163 High Desert Camping In October
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
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When I am photographing landscape images I use a Manfrotto tripod
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A lot of my film portfolio was created with the Nikon N80 and Nikon F4
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Two lenses I am using all the time are the 50mm f1.8 and the 17-40mm f4
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Some astrophotography and documentary video work was created with the Sony A7r
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I am currently taking photographs with a Canon 5D
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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 163 High Desert Camping In October
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163 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown October High Desert Camping
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Appreciate you guys checking this one out. I wanted to talk about the trip that I did out to Eastern Oregon here just a little while back at the end of October, and it was kind of cool getting out to camp. Kind of late in October. It was nice, and I guess this year without having many wet weather days over in Eastern Oregon. So we’ve had a lot of clear weather. I think it’s been clear and then also pretty cold here for like the last like week or two, but it had been above freezing for a while and October this year. I remember years past, and it would be like below freezing. At least by the 10th of October. I mean, even by like the fifth or so, I sometimes remember being below freezing temperatures, especially over in Eastern Oregon up in the mountains and stuff, for they’re even in the, you know, the plateau areas of the Great Basin. I remember some areas out there being, like, below freezing quite a bit. But this year was it was still pretty nice. pretty far in October, I was kind of impressed. But by the time I was out there for this trip, it was freezing. I’m pretty sure, so I was. I think I went out over to Eastern Oregon. And I was out in like that, like the high desert Lakes area. So there’s like there are a few lakes that are all kind of like gathered together over there. I think it’s like silver like summer Lake, a Bear Lake. Summer summer like it’s talked about. There’s goose Lake that’s further south, there’s like Crump like there’s I think there are a few others, but they also have kind of like try it out now. But that whole area there as the kind of stretches over toward like highway 395. Further Eastern, there has a bunch of features and terrain that I don’t think I’ve explored too much of what I’ve exposed as a bit of it before, but there’s a bunch of stuff out there that that’d be kind of cool to check out. This hardly got any of it really, and I think there’s like really big areas that that stretch out for a long amount of distance that is probably pretty hard to Well, alright, I don’t know, they’re, I think they’re all like pretty big stretches of public land. That’s what’s cool about that area is it’s enormous, like vast expanses of BLM land, through a lot of that desert land. But it’s also kind of difficult to reverse and say that the roads there aren’t very well maintained. And there aren’t that many roads. So it’s cool, you can get out, and if you have the time, you can hike those roads, or you can hike off anywhere you want, like of those roads and just kind of like check out the area of the land or at it and it’s definitely like an exciting kind of landscape out there. But that’s what I’ve always liked about the high desert Lakes area out there. So the kind of like landscape and the trees and the rimrock. And the way that that looks out that was that was pretty cool. So I took off over there, especially this time of year in October. It’s enjoyable. I think a lot of the areas that I was in were just like the juniper trees and sagebrush and stuff, but the way the cloud textures are overused and organized, pretty cool. This time of year is like late, late mid-October. But it’s also really cool when you can come up with some aspen trees, like the aspen trees over there this time of year are cool because they kind of a turn from that green leafed tree with the whitebark. And they have these red or orange has kinds of fiery leaves. And they look cool and dramatic. And they have a cool contrast in the landscape over there in Eastern Oregon. So it’s cool. You can come upon a grove of those, and they seem to grow in a cluster together over there in certain places when you get to certain elevations when they’re in good spots to grow up in those. The mountain passes. I think some mountain rims in Eastern Oregon have some clusters of them. It’s cool that you’re going to come upon them. I think up in the like the Fremont with NEMA National Forest as you’re coming up to the rim over summer Lake, I think I saw a bunch of them over there. And I remember driving up through a number of those, and it was cool. There are just big groves, and all the leaves kind of turn like really red, orange, bright colors as they’re starting to drop. And this was cool, especially in years like this where it hasn’t had a ton of rain or a ton of, I guess even like early snow or just big storms that come through and kind of knock those leaves out prematurely. So a lot of them seem like they’ve been holding up pretty well. And it’s got kind of a bright kind of crisp look