Developing Film And Converting MiniDV
Developing a roll of film. Converting Mini DV tapes from 2006. Camping around Mt. Jefferson. Viewing the meteor shower.
154 Developing Film And Converting MiniDV Tapes
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
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Developing Film Converting MiniDV
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154 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Developing film and Converting old tapes
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast for the first week of September 2020. I hope everybody’s doing well. Thanks a lot for checking out this episode. I wanted to talk a little about the start of September, some of the stuff I’ve been up to. It’s cool, and I just finished a roll of film here pretty recently. Like I think during this last week when I was out traveling around, and I haven’t finished a roll of film in a while, I’ve been shooting mostly on the digital camera that I’ve got kind of moved over to canon equipment back in 2018. And I’ve been shooting with that for, and I guess now almost two years is what it’s coming up too. And so, during that time, I picked up a Canon film camera.And I’ve been using the Canon lenses that I have for my digital camera. On the Eos system over on an older canon film camera from I think the late 90s is what I was able to pick up. So I went over on like kth comm. I think this was this is probably like nine months ago or so at the beginning of the year. And I picked up a really inexpensive Canon camera body was like $35, something like that, to, to pick up this camera, mostly plastic in the body, but it has a bunch of the manual controls that you would expect from the sort of mid-range SLR sort of like the five D Mark, or you know, the five D Mark, the five D line, you know, whatever when you want to pick, but it’s not the full professional build model. But it’s definitely not the lower-end one. So yeah, it has like kind of the same layout of buttons and stuff on it as you can get with the more modern layout of cannon buttons and stuff. So most of it’s really the same as it kind of translates back from one to the other. But it’s a cool, pretty simple camera, and it’s got, I think, like three focus points, three autofocus points on the inside. And that works fine for the kind of simple stuff that I was trying to do. But it’s cool I was a cargo by I’m out here at a wildlife refuge spot. And I was checking out sort of has changed now that it’s September 1, they’ve cut all the grass that they grow in these fields out here, that’s all been cut, bailed, driven off. And then now it’s like been tilled up, and there’s like dirt and rocks and like all of these big multi-acre fields that kind of a stretch on out here. So we’re working with this canon film camera, this, I can’t remember what the name of it is. But it’s got pretty simple controls, and it’s been easy to use. It has a weird battery. Maybe I have talked about that before. The kind of tricky thing about some of these late 90s SLR cameras is that they take this sort of proprietary about these almost proprietary disposable batteries. I think this one is something sort of like to sort of fat double A’s that are bonded together. And then kind of wrapped in this, you know, this little casing unit and that’s supposed to like fit in your camera, and then the power of the camera for a couple of rolls or something like that it works fine. But I always kind of prefer the double-A or something that’s a little more standard. They understood that they needed certain batteries to deliver more power for certain mechanisms. But I think now they’ve got that pretty well figured out with different series or different sets of series of double A and triple A batteries that they can use. Like that, the lithium-ion double-A batteries seem to work fine. And a lot of the stuff that I’ve used before, even just you know, the basic Duracell stuff has always worked fine. These are, these are weird batteries. So there, you know, like really thick, kind of, like if you took a double-A battery, and it was made playdough you took a double-A just kind of squished it a centimeter smaller than it was and kind of got it fatter on the sides. That’s sort of what it looks like. And like I was saying, Yeah, bound together as I set it to and then put into the camera, and I haven’t had to replace it in a year, but really, I’ve only shot through one roll. So I think like when I shoot with the Nikon f4, I think that takes a proprietary battery, but if you have the double-A battery pack system that attaches to it, and that’s what I had so that one took like, took like six double-A batteries that went into the base and into the handle of the camera. And you could get about ten rolls of film shot with just that one set of batteries. And for me that would last a really long time. But if you’d imagine, you know, 10 rolls of film is you know, Max 36 frames. So if you multiply that out, it’s you know, it’s not more than a day’s worth of shooting if you’re if you’re kind of shooting an event or like a wedding Or a sporting event, or something like that, where you’re going to be expected to come back with a lot of frames that you, you