Smith Rock Camping
by Billy Newman
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Billy Newman Photo Podcast | 142 Smith Rock Camping
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Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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142
Hey, what’s going on? This is Billy Newman and you’re listening to the Billy Newman photo podcast. Appreciate you guys checking it out again. I wanted to touch into the day and talk about a trip that I just just finished up going on out to have to Central Oregon over to the high desert area in Eastern Oregon, I guess it’s Eastern Oregon kind of over near the bend area. We went up to Smith rock this last week and did some camping out over there. Had a great time is it’s pretty nice but we did the the hike over there at Smith rock and I guess I wanted to do just to kind of show podcast about the area over by blacksmith rock some of the hiking that you can do and some of the the trip and photo stuff that we were working on over there. But yeah, I had a great time and over to Smith rock took off for a pretty quick, easy weekend trip. You know what’s great about living here in Oregon on like the I five corridor is you can just kind of jump over to Eastern Oregon over over the cascade pass, which is definitely tracking a drive. It’s different than just being on the freeway. But it’s pretty cool. Yeah, jumping over the highways and getting over kind of into the backcountry in the Cascades and then heading over over the past and then down into the high desert area of Eastern Oregon over there. So yeah, with three sisters headed over to Tara bond, and then went into the Smith rock State Park area. Really, man. The thing I guess I should say is Yeah, Smith rock is just world-class camping or hiking area. You really can’t camp there. I guess you can kind of camp out in an attempt you can kind of bivouac there. I guess some of the rock climbers do that. But there’s also like another spot the area we can to is this campground called skull hollow, which is about maybe five miles away or so it’s really not too far of a drive but yeah, hop in the car, go around the mountain. And then on the backside of that you can you can hang out and set up a camp I think it’s there we were at was probably, I guess, I guess it’s BLM maybe it’s like state forest or something stuff. But it was dispersed camping areas. So you can kind of drive up this road, pull out on the side and kind of walk your tent over and you know just a couple of feet and set it up, hang out there is all free. And you know, you’re just sitting out there in the, in the scrub of the sagebrush and on some lumpy ground. And I think there’s like open-range cattle that walk through there to other times we can’t there in the past. I think Marina and I had been there maybe years ago, and we had camped just a couple spots from the place that we were this weekend. We put up the tent, hung out there had the car park there and then that morning, we woke up in the tent, we could hear like a bunch of big footsteps around and sounds and animals and we were thinking, oh man, that’s weird. And we hands up the screen on the tent looked outside and we were surrounded by cows. So yeah, the cows the cows just kind of walkthrough in their little group during the night or during the morning and ended up in the acreage around where we were. Yeah, kind of cool about open range cattle and stuff but it’s fun hanging out over there. Yeah, check it out. The skull hollow campground was cool. Get our camp set up over there was cool. Had a couple tenths going and yeah, took off, went over to Smith rock did the hiking trip over that that was pretty cool. That’s where we did some of our photo staff. Most of the hike was like kind of a cool afternoon hike. It’s really a great one because it’s, it’s a couple miles. It’s definitely challenging. If you’re not super used to hiking, you could do it, but you could try it and try out for a little bit. We’re not trained for Urbino Get ready. I got busted up my feet, I got some hotspots and stuff. So it’s like maybe there’s three miles four miles, I’m not sure it takes about four hours or so. Okay, taking like an average sort of mellow pace to it, but it’s cool, you’ll be the lower part Yeah, it goes around like the crooked River. Maybe it’s only two hours. I don’t know. We went around the lower part around the crooked River, which is really cool how the way that the area was formed is really like if you kind of look at it from the outside me the ranch land it’s all surrounding is this pretty high or it’s higher in elevation, it’s just kind of this this flatter area and then it comes up to the crooked river where it drops off into this rim Rock Canyon and then Smith rock is is the volcanic remnant that’s been left there as the erosion of the river is kind of wrapped by and pulled away all the sediment that was there that would just kind of make it look like a average boring hillside. And so now you have these these really exposed like vivid kind of crisp volcanic rocks that are just alien to the activity that we see in erosion commonly across the earth here so smooth rock yeah pretty cool pretty unique kind of spot to go hike around at but yeah really fun to kind of jump in there really interesting kind of spot to be yeah did the hike around the crooked riverside up to the backside where like monkey faces I was really cool with with a couple people that hadn’t been there before. So we got to catch on that that area for the first time and yeah, monkey faces such as Cool phenomenon because really when you come around that corner it does. anthem is the anthropomorphic I guess it’s animal. Yeah, anthropomorphic look like and