to it this October. Given that there hasn’t been much rain, and it’s been pretty clear, and it’s just been, you know, a little bit of wind, and now that it’s frozen, I think the leaves are going to start dropping pretty quick. And now that the rains are probably going to come through, or a couple of sets of storms are going to come through. So out there in Eastern Oregon, I came upon a spot to camp that I thought was pretty cool. And I was driving around through, what I did is I took off from the main highway, I took this mountain road that cuts off in a BLM rent land. And it’s real Rocky, and real bumpy almost doesn’t look like a road at some time. So I threw it into like four-wheel-drive low for a lot of it to just kind of like crawl over a bunch of the rocks or just kind of take it real slow and kind of take my time get over stuff. And I took a couple of miles back into this road. And then I would kind of stop along the way and then take out some hikes like out to the left or the right of the truck. And then kind of make like a little bit of a loop and then come back around to the truck and just sort of check out the area and see what was going on out there. And I had my camera with me. So I got to like walk around and take pictures and stuff. And then I’ve also on this trip in trying to take a bunch of video clips, like where I’d like take my tripod out with me on that little, little bit of a hike or something that I do a little walk around that I do. And then yeah, stop, set up the tripod, take a longer clip of video or a piano video, so that I have that my collection also, and then take a couple of sets of photos. But it was cool. And I like this area. And this time of year too. You know, it’s tough in the summertime out there in Eastern Oregon. And also, I think sometimes in the wintertime too, when it’s sunny. But, but when it gets like real sunny, and it’s real clear out, you get this kind of like haziness to the sky a little bit, and everything just sort of looks a little bit more blown out with the sun. And the way that the shadows look on the ground, especially through like the mid-day. So real early in the morning, it can look really cool as the lights are kind of coming up over the horizon real late in the afternoon, as it’s kind of get new the horizon again, over in the West, that can look pretty cool. But when it’s real clear, it looks, it looks really kind of blown out and washed out harsh during the day. And it definitely looks like that a lot during the summer if the sun’s really high up above. But now, as it gets kind of in the fall here, what’s cool is you have like a bunch of this kind of textured clouds moving across the sky as part of the weather pattern. And so you get sort of a more textured landscape. And you also get a lot of shade cast, with the highlights of sensors still coming through it on days that I totally overcast. So that was what was fortunate for me, and it’s sort of part of what you get is the weather and some of the circumstances of weather that you get during this, this period of time from like the kind of mid-October into November before it gets kind of real wintery and stormy out there as you get into later November. But this time of year is really cool. So I really like that part of it a lot where you can kind of go out, and you seem like a lot of texture in the skies, that kind of goes up in elevation up into the sky, but you still see, you know, some sunny sky You see kind of colored to that light that’s sort of cast to the clouds. And you also see color in the clouds and texture in the clouds. And I don’t know, and it just seems like you get like a little bit more, a little bit more to photograph. And I was like that when the skies get some texture in it. So that’s kind of cool with some of the landscape work that I was trying to do out there in Eastern Oregon. And I thought it was pretty fun going out there. But it was cool to see the spot that I came up to camp at, which was sort of like by the end of the day was this pretty small, and I guess it would have been a pond. Or it would have been like a real small lake, probably like a five-acre lake bed. But now it’s dried out. There’s no water up there at all, but for maybe what kind of gathers there incidentally through the year as it sort of collects across the landscape like it wouldn’t naturally, but it’s really nowhere near as much as it would have been before. But it’s cool. It’s up along this, this piece of rim rock this sort of stretches along and then kind of connects into the hillside. But below that, there’s like this big lake area. And you can kind of see how flat The landscape is there as it sort of had been settled with the lake bed over time and then as it kind of lifts up on the banks of that as the rock sort of reappeared and then kind of turned up in the room rock but it was cool. I got to drive my truck just got like right out onto the lake bed which is really just like like a grown-up Meadow now, and then there are two-track truck tracks that kind of cut and criss-cross through the Lake, but they’re back and forth but yeah, like pulled off and it’s just sort of like listed as a road, pulled off into this little Lake and crossed over to the other side toward the rimrock and then got to hang out And then set up a camp over there. And it looked like people had already been in there was like a fire ring set up. And it was kind of cleared out area with a sort of like a sandy bottom, sort of like grit, dirt base beneath me. And then these reeds of