know, develop and produce and then pick from. But for most of this kind of like, landscape work that I’m up to, or you like, this sort of stuff, it’s a lot slower, it’s a lot easier in a lot of ways to put together and a little more steady way. And so yeah, 10 roles, or, you know, like, I’m not going to shoot through 10 roles in the next two years, probably. Because it’s, you know, sort of novelty thing for me to shoot now, but it’s cool. I got that film role finished, I think, yeah, like I was saying it was probably from January till near the end of August now. So it’s really not like a fast pace, it’s probably like two or three frames a month that I’ve been shooting, but it’s at a number of the different camps and stuff that I’ve gone to over the last year are different like trips and stuff that I’ve gone through different little spots that I was at. So I hope that there’s some cool stuff on there. It’s kind of fun when you go back and check. And you see, like what you got. And if you haven’t, like, duplicate it over, or at least if I noticed, I haven’t really duplicated over the the photo sets with, you know, a bunch of digital images of the same location, and then a bunch of film photos that same location have I really like crossed over too much. It’s really almost a surprise to me what I when I developed the role, and I see some frames over there, I think, oh, man, I’ve heard you know, I’ve never seen this photo before, I never got to look at the back of the screen, just have to see how this photo would come out. I didn’t I didn’t get to pull it up on my computer yet. So you kind of look back to this thing that happened, you know, six or seven months ago, and you go, oh, man, I remember taking a picture of it, but I had never seen it. And so it’s kind of fun getting to capture some of that stuff. And get to go through and check it out. And yeah, sometimes there’s a there’s a cool quality to the film photos that come out. But this is the first role that I put through this camera. So we’ll see if it if it comes out at all, I don’t really know how to develop it now that we’re in sort of the, the COVID staff that we’ve been going through during 2020. I know like a lot of businesses and now opened up again or you know, like back into operations. But there’s also sort of some strange protocols of how different things work. So I was trying to kind of figure that out and see if there was delays or something to it. But I think that, that I’m able to take it down to a spot. And they can probably develop it in house over a couple days. But well, no, I think it’s still send out. Yeah. So I think it kind of depends on like, what what the, you know, what the location in Portland is doing or something right? I’m not really sure. It’s kind of interesting, I think they can do a lot of C 41 processing in house. So maybe it’s easier for him than what I’m thinking. But I was looking at a couple different services. So there’s always kind of the idea where, if you’re in a bigger market, you probably got a couple more options than I do. But out here in a more rural smaller market getting filmed about this become quite a bit more difficult. I probably talked about this before. Well, you know, like we’ve everybody’s seen, the film departments in the photo departments of a lot of stores, just kind of go out of business, or flip to be in just a few digital kiosks that you get prints made up. And that’s definitely going to serve 99% of the business. But in department store negatives were never the best things by any means. But but a lot of a lot of the access that you would have had to send your photos somewhere that you would see at least you know, like through your commercial markets you go to have kind of disappeared. And so so now like, yeah, you really just have to send an envelope out yourself to some developing house to have them, process the photos, send you back your negatives and send you back like a digital CD or thumb drive with your photos on I think now you can select for thumb drives for most everything. But it’s kind of a little strange. It’s and it’s a reason I was looking at this one service called I think the darkroom. I think they’re out of like an area in Northern California, like Santa Cruz or Monterey or something like that. And it’s, I think, probably south, probably Bay Area. Maybe I could say that more like the South Bay sort of what it seemed like they’re, they’re saying from some of their information, but with them, I kind of like fill out a contact form on that website. And then it sent off that information. And they email me back like a prepaid mailer that I can put my, my film role in, and then they’ll take it, put it through a scanning process during my negatives back and then give me the scans through some digital means. And the prices were pretty reasonable, but it seemed like it was somewhere around 20 bucks a roll to get the sort of good stuff, you can go up from there and spend more you can go down a little bit and spend a little less, but I wouldn’t really recommend that that’d be that’d be like a lower quality scan of the materials. I haven’t really that’s sort of what I’m faced with the local stuff too. Like I was saying I can go to this local camera shop