If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or a podcast interview, please drop me an email. Drop Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to book a wedding photography package, or a family portrait session, please visit GoldenHourWedding.com or you can email the Golden Hour Wedding booking manager here.
If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.
If you want to purchase stock images by Billy Newman, my current Stock photo library is here.
If you want to learn more about the work Billy is doing as an Oregon outdoor travel guide, you can find resources on GoldenHourExperience.com.
If you want to listen to the Archeoastronomy research podcast created by Billy Newman, you can listen to the Night Sky Podcast here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography: you can download Working With Film here. Yours free.
Want to hear from me more often?Subscribe to the Billy Newman Photo Podcast on Apple Podcasts here.
If you get value out of the photography content I produce, consider making a sustaining value for value financial contribution, Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books all on Amazon here.
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
0:14
Hello and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. And this photograph today comes from the lower Rogue River in Southern Oregon really cool area the Rogue River is awesome I think it starts up outside of Crater Lake and then kind of flows down through Southern Oregon comes out near near gold beaches i think but it kind of in this section I think it’s cutting through some of the siskey range in Southern Oregon as that kind of goes down but really beautiful spot this is a blossom bar blossom bars one of the most technical or I think maybe maybe one of the most challenging or most infamous features on the Rogue River as you’re going down there especially through the the wild and scenic section at least it seemed like that there was a few other things that seemed difficult but but this is a really tricky spot because so many boulders as you can kind of see in there, it makes that channel that navigable channel, really pretty narrow. And in this shot, we see this kayaker kind of right in the pocket of that that really tight stretch of the rapid there and blossom bar. But it’s really cool. I’m really happy that we caught him right in that section. And I think I just got this in one frame. This was on a film camera, the f4
1:35
you can see more of my work at Billy Newman photo comm you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think if you look at Billy Newman under the authors section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism on camping, and cool stuff over there. I was learning this, this tactic called feather sticks, do you guys heard of that it’s like a bushcrafting term I hate that word I prefer like camping or hunting or something like that. But in the world of bushcrafting which I’m sure you can YouTube, there’s this is actually a really, really an idea and a lot of that stuff is great to have of generating the skills that you’d need to run to to manage yourself in the outdoors. And the thing kind of the thinking behind it is the more that you know about how to work with your environment, the less gear you need to carry with you and and really the more apt you are to make proper choices in a short period of time that will help you out so that’s that’s really helpful. So you’re just kinda like having five building skills or knowing what to do and how to set up camp or how to run a tarp or how to get water all that sort of stuff. Anyway, in this case, you take some of these sticks that I’m talking about some of these drier ones, you take your knife, your sturdy bushcraft knife, but people still like to talk about anything you take around 24 inches of that stick and kind of break them down to 24 inches or so. And then we’re supposed to do is take that knife and sort of what would it be like kind of like peeling a potato or something or like you know, if you got to like kind of peel a carrot, what do you want to do is kind of start at the top and then you want to peel into it you kind of cut in with a knife just a little bit and then run a slice of that down all the way down to the the end of the bar but you don’t you don’t slice off that flake of wood that you’ve been pulling up you try and make it pretty thin too It’s called feather sticks for a reason right? You try and kind of make it like a thin strip of wood that’s kind of pulled up from it and the wood will just kind of naturally curl up on itself as you chop on it it takes a lot of getting used to you kind of have to get to get to get the hang of trying to get those feather pieces down you have to hold it onto the stick itself so you cut down all the way to the last like two inches or so of the wood and then you leave it and so what happens is I use a cut you kind of rotate the wood and you cut down rotate the wood and cut down and so you get after doing that for a while is just a bunch of these real thin flakes of wood that are all gathered up at the top end of this stick and then you have a nice dry piece of kindling that’s sort of worked down next to it and so what you do is people that a lot of bushcrafting and camping stuff is doing a lot of preparation and a lot of work that sort of seems like man should roll lighter or you know should read some newspapers or something I would have done more but if you’re in a bushcraft and yeah it’s one of those things you can do if you have nothing nothing around but yeah you make these feather sticks and they’re they’re good fire starting material if you get the right wood that’s that’s trying if you can kind of run down and you get these plumes of these kind of saw or Masada is but these little like plumes of wood flakes and they’ll they’ll burn up real quick when you get when you get a fire going on them. But what I did for this one, oh the other fire tip. What was the one I heard? Cotton balls and Vaseline. here that’s that’s like the Firestarter ticket because it’s pretty pretty neutral. You can use Vaseline for a couple different things and cotton balls too but that petroleum jelly that petroleum jelly that makes up the Vaseline will rock a fire and the cotton too. So yeah, you just need to take a cotton swab from the bathroom Vaseline you put that in like a Ziploc bag and then you pack that into one of the pockets of your backpack and you can get a fire going with a lot of stuff or you can get the base of a fire gun with a lot of stuff like that would work great even with the gun was like a flint Flint rod.