like that’s when you make an animal a person, right? When is it when you make a rock an animal? Hmm, I don’t know that word, but it looks like a monkey. It just looks like a monkey’s face. It’s what’s called monkey face. No way. So, so yeah, we hiked around that spire of monkey face and started going up the Misery Ridge trail. It’s just a bunch of switchbacks. It kind of gets you up in elevation to get you to the top of the the Smith rock rock there and yeah walked around the top here for a bit and then hiked down the backside of it. Yeah Really cool spot to check out over on this with rock side there’s a bunch of other camping and hiking and stuff you can kind of do there other than just the the top over loop of the trail but there’s there’s other trails that kind of go around the east side of the park that’s got some really cool stuff and then we’re just talking about hiking and taking pictures and stuff a little bit so far but really the cool thing there is all the rock climbing stuff that you do all the the sport climbing that goes on. And and I think that’s really cool. There’s there’s a there’s really a lot more hikers that today that there were there were sport climbers. There’s there’s definitely like a handful of people that were out there, but I didn’t see. And it’s probably because the conditions were I think scheduled to be pretty bad. Like I think it was raining a lot of the day so I don’t think a lot of people probably set up their their rock climbing rigs for a day in the rain but but I’ve definitely seen people there and really odd times of the year like super early March, middle of the winter, early April and stuff, maybe there’s a better time of the year to to do some of the types of climbs and stuff. But yeah, I was hoping to find some people do like a multi pitch climb. I remember seeing that a couple years ago on one of the surfaces where you’re just thinking like, Wow, those people are hundreds of feet up. That means they like to bring the rope up once and then pull it all up and then lead climbing again. And then like Malaysia is just like wow, how do you do that? That’s so so yeah, really scary, kind of interesting stuff, how they do all the all the rock climbing stuff. But man, I wish I wish I knew a little bit more about how I got into it, kind of what I don’t know as I guess it’d be like gym sport climbing for weeks, not not months even. And it’s fun, it’s fun to check out and learn about, but man like being on the rock over it’s with rock is a lot different I got to go climb over there one time years ago. And just like getting on the rock and trying to like fill out the routes and stuff is so much different than kind of going for that hole on the wall and the rock gym and stuff is just really interesting kind of get the experience of being hot and cold. And having all your like outdoor gear on stuff and you know, just kind of exposed to the wind and the elements and stuff. And then you’re also trying to like pull up this pull up this mountainside to at the same time. So it’s kind of fun. It’s it’s cool getting used to data no trying to rock climb stuff, but but man, yeah, interesting, doing the climb and being delayed and doing all that stuff. But as far as stuff goes, we did a couple a couple 360 things that was kind of cool. Going over to Smith rock in June, we’re trying to get into some 360 photo work where last year, we did like a lot of a lot of video clips, which is really cool. I really liked those stock video clips we produced in a lot of places. And we shot a ton of photos too, which is awesome. But But now I’m also trying to get into a bunch of a bunch of pieces where we can, well, I want to try and get the I want to try and get like collections of photos. And then I’m sort of starting to learn about where you can put these in like virtual tours. So you can put maybe four or five or whatever would take you know, you kind of go to the specific spots in a location or something and then you you get the 360 photograph and then you can kind of pieces together as a tourist, you can go from one 360 to the next 360 is sort of this immersion. Well, so I’m trying to check that out, trying to learn about it, if that’ll work for me very well. But But yeah, I’ve tried to do some 360 photo stuff where you take the photo, then you pull it into Affinity Photo, that’s another program. I’m using it on the Mac right now, I think it’s available on PC as well. It’s sort of a Photoshop competitor, you can buy outright, I think for maybe $79 or something like that. It’s it’s really not as expensive as the Creative Cloud purchases for a continuation. But the reason I guess I bring up affinity photos, it’s kind of noted as one of the better tools right now to project your stitch to 360 photo as an actual equo rectilinear projection in the program. And then you can still use the editing programs in the program. So um, so like, I guess like the new Final Cut Pro has an ability to project the 360 photograph while you’re editing it. So you could add in new materials to it like, I don’t know, like just plates of information that’ll stay up in the 360 space that you’re at as you move through it. It’s interesting how it is you can kind of stitch things into the fabric of the scene within Final Cut in the video and you can heal
