Social Media Scrub
Gear that I work with
Professional film stock I work with https://imaging.kodakalaris.com/photographers-photo-printing/film/color
I keep my camera in a Lowepro camera bag
https://www.lowepro.com/us-en/magnum-400-aw-lp36054-pww/
When I am photographing landscape images I use a Manfrotto tripod
https://www.manfrotto.com/us-en/057-carbon-fiber-4-section-geared-tripod-mt057c4-g/
A lot of my film portfolio was created with the Nikon N80 and Nikon F4
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/f4.htm
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/n80.htm
Social Media Scrub
The Nikon D2H and Nikon D3 were used to create many of the digital images on this site https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond3 https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond2h
Two lenses I am using all the time are the 50mm f1.8 and the 17-40mm f4
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/5018daf.htm
https://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/17-40mm.htm
Some astrophotography and documentary video work was created with the Sony A7r
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-alpha-a7r
I am currently taking photographs with a Canon 5D
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-5d-mark-iii
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.
I am Billy Newman, a photographer and creative director that has served clients in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii for 10 years. I am an author, digital publisher, and Oregon travel guide. I have worked with businesses and individuals to create a portfolio of commercial photography. The images have been placed within billboard, print, and digital campaigns including Travel Oregon, Airbnb, Chevrolet, and Guaranty RV.
My photographs often incorporate outdoor landscape environments with strong elements of light, weather, and sky. Through my work, I have published several books of photographs that further explore my connection to natural places.
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/
127
Hello, and
thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. My name is Billy Newman, I am a photographer, I’m based in the northwest, and my website is Billy Newman photo.com. That’s where you can see the rest of the podcasts that I’ve been producing. And some of the photographs too, you can check me out on Instagram, and just about every other social media location, that’s at Billy Newman. Today, I got a couple of things to talk about. It’s been an interesting week, I’ve been kind of moving around, I’m trying to get back into the audio recording, the media production sort of side of stuff. But it’s, it’s been a good week, I’ve been trying to put out some photographs, I’ve been trying to work on some stuff too. And kind of trying to spend some more time in the office as it is or you know, trying to try to send emails trying to work some stuff out trying to do, I guess, some springtime promotion sort of stuff. But it’s also been good to I’ve been trying to make some art, I’ve been traveling around a little bit, I jumped out to the Mackenzie River a little bit last week to try and take some photographs, I was out abandoned trying to take some photographs of the West Coast and the rocks on the beach. That was pretty fun. We did a drive up to the Deschutes A while back and put some photos together. That was pretty cool. So I like kind of kind of roaming around a little bit and trying to get to a few of these other diverse locations over a couple of weeks. But Gosh, really, it’s just the gas, the gasoline, that’s probably the biggest business expense that I have tried to transport myself around all these locations. And I’ve always wondered what it’s like for people and other types of traveling jobs or the types of art jobs, you know, where they have to travel for all the work that they would do. But man traveling for work, and traveling for work that isn’t, isn’t really on the books, that’s kind of tough, you know, so are just kind of choosing for myself to trap drive all the way out to the john de river and take a photograph. That’s a commitment, it seems like. So it’s kind of you know, there’s no audience, there’s no people, there’s no one to sell it to, there’s no one to meet with, necessarily, it’s just me going out to a public BLM boat ramp, setting up and trying to take a picture of some rocks and water and a mountain that looks pretty, maybe maybe it looks pretty, you know, it’s kind of been few and far between more recently that, that I’ve been finding some of the locations or art or I don’t know, some of the experience that I want to find, you know, it’s kind of a tricky thing in photography, sometimes it’s really about you having to put yourself in, in a position to where really beautiful things are gonna come by, it’s sort of an it’s, it seems a little twisted. And I guess there’s probably a lot of perspectives on it, where you could be in just about any element or any situation. And you can be a creative photographer that puts together, you know, interesting visual pieces, I believe that I understand that I’m working as a landscape photographer, I’m trying to build a portfolio with a diverse set of images and experiences. And really, to do that you have to put yourself in a lot of different environmental biomes, which is a lot of different types of weather, basically, or a lot of different, you know, there’s the coast, there’s the grasslands, there’s the jungle, there’s the desert, there’s the Arctic, there’s all sorts of different, you know, there’s snow, there’s mountain, there’s all sorts of different visual elements that