A Broken Window And Video In The Alvord
Billy Newman Photo Podcast | A Broken Window And Video In The Alvord
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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Hey, what’s going on? This is Billy Newman and you’re listening to the Billy Newman photo podcast for October 10 2017, how’s it going? I’m working in the truck this afternoon, I’m trying to put together a quick little podcast as an update to some of the stuff that’s been going on some of the media stuff that I’ve been working on. And I’m trying to, I guess, cover and explain it. A lot of times the podcast is just sort of me updating y’all on what kind of photos I’m working on. And what kind of media stuff is keeping me busy, are some of the media thoughts I’ve had over the week, if I jot them down, I try and like keep a little, a little notepad of like some little points that are supposed to make, but I hardly ever get to him. I don’t know. They’re about like, what cameras to look at that sort of stuff. But we we explained enough of it, though. So I’m here today, looking at a little list that I wrote down. And I guess it’s like a bunch of the videos and photos stuff that I’ve done this past week, that’s gone up. That’d be kind of cool to talk about. But like I cut together a quick little set of video from the alvord Desert thing a time out there about just kind of like being able to drive route out on the playa and then kind of walking around and checking out a few of the views like looking back up at the Steen’s mountains, toward the east or looking out toward kind of that flat horizon at sunrise. When you’re hanging out there looking at toward the west bow is really cool is it was fun being there, I kind of like what I maybe talked about a little bit before was how the weather had turned and had been bad for a bit of the time it was, it was fine. But just as you would maybe kind of expected you’re getting into the third week of September, the weather just starts to shift a little bit where you’re not really getting consistent, nice days. And I don’t know, just like the odds of getting a nice sunset sunrise, we just weren’t really there for enough time, you know, enough days of the year to really get the opportunity to see that. And I’d heard that another time. Think from like a National Geographic photographer who I think was taking photos in the 70s and 80s. Perhaps maybe maybe it was the the 90s and 2000s. But it was just sort of an anecdote that they weren’t really making the big point of it. But they’re just talking about this assignment that they were on, I think it was out in Alaska, maybe it was up in northern Canada, but it was sort of a colder environment. And they were saying that that, that it took them, I think it was like five days that they just kind of considered in their mind that they were just going to burn in learning the environment, or it’s going to take like more than five days to complete the photo assignment, it would take at least three days just to learn where to go to get the photos or there’s a cargo bag. But it’s kind of it’s kind of a weird sort of obscure point. But the idea is that you would want to have not just in the idea of odds of something but in actually your mind, understanding the eccentricities and the nuance of a place and being able to capture is a big part of it being able to capture like the feeling and the earnestness. portrait photographers talk about this too of like knowing the person better having a relationship with the person alive allows you to get closer, more natural or more real essence of the of the reflection of a person when you take their portrait sort of similarly almost in, in landscape or in travel photography, the amount of time that you put into understanding your environment or the the event, the way that something’s gonna come about are sort of part of what these high level pro photographers would do. And in understanding how to capture their story, there’s lots you can do materially to produce or to create a product of photographs in a much shorter amount of time. But I guess when you’re going into developing a photo essay, that reflects sort of your deepest level of work, it’s really not about the pace of time that you put into it. To produce the product, it’s about, it’s about sort of the uniqueness or the the artistic expression that’s sort of unique to that photographers vision of what they’re trying to produce. It’s how close they can get to that. And that really takes more time than it would to just do event photography. It’s sort of, if you think about it, it’s almost a different level of experience in photography, we’re one year, you’re kind of working quickly to capture stuff, and maybe every time you’re working quickly, but it seems like there’s this higher level of photography, where you’re really trying to put the best collection of work together, and you’re really trying to put enough time into it. So it’s actually it’s really worth something at a high professional level. Well, or at a high meaningful level, outside of like, commercial liability.
