Lockdown
Photography during lockdown…
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.
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.
143-Billy-Newman-Photo-podcast_mixdown
Hey, what’s going on? Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded. I think, What is it now? May 1, 2020. Wow, the way we went through the year, I hope everybody’s doing good through the coronavirus pandemic that’s been going on and going over the whole world now; it’s pretty crazy. Here in Oregon, fortunately, it’s maybe a little lighter, though, there’s kind of the social dynamics that have changed pretty recently, or, you know, over the last 45 days has been a lot of businesses that are closed, you know, with the lockdowns and stuff and a lot of people not really getting out or moving around and really been the same for me. So I figured I
should be
doing some podcasting, which sounds like a good time. But yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about some public land stuff that I’ve been doing, which has always been kind of fun. And there’s still a little bit of stuff that you can do even with during a time like, like right now. Where there’s the state lockdowns, I’m not sure which state you’re in or how it is. There’s different regulations in each of the states. And really, some of them are actually more flexible than they had been prior to this. But there’s really still a lot of land access on public lands through the western states. And I think through a lot of the states through the the east to hear a lot about the beach closures and some of these populated city areas. But that’s not really the same across the United States in every capacity. Now there’s parks that are closed parks are a different type of land management. Then your your public lands like BLM, or national forest land, national parks are closed. State Parks are closed state forests are closed. But really in a lot of places, there’s public access to a lot of waterways, and a lot of land and forest areas that would be out in the western United States. I’m not sure quite what it is in California, they might have they might have gone through and done more specific closures here. In Oregon, as I looked up the US, fish and wildlife, I, their site, they had some COVID related information and they were instructing that bear season is still in fact starting April 15. turkey season is in effect, General hunting is in effect. fishing season is in effect fishing was close to out of state fishers. So I guess you couldn’t come in from another state. Maybe Washington is what they’re thinking about. They also closed the Columbia River to all fishing, I think because Washington is closed, all fishing shoot. So I don’t know what Washington’s rules are, they might have more more strict land access than what we’ve got here. But as it goes, you can go out in Oregon to public lands and walk around or hike or camp as long as you’re kind of doing the social distancing stuff. Now there is an issue with I think the governor here in Oregon had instructed that people are not to use trailheads. That had been I suppose mistaken for not to use trails, but apparently by instruction of one of the directors of I think it’s the Fremont Wynnum a national forest down in the Lake County area of Oregon had, I think posted a news article to like the Lake County local paper, but I was reading it, it instructed that rain, which is sort of a funny way to follow this up. But it didn’t instructed that the governor’s rules would be followed, so the trailhead would remain closed. But if you were to park off the side of the road in a way that didn’t interfere with traffic, you could hike in to the trail from the side, but while avoiding the trailhead and this therefore would follow the governor’s instruction, abide by social distancing regulations, and allow for access of the land in a continued fashion. So I guess that’s how you’re supposed to do it. I’ve done it a couple times. I’ve gotten out to a few public land locations and tried to do some traveling around and getting out and stuff I was trying to do some some some 360 degree photo work over the last couple of weeks, which has been really cool and I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I really liked doing the 360 stuff I think back in June of 2018 we had done a bunch of podcasts about some of the 360 photography stuff that we were trying to do some of the video stuff we were doing with the GoPro fusion at the time and that was all really cool and I liked that video a lot this time I was working with a Ricoh Theta zone and I was going around to a few locations to try and get some photographs. Specifically I think photographs a lot in this circumstance not so many videos. But but yeah really interested in the in the 360 photography stuff that I was able to, to edit together and to capture during that time. So that was cool, but I went out to an area in in Central Oregon. That was pretty cool and went up on like a hillside to do some 360 Working is cool out there because you can really see the topography of how the Great Basin was formed at the well, I guess like during the whole era of the Pleistocene as it was for a long-standing period of time, like a lake, it was just a big lake out there. And then as things started changing at the end of the Pleistocene, I think there were huge changes that ended the Great Basin stuff that ended a lot of the megafauna that was in the area. And that kind of changed the topography of the landscape over the last 10,000 years to be something that’s much more of the high desert, sagebrush Juniper tree exposed rock landscape that we see today and a lot less of the forested, temperate kind of mountain climate that we have through the Cascades. And though part of Oregon, I’m sure it was always more dry,
given the range out of the Cascade Mountains there. But I think for a long period of time, as according to science signs posted on my drives, in areas where I go hiking sometimes, but you know, like when you get up to someplace and it says, you know, this area so such and such time ago had these animals in it? Well, you see, like giant beavers, or you see, like camels, or giant sloths, I guess, out of the area, too. There’s all sorts of stuff that they had. That ended up being wiped out 100,000 years ago, 60,000 years ago, to, what 1020 10,000 years ago, something like that. There’s a lot of changes that happened over the period of the Pleistocene, I guess, during what they call the quarternary period, a period of glaciations that the Earth has been involved in for the last 100,000 or 200, maybe million years. I’m not sure it’s its last couple 100,000 years we’ve been going in these cycles of glaciations, or you know, we’re in an ice age period. So we go into an ice age like we have ice on the Earth right now. It’ll be more ice at a point and then less ice at a point. More ice at a pointless ice at a point. I guess it’s been going on for what they say somewhere around like 200,000 years, these 30,000 year periods of glaciation to non glaciation. were like, I think we’re coming. We’re like on the far end of the Glacial Maximum now. So we had the with the Glacial Maximum about like, what, 11,000 12,000 years ago? Or is that right? No, I must have been, like 15 20,000 years ago that we are the maximum, then it started receding. I suppose. That’s when we were able to No, that doesn’t make sense. We had like the land bridge, like the Beringia stuff where people got over that was probably 15 to 20,000. sea levels were low, or they say, like, 400 feet, they squared along the coastlines.