grass, we’re sort of growing up, out into the distance a couple of feet. But that was really cool; I really kind of appreciate getting to go out there. Also, what I thought was pretty cool at this spot that I was camping out was trying to set up the tripod to take long exposure photos at night there. So when it got dark, the sky was really cool. And there was also still a little bit of those clouds are sort of drifting in and out at different times, which kind of added like some cool texture to it, they’re kind of lower, cumulus clouds are moving pretty quickly across the landscape. So if you had a longer exposure of 20 seconds, or somewhere around 30 seconds or so, you could lead in a lot of light, which would be cool for the photos of the stars. But you could also get a little bit of a drag effect to the view of the clouds as cumulus clouds as it moves quickly at low elevations across the skyline there. And so you could kind of over 30 seconds kind of get this sweep to look, as these clouds kind of swept across, sort of I think they’re moving kind of like, well, I guess would be sort of like West to I generally guess East motion. I think it was sort of like a Northwest. Yeah, northwest to like southeast direction, more or less. But it was cool. Yeah, kind of watching this concert sit by, and then I was looking at it, but like, I think it was Jupiter and Saturn. That was sort of up against this rim rock area that I was looking at. And I think it was part of the constellation of Sagittarius. And then Scorpio was sort of down by that time, but it was cool looking at that. And then a little bit further over to the east was where a really bright view of Mars was as a kind of bright or sort of coppery color to it. It looks really beautiful. Right now, it’s cool this time of year. I think it’s near opposition to a, so it kind of rises up around the same time as the sun is setting. It’s a little bit off from that. But it looks really large in the sky right now. And it’s a really beautiful and like bright view of Mars is sort of coming up over into the eastern sky as it starts to get dark in the evening. But it was cool, like looking at Mars and then looking at Saturn and Jupiter over in the Sagittarius area. So that was kind of cool. And then try to take photo photographs of that, along with some of what you can kind of see within the Milky Way, was pretty cool, too. So I was trying to set that up and get some long exposure, night photography of that. And yeah, I kind of really liked the way that the swept look of the clouds looks is it kind of crosses the sky. And that’s something I was kind of trying to do a bit with some of the photography I was doing out there was trying to get a long exposure sweep to look to the photos of the clouds in the sky. It’s cool, and I’ve got I got one of these tools that helps me do that in the daytime, too. So I was saying like I was out there in the daytime, I could take my tripod, and then set up this, this big stopper, which is really just like a, it looks like black smoke glass. But it’s got like a ten-stop ND filter on it that fits into a pocket that goes over your lens. And so you can set your lens to something that would be ten stops, have a slower exposure to gather more light. And then that kind of gives you an effect. So you can kind of change the amount of time that you have your exposure set for if you want to kind of make some different effects, which is really cool. If you want to try and shoot like moving water during daytime light, you can kind of change that affects a lot. I’ve done a lot of cool stuff at rivers with it. But this was really cool to just go into a landscape where like you’re trying to take a picture of a landscape, but there are clouds in the sky, and those clouds will move over a period of 30 seconds. And so you can set it up with this big stopper, take a photograph of that landscape, you can expose correctly for the landscape. But with the big stopper, you get the effect of the time passage. And then that means that you can kind of see the sweep of the clouds in the sky as time passed, and the clouds kind of moved west to east, so it’s pretty cool. Getting to getting to try that out. And I think some of the results are pretty cool. And some of the long exposure results near dusk or near the blue hour were pretty cool too. So I was happy to kind of get to try that out and get to work on that a bit. And then it was also talking about video clips to how is trying to get some video clips of different pieces. That’s been working out. I think pretty well. I mean different trying spots at different spots at the coast. response on this mountain drive I was on in the new different spots over in Eastern Oregon, out in the high desert. And I’m kind of trying to get like the addition of it just kind of okay or cool, or, you know, sort of steady like full HD video clips at different locations; there’s a lot of stuff where I’ve like had my phone, and I’ve just got like, held it and record a lot. And even still, I’m trying to do that with the camera to get sort of some casual video recording clips, more times through little trips and travel pieces that I’m doing, just so it seems like I have video content, as well as photo content that I captured on some of these outings that I do. But, but as I’m going around, trying to capture some cool video pieces, Chinese the tripod for it and try and get some sort of steady shots that are a little bit more cleaned up. And then just some of the walk-around stuff that I’ve done