It’s like, the level of meaning that it has and you’re really trying to capture the essence of real life and photojournalism I think specifically what we’re talking about not structured commercial suits for marketing campaigns, but for photojournalism, like National Geographic, something like that, where you’re like, imagine going to Mongolia and embedding yourself with a family there and trying to capture their story. If you had 24 hours to do that, you could produce a large amount of media in that much time and it It could be if you were a professional, it could be a professional quality that would adequately provide coverage for the news you’re trying to describe. But if you’re really putting together at least back in the day, when there used to be budgets for bigger media projects, or for bigger, you know, like single use media projects, and let’s say like a magazine to add a monetized strategy to it, like National Geographic, you know, I could actually send someone in Mongolia, a couple people to Mongolia one person to write one person to take photos, one person to produce something else or a handle whatever it is, they used to have, like whole old team of people, lots of teams of people, freelance people working outside of the country to collect, to collect news, it used to be international news, it’s just sort of what it was for. We don’t really get to do that anymore, because the internet’s made things so cheap. So, so now we’re in this position, where if we were to get a chance to like, go to Mongolia, do the coverage on the small family that lives in a tribe in a remote area and try and kind of cover their story and their landscape and what they have to go through, you’d want more time, you would want more time to kind of experience that, like you’d want five days, you’d want two weeks to spend with them. So you kind of learn the rhythm, I guess it’s part of it, you learn the rhythm of the land, you acclimate yourself to the areas, so you’re not bringing a lot of what you ever had out from the outside in. And I guess it’s this whole kind of experience of of trying to sort of remove yourself from the outside stuff and and sort of find the art that’s in the story that you’re trying to, you’re trying to dig up. And it’s just kind of like what it takes to work on something for a long time, and probably any discipline of art, or creativity. But it’s interesting to hear about how like, you know, photographers would need to work on stuff for a longer amount of time. So I like the idea, again, to work on photos for a longer set of time. Like, trying to put together photos, like I guess I got on these trips, like have a week in a spot, or you know, have some amount of time out in the spot and try and take a bunch of photos, but kind of what it talks about when we were talking about the alvord earlier, and we’re talking about the amount of time that we were out there, even though we were there for let’s say, let’s say three solid mornings, and three or four solid evenings. What ends up happening is like, if those four days for a landscape photographer, or you know, for landscape photography, if the weather isn’t quite right, or you know, just whatever, strangely, as fleeting of a moment, as sunset can be like, it can only happen sunset and sunrise, it can only happen for a few moments a day, really, you know, like, okay, let’s say on a wide range of it, if the clouds in the right spots, whatever it might be, it’s like maybe 15 minutes a day that you can really get these solid sunsets, maybe longer, let’s say a half hour a day, or a whole hour, if we want to say golden hour and blue hour or something like that, you can say there’s two hours a day to do this type of landscape photography that I’m trying to work on. But if on those couple days on those couple half hour segments that seem to come and pass pretty quickly, if the sun set doesn’t appear, if there’s not an apparition of, you know, whatever kind of cool color or you know, whatever kind of different environmental factor phenomena we’re trying to capture, then we don’t get it, we don’t get to see it like, or if an additional environmental factor comes in, like smoke or dust, which is what we got in the alvord. And what we got Hell’s Canyon, then that kind of interferes with stuff too. So I guess ultimately, it’s just weather sometimes screws up pictures you want to take. And that’s why I happen to spend a lot of time there like having to live in an environment or live in a place is really like that’s the way to get the best level of work for photographs, or for images, or something like when you’re really familiar with it. And it seems like that a lot of places you would go like a lot of travel photography, it seems like it’s taken to the place, but not during the season that you would want to go there. Alright, I’ve noticed that a couple of times, you know, I don’t know if that would make sense. But like I remember Gosh, like a beautiful spot up before I started going to the ego cap wilderness, the Joseph area, the, the the lakes and
the mountains and stuff up in, in North Eastern Oregon. And some of the really cool postcards and pictures of the landscape, picturesque images. They were all taken probably by a local photographer, you know, whoever was there, but photographers, but in March or April or May, but it was always like during a certain specific time, like when the wild flower bloom would be or while it grass was still green. And before it kind of turned into that yellow field that you get by June, July. And so just kind of all these really specific things that made it look very picturesque, very beautiful. And it’s interesting how you can kind of see those things like oh, yeah, that only happens some days out of the year that’s gonna be like that, that the hills are going to be covered in snow, but that the lake and the grass or on the lake is all going to be green, but the water is going to be blue. And so there’s all this, this