They came over through the land. So that was all pretty long ago. Why anyway, at some point, like I was there, like, I’m
gonna figure out Wait, let me remember. Let me think back to 15,000 years ago, where was I? Yeah, I wasn’t here. So I don’t know what happened. But apparently, there’s been some recorded evidence that I was learning about. And I think it’s like Montverde, down in Chile. And that’s a location where I think they carbon-dated something to 15,000 years old, like human remains, human element, remains, there’s, there’s like a few locations here in Oregon, where they, I guess, have evidence of the Clovis people that sort of around like the 1112 13,000 year mark. And then there’s other evidence of things that are I don’t know within like the it’s time it’s like anything from like 7500 years to 15,000 years ago seems to all kind of be in flux have a date, because there’s really not many, not many perfect ways to date that. And if it’s a cultural artifact, like a, an arrowhead, or a pot chart, or a scraper, there’s there’s some indication of how those things are going to be created, or how those artifacts are going to be created and how there’s going to remain like Folsom points, or Clovis points are pretty distinct from each other, but they’re not really culturally distinct from each other. So it could be like a variation of many different tribes and languages and peoples. All well unrelated to each other, but related with a similar vein of technology for a few 1000 years of you know, their tool use shape was kind of similar because they’re all kind of from a similar descendency. But I think when you get like
more than 100 miles away, your language is separate over like a couple generations. You just got to speak different languages.
But man wild stuff anyway, so I don’t remember where we started with this, but I was out in Eastern Oregon, exploring the Great Basin. I went up on a hillside and public land and I was doing some 360 photography work with the Ricoh zeta Oh, Ricoh Theta zone. That’s what it is. And yeah, it was capturing some stuff on a hillside. Really beautiful areas up there where those ridges kind of drop in and out. And so it’s cool when you get Like up to a higher elevation, you can kind of see the pockets of where these lakes and pools of water and kind of sat and rested for what seems like I think I was saying something about recording some 360 photographs up on some public land in the high desert, in the Lake County in Great Basin area of Eastern Oregon, beautiful spot over there. I really enjoy it. And yeah, it was awesome to use the Ricoh Theta zone to be capturing some images up in that area, it’s cool when you’re at a higher elevation. And with a 360 camera, you can kind of you can kind of it provides a little bit of a different perspective, it seems silly to see like wider, but when you re when you kind of replay those images, and you’re able to sort of look around in context of what’s the left and to the right, if you can’t able to put together the context of the landscape a little better, a little faster than you could if you just had a series of individual photographs that had segments of the wider landscape captured and it was cool at that higher elevation, you can you can kind of look down to areas that we had been hiking around earlier in the day through some of the ridges and troughs, that would be over in that area.
And you can look down, you know, it’s like 500 feet down in elevation to what we thought was kind of the mountain top pass and then pass that as another maybe 1000 foot or a couple of 100 foot drop in elevation as it goes down toward the lake basin area. So all that was pretty cool. And what was also cool about it is just sort of visualizing how popular that area had been in the past, I think, you know, prior to the Western expansion of the United States. And as 1000s of years passed by in this region of land in the northwest, it had been populated and that region specifically been populated by nomadic tribes that had been able to travel and subsist off of the wild game that was there, I think a lot of like antelope and deer, and it looks like bighorn sheep by some of their wedding or some kind of sheep, but it looks like that from from some of their their pictographs and petroglyphs information that they left there. And the dynamics of some of those populations of animals have changed in the time. Now given like modern data, no, I don’t know if we’re gonna see a lot of sheep out there in Lake County. But there’s one drawn on a rock out there. So they must have been trying to look for it. There’s a lot of them in the southwest as he moved into the I think the Mohawk tribes. for them. That’s why I have a 3000 to 25 2000. I don’t know, it’s probably about 3600 years ago, so everything but or 100 years ago, really, I think it was like Captain jack over there Captain jack stronghold for the Murdoch Indian Reservation area. And that was like in the Indian Wars, the 1850s. So they’ll ask to tell them, but yeah, there’s some information about some of the piute, the pirate Indians, I think the Northern piute that were in that area of Southern southeastern Oregon, Nevada, then into Utah, Arizona and New Mexico if I kind of understood right, but I know there’s some fluctuations in there. And differences and timing and stuff. But yeah, pretty cool stuff. It was really, it was awesome to get out there. It’s getting, it’s cool to get out and kind of walk around in some areas of some public land, where we still have some access and still get out to try and do some photography stuff. Even in this period where you’re supposed to stay home and there’s a lockdown it was, it was cool to kind of get out and try and do some exploring, and some social distance conscious. I mean, it’s fine with me, I don’t, I don’t really have to be around a lot of people, it’s better to do landscape wildlife photography worked while you’re sort of in some type of isolation, I’m sure like a lot of hunters are kind of considering something like that too. You know, hunters, fishermen, people like hiking or, you know, a lot of those solo activities. It’s cool that, you know, this kind of this time, sort of is provided a little bit of a reset for probably a lot of people out there to have a bit more time to invest in some of the things that they’d want to, I suppose a lot of folks are probably stuck more in their local area but
but it’s a great time to, to get to invest in some things that seemed more important to you. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I hope you guys are doing well. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. You can check out more at Billy Newman photo calm. I’ll be doing a ton of updates over there. Airplane taking off. Sounds like prop plans about to fly over my head. It’s like that scene in North by Northwest where Cary Grant starts getting run down by that biplane. That’d be scary. So that’s not In the future. Anyway, check out more AbilityOne photo comm and doing a ton of updates over there. A lot of blog posts updated. New portfolio. New about page new homepage, new links to stuff. It’s looking sharp guy, check it out. Thanks a lot.