 1DsMk3 to 18 megapixels on the 1Dx.

Actually, it doesn't matter what kind of camera he uses, his customers buy his photos for licensing, they don't care about his cameras. His other customers who buy those tutorials want him to use a “regular” camera, like the one they have.

On the other hand, the “belly-to-belly” photographer, i.e. portraits, weddings… has to meet the people on a one to one. The “belly-to-belly” photographer has to have a camera that's better than his customer. Yes, I know people say it's the photo… and who cares about the camera. Retail customers care about the camera/equipment you use. That's what they pay for! You know the: “You must have a good camera.” Everybody can take photos. People upload 250 million photos on Facebook per day, according to Facebook, so it's not that difficult to press on the button aka the shutter.

Activity on Facebook:

On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day (my emphasis)

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics — 11-Jan-2012