you can put together from nature that they have just different context, different look a different kind of feel to it. And so all of that is sort of an element that you have to expose yourself to living in Oregon is cool because a lot of that is significantly close to you in some way. But at a time and for for travel photography, or for landscape photography, it engender the idea of having new experiences, or going to new places, and seeing and exploring new visual things from New angles, you know, or having new experiences with, with people or with gear with equipment, setting out that all that sort of stuff, adding those those visual elements, or those elements of a story to it, you know, you could take a landscape, but then you could take a landscape with an ultralight glider in it. And now it’s a story about about something else, or you can take a photograph of a hiker, or you could take photographs of a fish, you know if that was pulled out on a fishing ship by the river. So there’s all sorts of context that you can add to the story that’s describing the history of what happened in the experience. And part of that is something I’m trying to do better with the photography that I produce. However, a lot of it, though, is pretty or it’s pretty structured, it’s simple. It’s supposed to be maybe a little bit more refined, or clean. I don’t know, what I loved about landscape early on was the idea of setting a camera up on a tripod, having a lot of time in-between frames, and then kind of waiting and being specific and sort of holding yourself for the moment when the light was right when the clouds were right when you sort of set things up to be at the right angle to expose yourself and to get the most beautiful version of the experience that was going to come across the land at that time. That’s interesting. You know, it’s a hard thing to try and get yourself to learn how to do again and again and again. I hardly am able to do it, but I have fun doing it. I guess everybody does, right? Everybody tries to be a photographer and that’s kind
of one thing I was trying to think about a little bit more to I was looking at well was looking at photographs, I was looking at Instagram online. And I’m kind of looking at social media as a whole. I’m sure probably a lot of people have been doing this. Maybe more recently, there’s a lot of stuff about Facebook right now, too. And Facebook’s use of a lot of personal data through a lot of specific algorithms that are trying to match that information to companies that would find it valuable to understand that data about you. And I guess there are inferences that they can make about the things you’ve liked. It’s all psychometric psychometric data, is that what they call it psychometric data. It’s this idea that there’s, there’s sort of what you might consider abstract things that you like, or don’t like, that you leave behind, in this way, give information that’s left on these social media platforms, and then that’s sort of collected and algorithmically compiled to understand what maybe you would want to buy, or what you would participate in or who you would vote for all those sorts of things seem to be up in the news right now. That’s an interesting debate, it’s really important. Facebook is built to do that one thing. So it might be a choice of whether to use Facebook or not, I figure I need to use Facebook, and I need to publish content to Facebook, I appreciate doing that. But I also am trying to be kind of technology conscious, or, let’s say conscious of the data small that you leave as you go to all these different locations, or maybe what is it that’s being tracked about you on the internet, while you use Facebook? Or what other sites are connected to Facebook that when you visit them, give Facebook some information or allows Facebook to have some information it shares with more advertisers. So in part of that, it’s kind of this idea of thinking, Well, what is my social media? What’s my social media influence? Or my graph of people that my network of people that I associate with? And then has it been the same for 10 years? Are these people any different? Have they ever built more relationships? Or is it useful? Is it useful for what it says it should be useful for? And sometimes I seem to find that it really doesn’t seem to be in that way built to give me more of what it’s built to do. That’s kind of a confusing way to say it. But if Twitter is an idea, where you’re supposed to put up a message and Twitter as a service that disseminates that to lots of people that would want to hear that message. Well, that’d be really interesting. But over the last 10 years that I’ve been using Twitter that I’ve been sending out stuff, it doesn’t Twitter itself doesn’t really help build that, or it doesn’t help spread that message to people that would want to hear it. And that’s because people have a market understanding of communication, it’s too many incoming signals, so they have to limit it. So really, the goal of Twitter is to limit how many incoming messages you would get, or how many incoming things are perturbing your piece, it seems like and you have to, you know, wait for other people to find it or be interested in it. So there’s lots of success has been having on social media for all these years. But what I had to say is that probably what I’ve been doing just hasn’t really been working for me, it doesn’t seem to be that fun to do. So what I’m going to do is go through at least Twitter and Facebook too. And I’m really going to try and I’m going to try and go through I’m going to write down everybody I would want to follow, I’m going to try and do some research to I don’t know if really a lot of people have done this, I think maybe like me, a lot of people put their Facebook page or their Twitter page together, years ago, and it was kind of a new, more novel system. And there may be at that time weren’t as much of a variety of people to follow on those platforms. So at the time, I followed a lot of people that I thought would be okay, or effective. And I’ve kind of continued following them for years for 10 years. in a lot of situations, I don’t believe they deserve my attention, at least 10 years on, or what’s a, like a friend like or a person I did a group project within a college class, maybe eight years ago,