with my phone or with other means in the past. It’s been kind of cool, but still, a lot of the primary stuff is, is a photo for sure I’ve had the film camera out a bit. I was setting that up on a tripod trying to get a couple of photographs with it, as they kind of go around to different spots. And I thought that was pretty cool. But yeah, I was dealing with that rocky road out there. So I camped out by that lake bed near the rimrock. Looking at the stars and stuff, that was really cool. I’ve got that portable propane heater with me. And that’s really been saving me from the real cold weather. And I think kind of like I was talking about on that last podcast, how I think a couple of podcasts back how some of the layerings I’ve tried to do is like like a wool layer as a base layer, and then down insulation layer and then a gore-tex rain shell over that. And so I was fortunate I didn’t have to deal with any, like wet weather rains for that GoreTex show over the down and wool really holds in like a lot of the heat, too. So that was helped me a ton out there was getting pretty cool. And I think like, you know, like this time of year, October. It was like it was before it for the time changes now but at that time, it was like six o’clock, I was getting tired now it’s five o’clock, and it’s dark out. And it’s cold to you know, it’s like clear, and you know, late October and then it just gets real cold and that kind of higher elevation kind of Mountain Lake areas out there in Eastern Oregon. So it seemed like it was getting kind of near-freezing here. The other pretty soon was it seemed like it was in the 30s, at least like pretty soon after dark. So it was definitely trying to like add up some layers and turn that propane heater on and try and stay pretty warm. So I wasn’t in the tent; I was just in the canopy of my track, and I was able to stay pretty insulated through the night, so it wasn’t really like a big deal. And it was okay, you know, like I think I’ve talked about this before to my sleeping bag, I think it is rated at like a 15-degree sleeping bag. And so this time, I doubled it up with a second sleeping bag that was like a 15-degree sleeping bag. And that worked pretty well. But I really was still like asking, man, I need like a blanket, but I think I need to go like for like a thicker zero degree bag or something like that. Maybe I can use that. Or maybe devil that up with this one too. But yeah, like that deal with the cold out there. It as it drops down to freezing is, I think, kind of difficult. I don’t really ever seem to enjoy it, you know, like people kind of seem to get through some of those cold nights and some of those like higher elevation or harsh environments. I mean, Oregon is really like a pretty temperate climate in a lot of ways. I can’t imagine like being out in Arizona, where it’s, you know, seven degrees or something like that. And some of those mountain spots that I’ve heard over are certainly like out in anywhere like those northern areas or like the boreal forests as it gets into the wintertime. And you have to deal with like a lot of snow. You know, this is just kind of like a nice sort of dry climate, where it’s maybe dipping into the freezing temperatures. But even still, yeah, I’ve just never really enjoyed like, just kind of hanging out in the dark was really not a ton of stuff to do kind of I guess it kind of maybe taking pictures and sort of standing by a little space heater. But yeah, it was really fun, though. It was cool, you know, kind of hanging out and sort of putting up with the cold and stuff and hanging out by at camp and taking some pictures of the sky at night and stuff. That was pretty cool. But yeah, the next day, he got up, and I think he tried to put together a little bit of food and stuff that I had, which is kind of fun when you’re out doing the camp and stuff. But I got in the truck, get the four-wheel-drive going again, and then kind of carried on that bumpy mountain road for a while and took a couple forks of the road off to another sort of small four or five-acre pond bed or lake bed that used to be out there and then now it’s gone. And, and sort of rest against what had kind of eroded against rim rock against the side and then just sort of some rolling hills sort of carrying on past it, but it’s this kind of like little dips that kind of come up maybe 100 feet or so then down at, and then sort of come up and down a little bit sort of rolls along about the landscape out there. And from Google Earth, it looks like it’s just a real arid sort of flat, you know, no vegetation kind of landscape. But when you get out there, you notice that a lot of it is the sort of, it’s kind of a sparsely populated area of juniper trees, but when you sort of look across, it really fills the space pretty well, whereas you look across, you seem just like a good amount of, of trees and vegetation, and it’s all these, you know, this kind of smaller, but kind of wide and the shapes that they are these, like juniper trees are just sort of smaller, like evergreen trees out there kind of, in a mix with the sagebrush and stuff. And it kind of looks cool with the sample landscape as it is look back, I think, as I was looking toward the south, as the mountains gonna pick up a little bit more, it kind of just has like a cool look to it, as you see like the sagebrush, the juniper trees, and then it kind of sweeps up as you can pick up toward the rimrock as you get nearer to, I think summer Lake, and you get up as a view toward the uplift as it moves into the Fremont with NEMA National Forest. But it was cool. Yeah, being out there driving around, for wheeling around out there, it was pretty cool. And I think I went about as far as they could on that road, before, it really just sort of like washed out and just kind of turned into death. And after a while, so I bet somebody could take it a little bit further than I did. But I think it runs into some private property at the end of it. So I decided to kind of wrap up there and then spun around and then accrued back to the little town that was out there. And stopped in and got coffee, which is always like a kind of necessity; I think I have like my mix with me. I have like my Jetboil and coffee mix with me. But I stopped in and stopped at a little coffee shop place which I was going to try and do it some of these little towns like it over the coast a couple of weeks ago to not the coast, but I was like a little logging town next to it, you know, but out here, yeah, and Eastern Oregon, picked up some coffee. And I took off to another set of these like small little rolling hills that were out there. So the bigger rim rock section, I went over, I think from as I said, it’d be like the south side. And then I crossed town and then went north of town to like the other side of like the, I don’t know, the top of this Lake area that it would be and then there’s this set of like little rolling hills that kind of carry on for maybe 10 acres or so. And I guess that was like a pretty anthropologically active area back in the past which is really cool of these different tribes that moved into the area, and then use the land to camp or to set up and then go out and do like hunting trips from around the area. And it’s really cool to kind of think about the land that you can walk around as, as different places that people have camped sort of nomadically through different seasons over 1000s of years out there, you know, I think it’s like it’s like 12,000-year-old artifacts dating back to that area around like fort rock. And I think over by some other Paisley ice caves, think some other I get like that. And then there’s other information about you know, like, more recent stuff too from history, just that you know, a couple 100 years ago. So really cool to kind of be out in that area and get to check it out and walk around and stuff. But yeah, this area has a bunch of small roads through it that kind of roll over the hills and stuff, and I was able to have like a pretty good map of what was there, and I’ve been to that area a couple of times before, but I didn’t really know where the roads went. So I didn’t really get to explore around as effectively as it was this time, but it was pretty cool getting to cut through a couple of pieces and get to stop and get out get to take like kind of short walks out and get to go up to different lookout points and take pictures and stuff of the landscape and stuff out there of this little kind of rolling rock formations that sort of carrying along these hills for a few acres. So that was pretty fun getting to go out there and kind of meeting like a big loop with the truck and four-wheel drive. And so they came up this like draw along like a creek and then came up the hill. And so it was like a four-wheel, you know, like a real four-wheel and experience where you just kind of like you know, pull it up this big kind of Rocky thing up to the top of a mountain and then you can take off down the backside of it and then kind of intersect back down with the main road. But yeah, I did that for a good part of the day, and kind of took some photos and videos of some of the If out there and then took off, and I took like a gravel road that that sort of cut between that small town that it was at to another town for the north of there. And there’s like a highway infrastructure that sort of connects the two, but that’s sort of, I guess, would make like a V shape between it. And this gravel road sort of cuts the long stretch along the top of the V. And so I was able to take that and, and take that road back up to this small town before I was able to head out, but it was cool going over through that area. And I think that was as they’re starting to become evening and stuff, there’s a bunch of little spots where I could pull out along the side of it, set up my tripod, and take some pictures of stuff. And that evening was cool with the clouds and stuff, same as I was doing the night before in that area, but the rimrock was I was able to kind of get out the check this time, I had like a little bit more open view where it was just sort of like a bigger, wider open landscape with the cloud formations, and then the sky stuff above that. And I was able to stop for a few of those. And take some cool long exposure photos of the night sky and the sweeping clouds and stuff of the area up there. But it’s cool. Yeah, I loved getting out there. And going around, I threw some stuff on the high desert area, especially out there in October. I think it’s like my favorite time of year to be out in the high desert and to get to go camping and up in the area up there. So let’s go have the truck outfitted for a little bit better. And it was cool. Cool, go on and get some photos and stuff. But thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate you guys tuning in and checking it out again this week. If you can, go to Billy Newman photo.com to check out more information about me about some of the photo stuff that I’m doing. Until then, I’ll talk to you again next time.