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179 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Photographing The Owyhee River
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Billy Newman photo podcast. I’m out, and on a trip, I made it out to Eastern Oregon. I’ve been camping out now for one night, and I got some gear tips to go over some stuff that I had prepped in advance for a trip out here and some stuff that’s worked out to help me out. Staying out here in the cold, I have to tell you, and it’s cold, it’s wet, it’s been wet, it’s wintertime II, there’s a lot of cold, damp sagebrush, a lot of wind, a lot of clouds, a lot of photographs too. So it’s been fun. I’ve been making some progress on some photo stuff and have been kind of finally able to shoot some video stuff that I’ve wanted to get produced for a long time. So that has been an advance. And I’m happy that that has occurred. Today though, I wanted to focus on a set of equipment tips that I was talking about a few little things that have helped me out on this one. The first one is one that I’ve been doing for a couple of months now, but I have a lighter, and it’s got about a foot of duct tape. Actually, on this one, it’s gorilla tape; it’s a bit tackier. And then I’ve got my pocket knife in my pocket all the time. But I have this, this, this regular giant lighter. And then it’s got about a foot of duct tape wrapped onto the handle of the giant ladder just across the big ladder itself that stays in my pocket all the time.
I’ve got another one like that in my bag too. But while I was out hiking around and walking and stuff, I’m was able to grab that tape and then use it on anything that I needed at the time. So if I have a rip, tear, or something else that I need, I’m able to get it at any time I have access to it; it’s been excellent. I’ve found a bunch of uses for that. Some of it’s been efficient. I got my fishing license a while ago, and I was able to hit some lakes and stuff that are stocked with trout throughout the wintertime. It’s been fun out on this trip, to you know, just like Something’ Weird Eastern Oregon stuff, and I’m not going to be able to make it back to this Lake for probably years, you know, as it kind of goes, I mean, I thought I was going to do this like four years ago. And I spent four years out in this spot, or you know, this area to go to these or this little pond Lake out here, which is pretty remote, but BIA has some stocked fish and stuff. And it’s fantastic. Yeah, like throwing some tackle, throwing on some get-together and having access to a lighter, so you have a fire, and then like you have the tape and stuff to wrap up to the secure whatever.
I know whatever kind of stuff might happen. But a lot of incidentals and stuff seem to happen out here. One thing I noticed out in the desert specifically happened just the other day as I had a cut on my finger. Now I have some superglue that’s packed into an ammo camp I have over in the side. And that’s probably the first one I went to. I also have my first aid kit and bandages and stuff like that. But what I did for the time was I had to because I was just kind of out with my backpack and stuff. But I got wet. So I got to clear out, and that’s a tricky thing like here in the desert is that my hands are like, penetrated with dirt. You know, like there’s dirt under my nails. There’s dirt on my hands. So as soon as you get like a cat on a finger, it’s Yeah, you know, it’s just like going to be dirty, it’s just going to get filled with dirt, which is terrible. And that’s sort of where you can get like minor infections and stuff like that end up being blood poisoning that ends up being more significant problems that you do want to have while you’re out on a four-day hike in the desert. You know, cut your finger on a rock with your knife.
That’s usually what you cut with your knife, and then you know some knickers slip or whatever happens. I think I clipped it on something that I was grabbing at. It wasn’t my knife this time. But it was a piece of metal that was mine and as I grabbed it and I like poked in, and then I got to cut it out. So I was able to. I was out travel. I was like hiking around; I had my backpack with me; I didn’t have my first aid kit back in the truck. I don’t need it. It’s just a slight scratch on my finger and stuff. But I was able to wash it with the water ball that I had. I was able to do a much better job at this with actual antibiotics and stuff later on. But I was able to yank some tape off of that and throw it on and kind of bandage on my thumb right away, which is fantastic. Then I was able to use some antiseptic and stuff later. I have cleared out.
Superglue it, which is fantastic for these finger cuts. You can put a little superglue on there, and it’ll seal up right away as long as there is no blood contact or something, but for like a light kind of superficial cut into the skin at the top. I was able to put a little superglue on there, and then it dried up pretty fast. It sort of seals it together, and then I wrap it in a bit of tape, and the video works pretty well for an outdoor band. It had like a little more stick to it. It was able to kind of seal up there a bit more. You got to watch it a little. So, like bandages and stuff, you don’t want to get anything else. Still, we’re pretty good at some of the stuff that I was doing out there. In addition to that and cutting the tape, most of the time, it is for stuff that I’m doing, like trying to hang things up on trees, trying to get things set up while I’m trying to do some work stuff, or setting up a marker or something.