that’s still a town away. And I could drop my film out there, then there’s sort of the old-timey, they haven’t really renovated anything since the late 90s, sort of camera store model that you would have seen before. But you go in there, you can drop your film off, they’ll have it ready in a day, which is great. Otherwise, with this meal and service, we’ll probably have to wait a week or two weeks to get my film back. But you can wait like a day, two days, three days or something, go down and pick up the film. But the problem is the CD that they provide you is bad. Or it’s just got like, I haven’t done that in years to I used to have like a CD reader, I haven’t had like a CD drive in a long tiling a couple of years now at least that I’ve like done the CD stuff, shoot. But the seat Yeah, the CD-quality or like, whatever, whatever system they’re using to scan those images is pretty bad. So you get like a, it’s like a two megapixel scan, it’s really highly usable for anything. But you know, like, something fun to see on a computer screen. But it’s not really good enough to print anything more than like a four by five or so in photo. And even still, that’s kind of, it’s not as rich as it could be, if it was scanned properly. So that’s one of the benefits that you get with doing the send out is that you get to kind of work with whatever, whatever scan shop is actually looking at and dealing with and caring for your photos and a lot of these local shops, they probably do a good job also. And if you’re in again, like a larger market or more developed market, there’s going to be well, I don’t know, probably like, I don’t know, there’s probably going to be one or two places. And most of the West Coast market cities like say, you know, like Seattle, now the car going by. But like Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, I mean, Portland’s got two or one, maybe they’ve got like a little art-house style one. But I think a lot of these also, I think they kind of cheat a little and send their stuff out to a bigger print house when it gets a little more complicated. So I’m not really sure how that goes, you kind of have to look at it. And like sort of read what that little spot is up to and how they kind of work with us that’s filled with photos and stuff. But But yeah, I think getting the scans is a pretty good way of going about getting your film stuff created. And it’s not too bad sending your scan in getting it developed put on CD getting sent back to you, that’s all pretty easy to see 41 processing for a lot of the color film stuff that you can just get is pretty easy to use, like any other more complicated stuff, like medium format, or large format, if you get to shoot it, what’s the other one to 40 even like some black and white stuff, it’s like it’s just not standard enough, it’s not the C 41 processing system they’ve got. So it has to be sent out to like a different place. And it has to be, I guess, more beautifully processed to get handled. But I think that’s because kind of like what what we recognize is that the those those formats of pretty much all of it disappeared now. So you just really can’t get ahold of a lot of medium format film to shoot through. I mean, you can, of course, but it’s just not going to be something that’s done enough. So just about all that stuff is sent out to a few hubs that are large enough, so they can get enough of that so that it’s profitable enough for them to keep developing it. So it’s kind of cool. It’s interesting, but But yeah, I want to try and shoot that film off. Get my my film sent back to me. Hopefully that’ll work out pretty good. The other thing I’ve been trying to do, I’ve been going through like an old box that I have, and it’s got these mini DV tapes in from probably started in I don’t know 2005 2006 2007 and then probably no more by around 2008 or 2009 those interesting facets things kind of come and go when you look back at him . I think when I was getting into video editing and video processing stuff back in like high school and into college when I started a lot of the video footage that I’d record would be put onto these mini DV tapes that were little kind of like small palm-sized VHS tapes that were kind of a split between a few different video mediums that are out there like hiei or VHS See I think was like the other camera types that they had out there for a couple of years sort of were sort of floating around there in the market at the same time. They have these mini DV tapes, and it’s got footage on them still, and I think I have clips of the footage that is that have been captured off of it like way back in 2005. Whenever I use a capture card to capture mini DV footage over from the camcorder that took it and then bring it into Final Cut Studio three or whatever it was that might have been around back then probably studio two Adobe version one premiere one, you know way back. But when you’d capture the this AVI file that was huge as a humongous file was like two gigabytes every minute or something. It was terrible. It kind of a uncompressed and this is just like a standard definition grainy video it sucks to deal with, but you just barely kind of process it with the computers of the day running it FireWire over