your Nadir point. So the base view is your Nadir at the top of you as your Zenith point. So the Either point in a 360 photograph is where that tripod is going to be or where you are going to be in the photographer is going to be below it sort of thing. So. So that’s kind of a, I don’t know, an interesting part of it, where you got to kind of go through and I guess this is what affinities for is you open up the photo, after it’s stitched, you open it in affinity, and then you can go down and he’ll put the base there where your tripod was or where the person was that was taking the picture. And then you can have this kind of full 360 photograph without kind of a block at the bottom that says it’s just a couple people. So yeah, it’s kind of cool. So I’m trying to open it up in affinity and do a couple color adjustments to it, which is cool, that you can go through and do do kind of like post color correction stuff to some of the photographs, you can kind of do that with the 360 video, but you also kind of can’t do it with the 360 video as well. You kind of had some Oh, yeah, color correction. Like you can’t have been Final Cut. But it’s it’s really not the same as photo editing, I guess, you know, obviously. But it’s kind of cool. We’ve been having a good time trying to edit together those the 360 photos. I’m trying to go through a bunch of the photos I’d taken last year as well. And put those together and hope to well, no is it? What is that 361? I skipped in my mind right now. There’s like this 360 view year. I think it’s V or VR. And it’s sort of like a YouTube channel for 360 videos and stuff. YouTube also takes 360s as well as many other places. But it’s again, it’s kind of a cool little photo and video sharing site for 360 content and and social network and app and all that kind of stuff. But But yeah, I put some stuff up there. And that’s kind of people that are specifically interested in looking at 360 images and content would go But yeah, it’s it’s kind of fun. So yeah, 360 staff, some photo stuff had the Canon equipment out there. I was trying to take some landscape photos was cool. The weekend weather was, I think I had mentioned there was kind of a forecast to rain. Really, that was like some thunderstorms that were blowing across the Cascades. I think they’re just a bigger weather system overall this weekend. Not to mention the Perseids, which is you get back to on another podcast that was probably this but they got kind of clouded out for me. Shoot, I want to see some meteor showers. So not talking about the Perseus but I guess kind of going back just the campus stuff, it was cool. We were really happy that we got to go out and do the camping stuff. Sorry that we didn’t get to see the Parisians. But I don’t know, I guess we’re camping out and stuff. So that was pretty cool. It was thunderstorms that rolled over the Cascades. And then we have these big heads. We’re really fortunate that I guess the big system, which I live a really active, I pulled up the weather map on on dark sky, the weather app that I have on my phone. And you can see just this big red hotspot, maybe 25 miles or 30 miles to the north east of us. And it was probably just you know, a ton of rain, hail ton of lightning. So I’m really glad we didn’t get wiped over by that. That’s pretty cool. But it really was a cool kind of textured night where there’s just a lot of clouds. And like a lot of kind of thunderstorms and stuff. It’s cool that the airplanes are kind of coming in real low, they had to go around around this huge thunderstorm system. So they were coming in real low. And kind of making these sort of strange routes was just kind of fun to see that I remember seeing that a couple of times in the past when thunderstorms have come in, and airlines would have to take just these kind of big alternate routes to get around this, this thunderstorm cells. So that was kind of cool. Check it out, we were taking pictures of it as the sun was going down, there’s a rainbow kind of red as the evening was coming, coming to a close of our camps. That was pretty fun, get some cool pictures, that and that’s what I love. I love that that time of day or you know, right at the end of the day, as a certain type of lighting effect that happens when there’s really like mostly clouds over the sky. But right as the evening the western sky has a gap where it’s clear, and the sun is able to shine through that pocket there. And you get a lot of light that bounces back between the cloud surface above you and the ground below you where you’re kind of in this little pocket where it just sort of sort of reflects against itself, but you get this kind of warmer, sort of diffuse town around everything kind of changes the way the shadows are. It’s different than overcast, you know where you get a diffusion of the shadows. But this one, you get a really crisp kind of saturated quality to the light. And it’s a lot better than I think the softer sort of white light that you get in the diffuse circumstances of overcast days. But yeah, you get a lot of cool kind of rich contrast in those landscape photos with that kind of lighting condition. Sort of during that golden hour time with the right kind of cloud effect and stuff. Really beautiful, really soft kind of easy to expose for photography kind of lights up. Yeah beautiful spot to be really kind of surreal, colorful looking. location and evening and yeah, fun hanging out. Watch
the thunderstorms, camping out getting rained on, maybe getting one a little bit. All part of the experience of being outside being an Easterner Again, definitely got a little sunburn. sore. All the rest of it. But yeah, good going out and keep it out and stuff. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of the building human photo podcast appreciate guys tuning in, checking it out again, and listen to me talk for a little while about what was it? photos in Eastern Oregon and Smith rock. Appreciate it.