I haven’t talked to that person, they live out of state, they do different things. Now, I’ve never really had a relationship with them other than they didn’t work on a group project I had to finish eight years ago, what good memories I have. So what I mean to say is those people are out, I got to cut those people. I got to build this social media network for my life. Now really, I don’t think that it might be an unhealthy idea concept, especially for us are some of some of the millennials that seem to come of age as these tools like MySpace, and Facebook and Twitter, we’re really coming into their own. It’s kind of an interesting time where we kind of matched up with that just perfectly as it is. And so now 10 years on, we’ve kind of been stuck in this social situation where we’ve just sort of been roped down with our high school relationships or our early college friendships or acquaintances and a lot of circumstances. And I don’t know if if Facebook or Twitter is really like an example, like LinkedIn, where you have impersonal professional relationships, that’s not really a direction that I would want to move toward, but in a more sensible Wait, who do I want to see? Who do I like? Who do I talk to? Who would I interact with? Maybe I need to try and find those people. And in a lot of circumstances, it doesn’t seem to be my local social graph that I’m trying to communicate with, for professional purposes, or professional impersonal for the idea of making art and creative content. I want to try and communicate that and see what other people are building who are also kind of participating in that industry. Who’s cool, who’s interesting, in media right now or in you know, photography, or art or comedy or anything like that, who are the people or radio or podcasting, who are these people that are kind of the influencers that I would be sort of attracted to our tag on to? Those are the people I need to participate and follow on social media, I need to communicate with them more, but all these sort of, I don’t know, just people, I don’t know, who I they, I don’t need to participate, participate are associated with them so closely, especially if, after 10 years of the experiment, it’s gone nowhere. So that’s what I mean. That’s what I’m saying, I have to make a change, because it’s been 10 years of the same thing without really any dynamic or change. And I’m trying to find those things and fix them. Things that haven’t changed in a long time, but have to, that’s what I’m trying to fix right now.
I know
it’s coming together. Okay. So I guess what I’m going to do is I’m going to write down everybody I would want to follow that I am you know that I am right now, I’m going to drop it to zero. I’m going to follow zero people on Twitter. And then I’m going to refile it from the beginning. I’m going to refile afresh. Some friends, some influencers, some artists, and creatives, some business, some business, I’m think I’m gonna follow only business leaders or people who work in industries, but I will not follow an industry or company account. That’s at least a perspective I have, I guess there’s a few companies I could probably follow. But I don’t know; I don’t really want that stuff in my feed anymore. I don’t want to owe someone a follow. I want to follow who I like to follow, I want to follow who I’d want to communicate with. I think that’s probably a lot of what a number of people are maybe thinking about after some of this Facebook stuff that’s come out is well, who am I following? What am I on here? For? What is this? What is this really doing for me? Am I getting famous? Am I or am I getting a response? Am I getting the communication? Am I am I really getting to participate with my family in the way I want, or, or my friends or my old college friends or new friends or any of that stuff, it just doesn’t really seem to be that dynamic, or that developed in a way that, that I see a huge amount of benefit for myself in the way that it’s constructed right now. So all that is to say, don’t delete these accounts, don’t just get rid of them. But I would say manage them or you know, strip them of personal data, I just went through and did that today, I went through Facebook, I downloaded my data, you can go in there, you can click on the little little gear wheel thing, go to Settings. And then you can go download your Facebook data, it’s really interesting to do, you can see your likes, the ads you’ve clicked on, you can see the documents that you publish to it, there’s a lot of information that you put up. And with that, I guess it’s a lot of targeting or a lot of whatever that ends up being put out into the world through through other services. So it’s not bad to be public on the internet, I really quite agree that it’s it’s good and, and for the public good to participate and create in a public space like the internet. But I also think it’s very confusing for that public activity to be retro actively manipulated to provide an advertiser, some