whole scheme that’s sort of been organized and arranged in advance to look at Good are to look like a fine art image, I think, another fine art photographer that I was reading about, you know, it kind of described fine art photography as capturing a moment at the pinnacle of its greatest beauty or its its greatest expression, but capturing a phenomenal moment, in a phenomenal environment. You know, like the legal landscape, the land looks really cool and picturesque. out in front of you, you stood or positioned yourself and just the right spot, the heavens above you, though, clouds, the light, all are serendipitously, really nice. And then some other element like animal, you know, a bird or or some other kind of person, some of the kinds of additional element is also there serendipitously that can kind of create or bring a moment together to capture it in this fine art system of photography. But that just is one photographers kind of take on it interesting, though. But it was really specific about how unique and how special it is to really be a photographer, if that is added through selecting a place and a position to be in at a certain time to get the most amazing or the most beautiful capture of that real experiences, you can’t. And I guess if you are trying to do that, and just that single moment, then kind of considering how to be in the moment how to be at a specific moment how to kind of capture and bring it all together. All in one piece. That’s really what like the fine art photography system is about are for like the gallery photographers, I could see where they could really get into that and see like what it is. There’s also like, I guess another side of that outside of fine art would be just sort of a more real I don’t know if it’d be Street, but it would just be that photography is about capturing moments, and about sort of the real, more gritty pieces of life. And it’s really not about perfecting it or about, I guess altering the perception of reality to sort of meet some perfect, idealized, imagined sort of, piece of imagery. A lot of people do that, like I push towards surrealism a lot of the time, too. I guess I mean, a little different than surrealism, photography is always about that about, like, kind of taking a piece and then amping that up a lot as a photographer, but I don’t know there’s a lot of different like kind of avenues and pathways for I guess it’s why it’s an art. You know, that’s why different people in different consciousnesses throughout time have kind of interpreted it differently. Which is why it’s fascinating when I have a blast doing it, so it’s been cool But yeah, I posted a alvord video it’s just a set of clips. It’s kind of fun. It’s traveling around I posted another photo the the alvord Playa with a couple cool colors on it we brought some cool lights with us that kind of turned a bunch of different colors and stuff we were just kind of messing around and we noticed how cool it was the bright kind of colorful light is a kind of mixed and cast down onto the sort of uni toned color of the playa as a cut across but it was cool those to some of that day Instagram posted some stuff of our campsite one of them and imnaha one of them aboard. I think there’s another another shot of a campsite that we had up in the flowers. Lots of fun stuff so a lot of stuff like that going on. Oh man
this story Alright, so outside of the photo stuff somebody broke my window some I’m pretty sure homeless person in the area they took they took it like a landscaping paver like one that would be on the terrorists have a little landscaping feature at a house. They pick that up they went over to my car at the curb. Oh, and they smashed my my back passenger side window and and they saw a little baguette out of the out of the back that nothing in it. It was just empty. But they got that bag. They yanked it out in the back I lost my window I got a pretty pretty good side den from the concrete on paper like bashing into the side of the car. And so yeah, my car’s in the shop pretty sweet thanks homeless people thanks vandals making me report a claim to my insurance. Oh, hey. So yeah, right now the the truck is actually at the body shop getting some big dents beat out of it and then getting a window replaced. So yeah, thanks all those people for taking that productivity and just shattering it on the ground in the street. So that was awesome. It was pretty cool but but really overall i’m not i’m not too mad about it and I didn’t really lose anything. You know, the the worst well, or the one that stung me more was a couple years ago when I the foreigner still they broken to that and they stole my tripod at the time. I think they still like my tripod and I still I think like a Some other camera accessory but I don’t know what it was. It’s probably called White stand. It’s probably a light stand thing or something like that. Oh, it was a softbox Oh, that was a good softbox too. Yeah, I replaced that one and I placed the tripod. But yeah, I remember I had the foreigner and I take it all the gear inside and I just had like a couple accessory pieces in the back wasn’t really in there for very long but but yeah, so when it popped the window on the foreigner and then I had lost my tripod, lost the softbox What are they gonna do with it? They just pawned it for something that’s totally not worth like, what 30 bucks, they got whatever. And thanks. Thanks, guys. So that would stop me a lot more than this one for whatever reason, but I guess this is probably more monetarily impactful to you know, the car or whatever, and I deal with insurance. So that’s my story. You can check some of my photos out on Instagram, that’s at Billy Newman. And you can go to my website. That’s Billy Newman photo comm to see more of my images and more of the things that I’m posting. Thanks a lot for checking out this podcast. And you can tune in to another one sometime soon. Thanks a lot guys. talk again again soon.