5:27
I can’t remember what the other word is for it but those Flint rods that you strike and then you run a spray of sparks on to it said you can do that I always bring a lighter a couple lighters with a gun in my pocket right now but those are really easy fire starter tools where you can like that you got a good flame going for a sustained amount of time running out the petroleum jelly and the cotton and then you can stack smaller twigs and sticks and stuff on it and then run bigger branches on that really quickly and that that helps out a lot in my case I didn’t know that I had a couple couple napkins from lunch and I had some Fern that I spotted over here and it had died out so there’s these these dried out fronds of Fern leaves over I don’t know about 50 feet over here under the the side of the road. So I went over there with my knife and I cut down a couple handfuls of those I came back over to the fire I laid out a better of a smaller six at the base and then I stacked in a bunch of the dried Fern is a bad there and then I put some of the strips of paper towel that I had balled up in a section there and then I stacked up kind of a little fort like a little lean to four of some of the smaller sticks and then had some of the bigger sticks are ready to go but lit up the the what was it the paper towel and a couple in like two spots is what I tried to lift the paper towel in two spots with the lighter and then real quickly I just kind of held over the ferns was dried ferns and they lit up real fast here so that was a great fire started piece and that cuts you know cuts a big flame really quickly and then I put that over it and then that kind of got the lower ferns sort of burned and and some of the sticks go in and then I threw on those smaller twigs over and then that cut through the bigger six on there so dropped a couple logs on there yeah I was kind of scavenging them from some of the other firings that I was passing along the way even though I gone out what was it a couple I don’t know it’s probably a month or so ago now and I collected a good bit of firewood I’ve been some of the the areas outside of aware I was working at and yeah I’d kind of drive around and if I see like some some downed dried out wood on the road I’d throw it in the back of the truck and I brought it home and I cut it up and then I stacked it up and so some of its kind of seasoning out now we’ve got a little fire pit at home that we’re kind of we’re kind of using it with but I was gonna bring some of that some of the twigs and some of the kindling that I had and then I forgot about it and didn’t bring any firewood with me which is fine to know you know it’s cool really almost anytime I’ve gone out camping in the past I’ve never brought firewood with me even probably at times I should have or you know in places that you’re not supposed to scavenge firewood or that it’s been so used that there’s just no firewood in any capacity left to scavenge match where was that is in Wyoming yeah I was in Wyoming we were traveling we were camped out at a spot and cabbages go through there we were in September so I’m sure that he has been in constant use from you know April until the end right you know it’s just been constant use and it’s been like that for the last 100 years or how long you know we’re not the first but in that in that area out there there just been nothing available to burn so all the all those flammable resources that have been collected by other other kindling hunters in the past and it’s kind of interesting to see how that goes so we kind of had to be resourceful and we had to kind of figure out how to gather enough stuff but we did pretty well you know like we kind of go to like pine needles and pine cones sometimes those those were pretty well and are often pretty dry and will burn well enough they’re not going to be a sustaining fire they’re not going to really like get up embers go into the degree that you can really cook on an effective way but but you can’t cook on it I mean you can get some stuff going and in some other ways you can get you know enough of a fire on that you can you can get a lot going so that’s that’s normally what I would have is you know you have like one or two good logs that can kind of keep things kicking for the evening but to get that going you need to you need to have some smaller stuff and normally that guy you just don’t find where you show up because you can’t be here there’s gonna be sticks around so you try and gather that stuff up but man if it’s a busy area that stuff will happen scavenged shoot but that’s not my problem now so I’m I’m loaded up on some firewood and I gotta get better coals go and that I can get this stuff set rockin with
9:49
you can check out more information at Billy Newman photo comm you can go to Billy Newman photo comm Ford slash support, if you want to help me out and participate in the value for value model that We’re running this podcast with if you receive some value out of some of the stuff that I was talking about, you’re welcome to help me out and send some value my way through the portal at Billy Newman photo comm forward slash support, you can also find more information there about Patreon and the way that I use it if you’re interested or if you’re more comfortable using Patreon that’s patreon.com forward slash Billy Newman photo.
10:29
I’m trying to learn Unix, I’m trying to learn like the Mac OS, command line terminal stuff, I don’t know if you guys was learning the any stuff in in a shell language before, way back, like years ago, like back in the 90s. You guys might remember when you got your first PC at the family and like when I was a kid, I really wanted to play video games, I wanted to play video games so bad, but all the video game installation systems for Windows PCs, there are all this dos based systems. So you had to put in the desk and then you had to like go into DOS and then change it from the C drive to the D drive and then do some command line thing that I did not understand that all the time. Any of those directions were way over my head. So it was always like so hard and frustrating. I remember just having kind of like, you know, panic, frustrations about trying to get command lines to work and not understanding what you’re supposed to type in or that there’s commands you’re supposed to put it. It was always so frustrating. I learned it a little bit. And I’ve gotten into computers when I was young. And so I figured out some dos stuff really, but I was never proficient in it, I can never really move about a file system and a command line before. So it was cool. I didn’t really know anything about the Mac OS system. I know that it’s Darwin, I know that Mac OS was based on Unix and like the Unix file handling system kind of the same way that like Linux is based on that. And Unix is like the old command line system of file management stuff. I think that was back. There’s all sorts of stuff I don’t understand because there’s like the PowerShell system, which I guess is more for scripting languages. Or for I guess there’s a lot of powerful stuff you can do on that server side. And then there’s a lot of stuff originally, that stuff was set up as where it’s like more like a file cabinet system. And I’ve been kind of learning about that. I’m not an expert on any terminal stuff by any means. But it’s been really cool, kind of getting a bit more understanding about how to get powerful use out of a Macintosh computer. And it was cool learning a few commands on it. I guess if anybody wants to try it, I’d go into Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing. I don’t know if you guys would want to do this. But I’ve been going into terminal, I installed a new shell in Terminal called fish. When you first get started with Shell or with the terminal on Mac, it’s the bash shell. There you learn I guess what that stands, it’s like the born again, shall I suddenly came out in the 70s. You know, it’s like early 70s. Right? I don’t know this stuff goes way back for free computer stuff. But But I installed like an updated shell that gives me a couple different color modifiers. And it kind of helps. It helps fill in helps autocomplete some of the stuff that you’re trying to do on command line, which saves a ton of time and make sure my syntax is way easier because I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know when to put a space. Do I put a dash and then a space and then a letter? Or do I just not? Or how do I how do I pipe a command? What am I doing here. So none of that stuff I really understand. And so the auto completion stuff, have a more modern shell that you install on top of that makes a big difference. But first, it takes a huge amount of time, I guess you can type in man man. And that’ll be that they will bring up like the manual for Unix or for all the Unix commands. You can kind of get a handle on how to learn that. But really the best way is to go to YouTube. And the follow up tutorial for a while of learning some of the basic commands. Some of the basic ones that I’ve learned is like CD. For change directory, that’s how you you like move from one file to the next file. So if you’re in like, Oh, I’m in my Users folder, but I’m going to go to my Documents folder NASS, you CD documents, and then it moves you to that, then you type in LS to list the contents of the folders in that and then like you look at that, and then you can open up those programs in a writing program or you can create files. That’s been really cool. I’ve learned