sort of unfair, micro-targeted psychometric information. That seems like it’s not what I’m asking to do. It’s not what I’m participating in, I’m trying to have secrets. I’m a normal person, I want to have privacy. I also want I’ve pulled this publicity, publicity, club, club publicity, that’s not the right word at all publicity, right? I want to put my photos up on Instagram or on my Facebook page. And I want to pull in leads, or I want to get you know, I want to share these images to Twitter, or, you know, whatever it is. So that’s kind of like what I’m after. I want to try and participate in that. But I also don’t really want to have them have my phone number, do they need my phone number? I don’t know. I’m trying to think about it and maybe play all that stuff a little bit more close to the vest, put up more photographs, put up more content, participate more, but not really have that tied into a bunch of weird pages I liked back in 2009. I don’t even know if those are associated with my interest really anymore. So any kind of erroneous piece of data on Facebook is getting out of here. I don’t know a lot of that was kind of cleaned up years ago, and most of everything’s just been kind of the the more professional side of work that I do for the photographs. There Even so, you got to clean that stuff up. You got to kind of hold your data a little bit more tightly, I think, and I think that Really the lesson that we’re going to learn over the next maybe six or seven years as we as we move in toward 2030. I think by the time we get to 2030, the advancement of technology and its exposure into the world into people’s lives, it’s going to be, I think, sufficient enough where there’s going to be some idea that the ultraism, the the belief that technology is only going to provide beauty to the world is only going to provide a benefit to the world. And it’s never going to have a downside or a dry, it’s never going to be used in a lifeless Mullah fullness and malevolently. Maybe that’s the word, I don’t know, anyway, it’s not going to be used for bad purposes. That’s what I’m trying to say. And I think by 2030, we’re probably going to see some environment where maybe there’s just a few more circumstances like this situation with Facebook, where we see, oh, we need to, we need to watch this, we need to be in control of this. However, that is, it’s always just that the personal responsibility position where, of course, companies can do some things. But we’re going to need to get to a point where we are choosing to be secure, choosing to be private, we’re choosing to protect ourselves. And I think, as a population, we always kind of choose to protect ourselves in some way, especially when some kind of new type of not threat but
a new type of behavior emerges. It seems natural that there will be laws built over four or five decades that work to combat the illegality of these new ideas, or the illegality of the idea that a computer algorithm can track your information, how do you for 10 years, and then micro-target you without telling you advertisements that influence your behavior, as is said to be the word? Who knows if that’s true. But along with that, I was thinking about Google too. And I’m thinking about just as an experiment. And I’ll probably wrap up the podcast here. I’m thinking about as an experiment moving off of Gmail, like I was just saying, I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve been on Twitter for more than 10 years now, kind of doing the same thing, not equal to that is my Google account, my Gmail account, I thought it’s silly Gmail account, a silly email address. For a long time, it’s not even a good one, it’s not even just my name, it’s got some silly numbers in there because I signed up too late. Way back then even in like 2006, or seven, when I got my email address, my name, he was already gone. So I have some kind of goofy when I’ve been using that for 10 years, I’ve sort of masked it. And really, Gmail has a lot of the best features. A lot of the best development and tools and there’s a lot of opportunities for Gmail. But really, I think what I’m gonna try and do is move temporarily, it’s, everything’s gonna be active, so but I’m going to temporarily move my primary mail service over to iCloud. And I’m gonna try and work with that for a little while, just to see if there’s something I’m missing or to see if maybe just a more in I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s secure. It’s just not being read or spread. It’s just sort of my private email and my service and and there’s also some other issues about push notifications and folders. And I don’t know just archiving stuff, all of that I kind of want to try and mess around with my mail service a little bit more. And in a way, I guess not really just believe that Google and Facebook are the only two that can provide me with services for the internet. I’m opening myself up to Apple right, so a lot of diversity there. Well, thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast you can check out all my photographs on my website. That’s Billy Newman photo comm got a Facebook while you’re at it
that’s
at doing no wait what is it Ford slash dynamic users forward-slash Millenium or something like that? You can find me there. And Twitter, Abilene human on Twitter. A lot of good stuff. Probably some more coming up this week going to the tulip fields soon. Trying to do some spring stuff enjoying the spring weather enjoying April as it is. I hope you guys are all doing well. Enjoy your day. Check out building in minnesota.com thanks again for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.