from the computer, or over like across the camcorder through like a little capture card FireWire mechanism that I had in it, I think it was I got to use like a Canon XL one back in the day. And that was pretty cool. That was like a pretty fancy camera for the 2004 2005 2006 range. And so yeah, it was fun to get to shoot on a nice big lens. And I got to do a bunch of sports stuff and a bunch of normal video stuff. But But yeah, sure, with that captured onto a mini DV tape, sent over FireWire to like Mac, g five computer I think is what it was for a long time. And then I got one of those later myself to use to do some editing stuff. And I had that until I don’t know, 2012 or so 2013 when I finally sold it. But yeah, using those computers and stuff to capture these mini DV tapes a way back, I’d captured the footage, done some edits to it or worked on whatever project that was associated with it. And then I’d rented that out. And I probably still have some of those captured files that are edited rendered out that are somewhere on my computer video archive that I’ve got around, I’ve seen a few of them float around, but it’s not really like the raw footage. So it’s cool. I’ve got these mini DV tapes still, to whatever still on, and I think they’ve been recorded over a few times. So I didn’t do the the archivist job of putting everything together as I probably should have project by project, mini DV tape, but mini DV tape to pull out all the raw stuff now and be able to have it in full. I think I’ve recorded over a few of those like short class project files that I would have recorded for a bunch of the stuff that I would have worked on through late High School in college. So for whatever, I got a box of tapes, so whatever I do have I have, but I definitely think that I’ve lost some stuff in there too. So taking these sets of tapes, and I’m trying to take them in and send it to like a conversion shop, sort of like I was saying, you know, with the film stuff, trying to get my film developed, I’m trying to send these these mini DV tapes out to a spot where they’ll take it, put it in the scanning system, and then capture that video off of it again and give me a digital file with that captured video. And it’s kind of cool getting to see some of the stuff again, I’ve done it with two tapes already as like a test, and then I need to drop in probably another eight or 10 tapes to see if I can get some video off of them. But it’s kind of cool. Yeah, some stuff that goes back to I think like 2006. And then another thing from probably summer of 2007. Maybe somewhere in there. Yeah, probably like the 2007 year I think it’s like this wedding that I recorded. And so yeah, I just, I just got this guy, this tape bag, it was blank. It didn’t have a label on it. And it’s just, yeah, somebody’s wedding from 2007 that I recorded. So it’s like, yeah, there you go. Yeah, another event that I accorded recorded some some stage event that I recorded, and got got tape of it, there you go camera set up on a tripod looking at video from I think that was 2000, early 2007 as well, you know, so it’s kind of kind of interesting to csfb, I just dropped off another two tapes, I’m going to I think drop off. Maybe you know that four or so. And I think they process it, they put it on a thumb drive for you. And then they send you the tape back and they give you a thumb drive. And it has a sort of process mark on it. But yeah, he through the through the same drive in your computer to transfer those files over. And they’re like a more reasonably compressed mp4 or something, I think this time, or QuickTime file, something like that. And yeah, drag it over your computer, you got to an hour of videotape. now converted over to a digital file. So I’m going to try and go through that box that I have and see if I can pull out some cool videos from some stuff from 2005 to 2008. Whatever range of stuff I was recording at that time, that’d be kind of fun to see. Really what I’m noticing though is that it’s just a lot of junk. I really am frustrated that you kind of think like early on, you’re like recording some stuff, you’re recording something cool. And then it kind of turns out later to be not not super useful. It’s just not like a really like a full contained thing. And you think man, there’s a lot of waste in here. If I could have eight hours of the good stuff. That would have been great. You know, if you really think about life and like, oh, what, eight hours what I’d want to still see now. Right? You know, like, what kind of stuff What do I wish I had recorded a little bit more of moment to moment. And I’m looking at that a little bit through the videos that I recorded that are like, what is this project and also into the photos I record to have like, you know, like that. There’s an there’s the process of photos that is cool, but there’s some nostalgic stuff about photography that that really is what grows Over the years, you know, like, if you just take in personal photos, it’s like the moments that the things in the the way that you sort of interacted with the thing that ends up being a lot more fun to see and look back on then just sort of the, the most plain, sort of flatly composed VISTA that you can kind of put together on a on a viewpoint, which is sort of what I ended having a lot of just like, Oh, yeah, it’s like, it’s like a horizon and then a sky. And I don’t really know where it is, and it’s sort of flat. And okay, but, but then there’s a lot of stuff. That’s, that’s pretty cool. And sort of personal to get to see. And that’s what the, I think the fun stuff is year over year, over years, you get kind of further down the road. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the proceed meteor shower that had come up a while back now, in early August, it was cool again, to see that hopefully, you guys got to get out and make some observations of some meteors that were going by I got to do a couple of camping trips. During that time. I think like at the end of July, when comet nowise was cruising over, some of you guys probably got to see that that was cool. But during like the end of July is when the Perseus start kind of ramping up. And then it’s pretty late. It’s like it’s a chance that you’ll see a meteorite, or you know, a meteor streak across the sky during the evening sky during those weeks, but it really starts to kick up and peak. I think it’s August 10 11th, and 12th sort of in that range ninth 10th 11th 12th. But really, I think like the 10th 11th is when it’s it’s the night to see it. And it’s cool, and knives are on yours that the that the meteor shower is really peaking. I think it can be like up to 50 or almost 60 an hour, but you’d be projected to see. But I’ve seen a lot of really cool ones before that. It’s been pretty fun, or you just go like, well man. I’m just seeing a lot of shooting stars throughout the sky. So it was cool. This year, I went out for a couple different sightings of it. I think like that during that last podcast that I was talking about was probably one of the better observation nights that I had when I was up on top of that mountain peak out in Eastern Oregon. It was really beautiful. It was the really dark night you can you can see really crisply into the Milky Way and into kind of the little filament light structures that sort of make up the edges and boundaries of the Milky Way. And then how dark it gets as it kind of falls off that into the deep space part of the night sky. It’s really cool to kind of check out and look at that and and that was a lot of fun. Getting to go out there. Look at the sky, look at the Milky Way watch the Perseids as it kind of started to kick in a little bit more after midnight. So I said it took about about 2am that night and they’re probably saw it’s probably 15 or nearly 20 pretty good ones. there’s a there’s a bunch of spinners that were kind of coming through there but there was really like a lot of good ones that I was able to see kind of later or over that night and the night before. And it’s cool when you get to see a few of them they really kind of stretch off across like a lot of different parts of the sky. I think they’re the idea of the Percy is is that they’re sort of originating out of the constellation of Perseus up in the north east part of the sky. But really, you can see him shoot now down into like Sagittarius and Scorpio in the south are way out past like Arcturus as you get like a little bit further over into the western sky. But yeah, it was cool getting to check out the meteor shower getting to see some of those bright tubes that are left band is like plasma tubes that are left behind is one of the bigger meteorites kind of cruises through burns up and leaves this kind of tube of I guess hot air hot ionized there. And it kind of glows for about a second or so. And the sky You can kind of see it as then sort of zips and whisps away as it sort of evaporates and cools back down. But it’s fine. Yeah, being out there watching a few media or media shoot by that was fun. And then yeah, really a great part of August and some of the observations that you get to do is get a check out the meteor shower, I guess there are meteor showers through other parts of the year to like, think there’s supposed to be? Well, it’s probably a couple more weeks, and usually another really good one that comes up in October that we normally Miss. There’s another good one, I think it’s like the Leonid. Maybe it’s a Leonid shower, that’s in November. But for a lot of us in the Northern Hemisphere, by that time, it’s just like clouded over enough. Or the the way that the weather is working just makes it so that you’re not really able to make the kind of observations of the meteor showers you’d like to I suppose even when, like I was in Hawaii A while back and I was trying to make observations and some of those things I hadn’t been able to do during the winter months here in Oregon. And a lot of that stuff I really wasn’t able to see in the way that I would have hoped to. or Yeah, I just like the observations of it like we’re just I don’t know kind of kind of difficult to make. So really like get the proceed meteor shower was always one of the coolest ones because it’s it’s kind of it’s, it’s right there kind of writing a good season where you get to check it out. And in a good location for a lot of us here in the Northern Hemisphere and stuff. So it was cool, had a good time. Getting to do some of that earlier this year, it’s