Yeah, I brought 20 for target shooting and stuff out there while traveling around on the public BLM land. Stuff, and so I set up a target like, say, 50 yards or something. And then I didn’t bring a stapler gun to staple on the paper targets that I’ve got that I have this tape with me. And so I walked in, I was like, Okay, I say, cut a strip of tape. And then I was able to throw it on to the guy who taped this stuff, but it’s that stuff that comes in pretty useful for a bunch of things that I’ve been able to kind of fine with. The other one is MATLAB. And I hear like, most of the time, it’s pretty dry and cold, which is okay, but it’s sort of got like wetness a lot of the time too. So it has come through, and it rained a couple of Scott likes wet out here enough that as you move around for a while, you have like, a bit of dampness to you. And it just kind of gets wet over time. But most of the time, it kind of catches on the jacket on the outside. But one thing I’ve noticed is trying to take a lot of opportunities to dry out clothes. Specifically, I guess drought happened more when I was out around the lakeside in the water early in the morning.
I like more humidity or do or things like that, but just sort of a lot of the time, though. It can be wet out here. So even though it’s a desert, and it was wintertime and stuff, and then it’s freezing and damp or something, it’s different from wet though, and I explained it, but yeah, I’ve been trying to draft some stuff and try to rotate some things around so that I’m staying dry and pretty warm. And that’s been pretty helpful. There is snow out here and a lot of spots too, so I mean there is wetness, ice, a lot of cold, and yeah, a lot of that snow that’s been piled up even if some parts of the days are like above freezing. A lot of snow has just stayed in the shade, remained intact, stayed frozen for however long it’s been since it snowed last. At these elevations, it’s probably pretty frequent that there is some cold weather or some overnight rain and snowfall and stuff that kind of gathers in that minute. See in a lot of spots out here, kind of all over the hills and stuff and especially for the distances of travel, it’s like well, yeah, there’s some water, there’s some rain or something like that in the wintertime, so it’s happening, but yeah, trying to stay as warm as I can try to remove my boots and stuff kind of near the evening and switching to like different shoes if I’ve gotten like a long hike I’ve been trying to do that a bit.
And that’s pretty good. Oh, another piece of gear that I’ve been using a ton on days out and stuff I get my camera bag set up, I get my coffee or something like that in the morning. Then I break open a couple of packages of those hand warmers. You can get these hand warmers anywhere. Sometimes the foot warmer packages are a little easier to use in shape. It is sometimes more expensive to get those hand warmers. You can get them in bulk but go out to get them, buying what’s got them all over every store but breaking them up and then throwing them in the pockets or throwing them into the toes. The pads for the feet work better because they’re a bit flatter. They don’t obstruct the placement of your foot and your shoe as much but trying to put Yeah, some like warming piece like those hand warmers and stuff into my socks that works tremendous or, or down kind of near my foot or something, but yeah, anything to sort of keep parts of the feet warm has been pretty cool for some hikes and stuff out here in sort of goes talking about I got out here pretty early, I tried to get up pretty early in the morning, so I can get out away from Camp before the sun comes up. So I can get some dynamics and some of the stuff that I’m trying to photograph. And that’s been pretty cool. I’ve been trying to do that. The hand warmers work great. It works excellent on fishing trips and stuff, too. That’s really what I was trying to do super early in the morning the other day as I tried to take off and then hit the fishing spot,
Throw some casts and stuff, and you’re just sitting there and stuff, and that’s really what you’re doing with one of the photographs too is you just got to get set up you sitting there with the tripod and the camera. Sometimes you can’t have ease with photography. Not to have to be quiet, be still, or concentrate on the fish in the fishing experience. You can roam around and keep moving and keep your legs moving and stuff, but yeah, with the fish and stuff, it’s been super necessary for me to rely on those. Those little hand warmers and that that propane heater when I can go out the first time without it, I think the next time I go fishing in the morning I’m going to bring that propane heater down with a little, you know, a tiny portable kit next to me, so I can sit on the dock and grab the heat there.