how to do that. The other part I’ve been learning is not mess with this before either but is is with like homebrew, which I guess is a package manager, it’s kind of so you can download programs from the internet. Or you can download additional utilities or applications into terminal and then run them from Terminal it’s pretty cool. There’s there’s ways you can do more advanced things where you can get, you know, just like your Mac OS apps that you would probably likely want to download. You can get those through terminal if you’d want to install. But with a lot of these installation packages it’s for it’s for these really interesting kind of applications that are quite old, like they’re 20 or 25 years old. Like I downloaded an email program that was new, right? It was a command line email program, I think called Alpine it was made by like the University of Washington back in 2001 was last time it was updated. And you’re like hey, Wow, that’s pretty new software. Now. way, that’s cool. But you can look around and there’s all these different formulas like there’s mp3 players, there’s file converters, there’s video converters, and paid converters, there’s like system utilities, there’s disk usage, utilities. There’s networking utilities. There’s games like I put zork on there, I put Tetris on there. I’ve been trying to like learn a few things on just you know how to open stuff, how to run stuff in there. And it’s been kind of cool. There’s, there’s all sorts of environments in there that I just had no idea really existed. But there’s a whole, like functioning computer system that existed without the graphical user interface that we put so much time into. So anyway, it’s been, it’s been fun. It’s just kind of a hobby thing. But I’ve been trying to learn a little bit of productivity out of it, too, because there’s, like I would ever do this. But there are some interesting things that you can do. One of the commands that I thought was interesting was the sips command, you can probably look that up like man sips man space sit for the manual for the command, sips, but I guess that’s like a Macintosh image processing. thing, something commands system, I don’t know what it does completely. But there’s cool things you can do with that, where if you have a folder of images, so you find a directory, it’s got a folder of images. But those are all large images, and you want to resize those for the web, you can duplicate that folder is really the process I do is in the GUI, I would make a copy of that folder, I would navigate to that and command line and I type a command like sips space, and then the name of the folder or like the size of pixels, I want the image and then the name of the folder, and it would process in the command line, it would process all those images to be resized to that format. And to that size. So it was interesting, I did an experiment like where I was taking some photos that were like five megapixel images, and then I would drop those down to 400 width pixels. Or, you know, like a 400 pixel width image that I could put up on a website. And it was cool, I could just take the whole folder, and then I could write the command and then you could see it process out all those images, and then you go back and it would be a resized image. It was really cool. But it’s just interesting kind of seeing your computer work and then understanding how to layer in commands, and get some action out of it. I hardly know how to do anything, I’m totally novice that I can barely kind of move up and down the file system and get something interesting to look at. But most of all, it’s just kind of me like looking at and go Hmm, how about that, but I don’t know how to use it at all. I mean, there’s so many system developers are like network analysts or you know, people that actually like get into computers that are in media and for computer development or for for application development. There’s still like a whole range of uses and applications and systems that people that are in that really get into quite deeply so you can kind of see like how powerful these tools are. And at a certain level when you’re trying to get into powerful tools you just move into terminal you move into everything that you can do in Unix it’s really interesting. So that’s been kind of fun to do. I’ll talk about it more in kind of a fun goofy way but yeah, man getting into Unix.
18:03
Thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com a few new things up there some stuff on the homepage, some good links to other other outbound sources. some links to books and links to some podcasts. Like this blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy numina photo.com. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode. And the
18:27
lucky next