ready to I’m out here. I like this section of the of this wildlife refuge, I was noticing the leaves and stuff like I was talking about the the acres of the of the grass fields have been tilled now. And that’s dirt and rocks that are sort of turned up all over these multi acre fields and stuff. But out here past that there’s groves of oak trees that kind of stretch out along the creeks as the ground and then up onto the hillsides is it kind of extends up into the forest over here more. But I’ve noticed in the oak trees, now that it’s September 1, there’s like this browning that’s starting to occur. And so it’s just sort of the the last two weeks of August is when you really start to first see it, but it’s the first twinge that the the leaves are starting to change their color and that the seasons are starting to flip. And it’s starting to move into into more of the fall. autumn season, which is kind of cool. It’s interesting to see like how it sort of takes place when I was driving on the freeway last week. And as sort of moving around a little bit more, I could see a few rows of trees that had been put in I think they were ash or maybe their poplar trees that had already started to turn really quite yellow, and on some of the branches. And it’s interesting to see how they sort of start to pop and turn a different time. But it’ll be interesting to see how this year sort of plays out. I’m not sure if we’re going to get the Indian summer the extended summer into like late September or October, like we’ve maybe gotten a few of the last last few years, but it’d be kind of need to check out, I’m excited for it to be September. So to be maybe a little bit of change of the vibe of what’s been going on for the last few months, I’m kind of tired of the pandemic and the lockdown stuff and some of the changes that have sort of come with that. So I’m hopeful to kind of maybe see the Far be a shift in some of the way that some of that’s working or kind of see like how it’s going to evolve, we’re going to maybe see now if like colleges are going back into place, or if schools are going back into place, or I think that’ll be kind of maybe it’ll set the temperature, the vibe of the type of change we’re going to see through the rest of the year and how it’s gonna go. I’m already seeing news articles saying you know, expect expected a distance Thanksgiving over zoom. So it doesn’t look like they’re putting it on the agenda to be back out of it or celebrating anything soon, which I understand, I guess makes some sense. And it sounds like a lot of states are going to be bringing their schools back into place, which I think is really going to affect a lot of parents and their ability to have a work schedule as a managing their kid in a home environment stuff. So that’s all going to be kind of strange. Now that kind of cascades a problem. But yeah, it looks like it’s gonna take a little longer to pull out of all the consequences from the pandemic. And it’s too bad I wasn’t a little faster. I was hoping that it would be kind of in July or August that would be able to kick most of it and get back to pretty regular business. But yeah, with a lot of states just not selected to have their their K through 12 classrooms reopened. But for reopening through a distance learning mechanism where you’re, you’re required to be occupied at home. I think that’s gonna put a lot of parents in positions, that it’s just gonna make it it’s gonna make it an auditioning, or it’s well, it’s just gonna be a weird couple months, and I think everybody’s got a pretty good handle on that. Shoot. I wanted to talk about this trip I did out to the lake Billy Chinook area. That’s a cool area. I like that I think like Billy Chinook is, well maybe it’s the lake I’ve seen a couple different names for that lake. It’s sort of on the border. one edge of it toward the north is the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. To the south. I think it’s when is that area. Now I don’t know what it is. I was trying to think of the the National Forest system as part of that. Now I can’t remember. But there’s some national forest out there. And I think it’s where like the crooked river and maybe the White River Salmon River, same river. I can remember it’s where like a couple rivers sort of have their convergence point before they think they enter up and head down toward the Deschutes river and They put a dam in there and then backed it up. And it’s an amazing location. It’s really wild to think of what the landscape must have been like they’re way, way back, but they put a dam in. But these canyon walls, he’s like really, really steep walls go down, you know, like hundreds of feet or something more than like where it’s even dammed up to today. So it’s a really kind of strange spot but but yeah, I was camping out over there. Really interesting area, it was cool. I didn’t camp down by the lake that was really actually very full kind of, like I talked about a few times in this podcast. The the outdoor kind of camping here is sort of the more developed pull your pull your truck and trailer in and set up a campsite. 