But as it was, yeah, the other day, it was just holding on to the heat from the hand warmer as best I could, and that was all going on. But I was also doing well, so I have this headlamp flashlight. I talked about flashlights and another couple of podcasts a while back. I got a couple like having a handheld flashlight that works well, and I also really like having my headlamps on trips where I’m backpacking and traveling stuff out of my backpack or even out of the car and property. I like having the giant flashlight around, and that’s kind of always just a couple of feet away so that I can grab that, but at nighttime, have that headlamp around, so you have like your two hands-frees in any way you look. You have your light, you know, that’s always great, but when I go to bed, I usually have like, you know, like the top handheld flashlight around somewhere. But I’ve also been trying to learn this trick where you take your headlamps to get off your head. Sometimes, I would wear it around my neck as a necklace that gets tangled up in me when I am in my sleeping bag. Sometimes, not always that comfortable. But I wanted to have the headlamps around to grab it at night when I woke up, and I needed some light to do something.
I like to take it on my left hand or right hand, and I guess if it interferes with your watch or something, you can use the other side. But I kind of loop it over my hand. And then I sort of strap it up like twice, you know, crossing over like a figure eight of the circle. And then I kind of cross it over my hand again. And then I do that once more until it’s kind of just like a tight wrap up on my wrist. And then I’ve got my headlamp strapped up on my wrist while I’m sleeping, and I set it up. So it’s pretty comfortable. It’s not overly tight or anything. But then if you wake up, and you need to hit your light real fast, you go right to your wrist, you hit your button, and then boom, you got your torch on right away. But I’ve been trying to do that while camping out in a tent. And whatever I wake up at in the middle of the night, boom, I can grab, grab hold of my light, and get to whatever I need pretty quick. But we’re doing that for the overnight stuff. And I haven’t been in snow yet. But the spot that I drove up to the Camp first was snowed in like as you kind of like creeping up the road, you’re sort of gently leveling up in elevation. And then, by the time you get up to the camping area, you’re in the snow zone.
So there’s like a couple of inches of snow that’s been there for however long the wintertime; I have to wait a couple of months for it to melt out and then dry out before I can camp there. Again, Buddha had noticed when I was up there, so I decided not to camp there. And I went back down to a drier spot that I could have a bit easier access to kind of move around. But it was good for me at the time. But what I was noticing, though, is yeah, and this had happened to me at another time when I was camping out in the car years ago, now outside you somebody. Still, I had the truck. I went to bed and then overnighted it snowed a couple of inches, and that covered all the stuff that I had and disappeared under the snow and stuff.
So it made like a hassle to try and find a lot of the small things on it, like little tools and stuff that are difficult to find. I think I ended up finding it all. You know, it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was like a hassle. It was kind of messy and stuff, but trying to watch for when an amount of snow would fall in that I got my camp kit stuff in a spot where it’s not going to get lost if it drops underneath the snowfall while I’m out here—kind of like camping, traveling around, and stuff. So I don’t know what’s going okay, but it’s been pretty cool, stunning spots out here, open skies, and stuff cool. Like, I just like these, like the high desert, winter landscapes and staff are fantastic. I like these photographs. So it’s cool to drive around in cold, really harsh kind of weather, sometimes wondering like, hey, what am I doing?
It’s cold, and I’m pretty far away from any towns. So I’m trying to kind of stay pretty mellow and pretty safe with a lot of it. And like a lot of stuff, it gets hairy out here, you know, like pretty quickly you can just kind of go from what seems to be like a pretty main highway to all of a sudden you’re, you know where you’re 70 miles away from anything. And it’s just kind of
Sort of weird, weird, bizarre landscapes that are mysterious hazards in the landscape. So it’s a little less maintained than some of the stuff that we’ve seen, you know, alongside the national forest lands outside, like the Five corridors or something like that. So it’s just more remote than that out here. And it’s kind of cool. Not many other people out here, you see some farm tracks and stuff or some other people do on their trip to travel around, but pretty small, pretty, pretty isolated things out here. But it’s excellent, and it’s fantastic. And I’m happy to get these photographs in and finally kind of do some stuff through the winter weather and do some camping. So I appreciate you guys checking out this episode of the podcast. I’ll try and do another one while I’m out here. And we’ll see how that one goes. But until then, I’ll talk to you guys later and recommend that you go to Billy Newman photo comm to see some of the work I’m putting together. It will probably be a couple of weeks before I put anything out from the new landscape photos I’ve put together.
New things up on the blog, the website about the packing list and stuff that I’ve been trying to put together for traveling out to the wahi doing some just packing lists, things about you knowing how to stay dry, how to keep your property, set and straight. Some of this information is about some Cool Bits of gear pieces that I’ve been bringing along with me on some of these trips that I have been helping out with, but yeah, some cool stuff on the website there. You can see more things on the Instagram page Bitly or at Billy Newman on Instagram, and it probably does it for me today. Appreciate you guys listening to this episode of the podcast, and I will talk to you again next time.