15 feet from another camper next to a lake so you can fish kind of spots. Those are all really full this summer. I think, you know, maybe like Tuesday, Wednesday, you can find some more open spots, but they’re still campers through the week. But then by Thursday, Friday, Saturday, most of those spots are real full in the small town junctions to get to those spots are even more full, like going out to lupine before you get out toward the Newberry crater Paulina Lake area or out toward like Crescent lake or some of those cascade lakes you can cut up to that the LA pine area some of those little travels and a gas stations out there that I’ve intersected with a couple times on this trip southeast Oregon are slammed by Friday with out of state license plates and within state license plates from people from Portland or bend or from wherever you’re going out to do their summer recreation stuff and it’s been way more busy this year than I’ve seen it for a number of the past years but but yeah, when I was at toward the Lake Village Nick area that the State Park area where there’s like tent camping and RV camping that was sold out it said no vacancy, and it was loaded like no no distancing and seemed really you know, but it’s just tense on 10 on 10 on 10 on truck camper, and so on. And it’s a cool spot that I would say it’s great if you get a boat or if you’re renting like a houseboat or family boat or something like that to go out on a school you can drive your trailer down, drop it in the lake and take off for you know, a whole day and just kind of cruise around acres and acres of of Lake out there. So really beautiful spot really cool. It seems like it’d be a good spot to go fishing or I think people do some kind of light watersports, sort of, not jet ski, but, you know, like wakeboard, innertube, ski sort of stuff. I think it’s like some parts of it. And then I think some other parts are still set up to be a little more slow for the fishing stuff. Now the car driving by what’s up cars. But it was cool that there’s a nice spot to go camping I, what I ended up doing though, is a was looking on that map. That off road on x map that I’ve talked about a few times shows a lot of the roads, the Forest Service roads to kind of stretch out and but Forest Service roads that are open too. So a lot of them have like gates on them. So if you’re going down a road and you see it on the map, you’re not really sure if it’s open open to the public or if it if it drives through or not. It’s cool because you can look on this map and see what is there where you can go and you can see what roads are open. But I was able to take this forest service or the cuts on the south side of the lake area, and then I think goes up into the mountains. And then it would if you took it all the way you would go over the mountain and then head down to sisters Oregon, which is a ways south of there, but you could take that just with with backroads the Forest Service backroads. But it was cool. But as you kind of climbed the ridge out of the Lake area out of the draw that was created by the river and the creek that flow into the bigger lake. You climb away it’s like 500 feet or something that seems and you get up kind of toward the top of it. And it’s interesting, the landscape is out there. It’s really it seems like a flat landscape. And then the elevation changes created by the erosion from the water that that kind of creates these big Canyon draws that then drop down into the lake. So you can drop in elevation a lot, but really as you climb in elevation and get to the top of that, it really looks like a plateau that flattens out and goes flat across the high desert area out up into like Mount Hood or Mount Jefferson that you can kind of see from that area as you kind of climb up out of the I guess out of that Canyon grassland area. So it was cool. Yeah, the camping spot I got to was a dispersed campsite. That was up on top of that ridge outside of all the commotion at the State Park area by Billy Chinook. And it was cool Yeah, pulled up out of there. Found I think like these four campsites had like firing setup and they were all about probably like spread out by like a quarter mile or so. It wasn’t too long of a space be I was this old rocky road that kind of curled out onto the precipice of this, this little point. And then the main road sort of stretched up the spine to the ridge, and went up a little further, until it crested over, and then came back down the other side, but went out toward this point, you had a cool view of Mount Jefferson, that wasn’t really too far where mount Jefferson looked pretty prominent in the view. And then, as you looked at kind of toward the north, North West, you could see the point of Mount Hood, kind of sticking up over the flat plateau, the land that I talked about, you can see all the Mount Hood, but you can see kind of the top third of it or so just kind of sticking up over this flat plateau landscape. And then below that below Mount Hood, it dropped into this big Canyon, and then dropped into the lake Billy Chinook that you can kind of see down to the north and northwest or north and northeast, below me. And so it was cool is nice. Getting up to that spot. I tried to take some pictures up there, try to get some sunset photos of Mount Jefferson and try to do a couple of sunrise photos too. That was cool. It was better to lighten the sunrise sort of given the the side of the mountain that I was on. But yeah, it was nice getting out there and checking out mount Jefferson at night it was cool. was pretty smart. Like I’m kind of against like starting fires and stuff right now. So I’ve been using I think I talked about a couple of times that propane heater that saved me a lot through the through the season. But this is a good spot to use it it says everywhere up there. I think after a couple, a couple fires that had gotten out into the grassland and then gotten out of control. Early this decade, I think it was about 10 years ago or so they had that Warm Springs fire that burned. A lot of it, if you pull up a satellite image of the area, you’ll see acres and acres and acres, this this whole big region that’s been blackened by, by this flat fire that have gone through the big section of the Warm Springs Reservation. And some of the land that kind of stretches out from there. real shame as that goes, but there’s a lot of stuff that says you know, hey, like we are locking down a lot of the fire you stuff that you have. So any any kind of just anything that seems hot, you just you don’t get to use is pretty much what it seems to say I think in use gas stoves. And then you can use some propane systems, but really it’s like, it’s it’s pretty against it in most ways. So like, I think you can’t use charcoal, you can’t use a fire pan, which is you know, sort of you get around these restrictions a lot of the time. You can’t use any of that stuff. And I think it really kind of noticing what i what i saw out there is the wind is just really kicking up fast. And if anything leaves the fire and as a hot Ember, it’ll just blow across and catch into a bunch of grass really way faster than you can get to it and way faster you can deal with it. So I understand like a lot of that, and I’m pretty happy to not have to deal with making a big fire or anything out there right now, especially through the summertime. So now that now that it is dropping into September and the fall, and moving into like some of the like hunting camp stuff that people are going to be doing. fires are gonna be great. That’s always a fun part of the October camping stuff. When you get to light up a big fire burn through some Woods there plate. still stay warm. That stuff’s really fun, but but man for like mid summer, really dry grassland camping. I’m happy to skip the fire this time. It was cool, though. That night when I was out there, I was camping out at the truck. And as you looked north, you could see up in Washington somewhere, you know, must have been way north of the Columbia River. You can see this Thunderhead system that had moved over. And you can see these these really bright and very distant strikes of lightning, they would shoot down somewhere east of Mount Adams so you can kind of make out up there you can see I can see Mount Hood from where I was and then a little over from that. Really more of like a due north location. You can see the hump of Mount Adams out there. And then so somewhere out east of Mount Adams from that landmark, you could see these big purple bolts of lightning that would strike down somewhere up in Washington, but that was really cool to see. Glad I got to be up there, and you can hear it, though. No Thunder anything you just see these distant flashes and stuff every 1015 minutes. You see these strikes from the storm and nowhere near me But yeah, as a trip, you can still see it from those mountaintops up there. So that was cool. Got a good time hanging out there out by mount Jefferson seeing some stuff. Check it out like Billy Shinnok that was really fun. Got to drop down to a couple fishing spots that are in that area. That was cool. nice spot, good summer spot spot to go really nice to get away from the State Park campsite area that they had that was super packed out and go to summaries that were a little bit more dispersed on the sides. How to get time doing that. So if It’s cool that I probably wrap up the podcast here for this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast for the first week of September 2020. You guys should check out my website Billy Newman photo calm; I’m gonna try and put up some more written and photo content up there on the blog posts section of the site through September and October. So that’ll be kind of cool. Have some new photos and stuff that I haven’t put up before. I’m gonna try and try and put out, and I got a few other things kind of planned for the fall, but I’m excited to get into but yeah, so a few few more podcasts or September. Couple more things like this talking about some camping, I have a few plans to go out and do some traveling and stuff. So I hope I get to do some posts and makes new photos about that. It’s pretty excited about what I got coming out for at least the next 30 days, and it probably slows down a lot into late October, November. Man the winning time. How fun. It’s gonna be exciting. But yeah, go to Billy Newman photo calm for slash support. You check out some more stuff about this podcast helped me out on there. It’s always appreciated. Yeah. Until next time, thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcasts.