Traveling along the Oregon Coast during the winter, Working on landscape images near the ocean, Rockhounding the low tide, Metal detecting the beach, Flying RC planes, Cold weather sleeping bag options, Renting Telephoto Lenses, Photographing Winter Migration Of Bald Eagles
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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.
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174 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Renting Telephoto Lenses, Photographing Winter Migration Of Bald Eagles
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I talked about some of the stuff I’m updating on the Billy Newman photo website, which is kind of fun. I got a couple of new posts up there for some of the trips I’ve been doing. I also talked about some of the stuff I was doing over on the Oregon coast, some winter rock hounding stuff, which has been cool. Right now, I’m parked around at a cool, I don’t know what it’s like a remote control airplane park that set up north of town, and I went over there to watch some people fly these airplanes around.
They’ve got these remote control airplanes, one looks like a, like a DC 1001 looks kind of like a just like a bit of jet airliner that kind of goofy tiny funny aircraft and stuff. And they have them set up on these little tables over here, then there’s this short runway system, and then they get it going well, I think they call it going in their hand, and then they kind of chuck it out of their writing as I’ve been watching them. And then they run it around and a couple of little figure-eight patents here, get them flying for a bit, they’re pretty good and pretty controlled at it.
I’ve seen some people out here before sometimes just like really like ramming it where they just kind of like punch the thing like up in the sky, and it’s cool because, with these remote control things, you don’t really have to risk life to do incredible aerial stunts and stuff. You can really pin those tiny motors a lot harder than you can with an aircraft that a person isn’t. They’re so light and stuff that you can really just kind of ran them out, stall them up in the air and stomp up in the air bring them back down started up again, and then how to take off, you know before they crash and burn into the ground and stuff. But, still, I’ve seen him kind of doing that up over here above the tree line that’s up on the far side of this big lawn than him, and I’ve been over in the park that’s over on that side here, and I’m kind of fly their airplanes around and stuff then I come up to the tree line watch what’s over there. Is it set up on the other side of the park? A remote control airplane Park is going, so yeah, I was here today watching this guy yet like his three remote control airplanes around give them, and I don’t know a good winter send-off up into the air. And yeah, he ran them around a couple of times.
Then they bring them down into a slow glide onto this long 100-foot runway or so. And then it just kind of skips across the ground. I don’t even know that landing gear. It seems like, but yeah, then he lands his plane, picks it up with one hand, sets it up on his little table mount, and reviews the flight. Flying around with tiny remote control plans. I haven’t really gotten into that.
Like oh, you know, the drone stuff is fun. Then there’s plenty of airplanes. Air stuff is pretty cool. But man, it seems I’d be too nervous, like just putting some $300 Mini airplane into the ground. You know, you see, these cool tiny remote helicopters just seem like a bunch of mechanics and metal and stuff. But I think, man, I lost control of that. Or I lose my orientation and power so fast. I’m sure I mean, obviously you can train for people to do it all the time as a bit of recreation, but man, it’d be difficult for me to pull off. But it’s kind of fun hanging out here at this park. There’s like three, three, or three old-timers you know their van Ariana, they’re not that old.
They’re not that much older than me, really. But they got their vans, they got their, their couple remote airplanes, and they’re taking turns flat over this big line stuff out here. So good, good times. But things I’ve been doing beginning. Beginning of the month, I posted the wallpaper for February. This was kind of a cool, sort of serene Lake shot that I took. Took in the wintertime. And I really liked this picture was up in the Cascades like it was the lane now. It wasn’t the laminate side. It was the other side kind of going into sisters, I think somewhere up there. But yeah, was it there in the wintertime. And so you can kind of see this like this real bright sort of shimmer of light coming off the top of it as you kind of go down it sort of pulls into this gradient where you get you to start to see the rocks into the water until it types of becomes clear rocks just under the water. Still, you have this mix of the water, the stones, and then the Way that the light sort of plays with the water in the wintertime there.
So I thought it was an excellent and sort of easy screenshot, and I thought I’d try and get this one posted onto the blog so that it can be used as part of the wallpaper. So happy, February. There you go. Happy Groundhog’s Day. That was a good time. And that had kind of been finishing up some stuff on the Oregon coast a little while back. So that’s sort of what I was talking about. And it’s easy to get over the Oregon coast, so but kind of trying to jump over there more often. Not but I had gone over the kind of specific to do a bit of like metal detecting stuff, which has been fun, you kind of get over to the Central Park here, you jump out, you got your metal detector, you do some sweeps sort of over that kind of like commonly walk path areas. And that’s sort of the more active locations here; as people walk there, this sort of stuff ends up getting lost or dropped there.
There’s nothing extraordinary. You’ll find a penny or a quarter, like some messy metal bit Israel, or you can find like a chunk of lighter that got left in the sand or something. I was out there to check out some of these winter gravel beds or rock beds that are slightly lifted as the winter storms are washing around. And I’ve been trying to find some Aggie that’s dropped up in the river area there. And then any other kind of cool stones that might have been dredged up out of the creek or river systems or flows. They’re trying to find like, Creek inlets that kind of drop into the ocean there. And I think the idea, geologically, is that as the creek as the water sits to erode the land, it’ll make up the creek draw.
Then all of that wash, that kind of comes out to the ocean, is going to be bits of rocks and minerals and metals that are kind of turned up through this dredging of the creek process over all this time. So all that space that’s occupied, that kind of pulls out new rocks every year. And I guess that’s one of the ways that you get aget sort of washed-up down onto the beach is that they kind of get eroded down to the beach by kind of washing through on this creek system here. So that’s kind of where I’m trying to go out to is these creek beds that sort of flow the water out, and they also some kind of wash away a lot of the silt and stuff.
So you see those stones that have been pulled up, that’s, that’s what it’s saying is, you know, the ground on top of it, if you had water, wash it away, you’d see the stuff underneath it. Now you know the things underneath it, and sometimes it’s incredible agates cool, Jasper rocks are cool, remarkable. Whatever else I’m finding out there, it’s basalt, some Jade, some other cool stuff. So we tried to do some little rock counting, picking stuff, some of it says it’s been so on some of these, or at least on this one I found like, you know, you pick up rocks, you kick-start the know, some stuff weird, you don’t pick it up, you know.
Weird stuff like that, you know, weird stuff you find on the beach, but it’s cool going out there in the wintertime, it’s pretty wet, pretty rainy, it’s not that cold, you know, it’s not as brutal as, like the high mountain stuff, the heavy snow stuff was but the Way if you’re not ready for it, that can be kind of a pain. So trying to deal with the wetness with the rain layers and the wind and the water stuff. It’s kind of rough on the camera gear. So I sort of try and leave that in when it’s real wet. But I’m trying to wait for the breaks, OK, try to be out, do the staff shoot the stuff, be in the environment, feel it look for rocks, detect metal, whatever other nonsense I’m up to.
And then if there’s a good break, and the weather good, lights good, I’ve already kind of walked through the area and kind of know what’s valuable, what to go after and get, I’m kind of seeing the Way that it’s changing and, and kind of appreciate it for that, get the camera, shoot the things that I need to out of the project and stuff. So I’m kind of trying to move it that Way. But also a lot of time I just, I’m carrying the camera with me. And it’s putting up with the rain. But some of it is rough. So it’s just like real wet, gray flat, I’m on the beach, it’s wet, it’s gray, flat, nothing is going on. So that I’m really trying to not take the camera for. But it’s still pretty fun. Again, jam around.
It’s been pretty good. I’ve been sleeping kind of cold on some nights. So even over on the coast, it’s like I’m trying to either double bag, my 15-degree sleeping bag. I’m also looking into zero or negative 15 degrees, but I want a negative 15 degrees. So that’s one tip I was looking at is if you don’t keep it all the time, and you can pick whatever you want, you want to get for sleeping bags, so you have warmer weather, colder weather, cold weather, and a freezing weather sleeping bag really opted like for real people. You’re probably only going to have one sleeping bag.
And if you’re doing well, are you kind of taking a serious you’re going to have two sleeping bags. And so that’s kind of what I’m at or where I need is I have like my warm weather summer sleeping bag or what I probably need now, I mean, you know, that’s the wintertime, and it’s cold as I need like a winter cold weather sleeping bag. So I’m hoping to get something before, so I’m going to get something rated to zero and just kind of replaced the 15-degree bag overall. So it’s just kind of zero sorts of moderately used that was kind of wondering, and after reading a bit, it was like, well, the 15-degree bag is, you know, 15 00, but zero is not that much different. So it’s like it’s better, but it’s not going to be like it’s not enough steps.
From where you’re at, to really change the effect that you’re going to have, I kind of understand what they’re saying, you know, so yeah, you know, you get to skip a step, go to the opposing 15. Or if you’re really into it, go to the opposing 30. But that’s going to be probably too warm for most people in temperate climates and stuff. So, I’m trying to think of hitting the negative 15 degrees out. So, what they say for a lot of this stuff is that that that number that they list is where you’ll survive that it is not where you’re going to be comfortable that I think a lot of the times they now kind of trend rate or describe both of those numbers. But, still, really regularly it’s, it’s a lot it’s, it’s a much warmer temperature, that will be what you tolerate in that sleeping bag, it’s not going to be zero degrees or 15 degrees I think a lot of the time even when it’s like 45 Well, I don’t want it to be right now like definitely if it’s around 30 degrees, like if it’s getting close to freezing 30 530-432-3128 anywhere in there, I am freezing in my 15-degree bag. So, hence, it really is quite cold even with layers of clothes on, you know that I wear outside in the daytime. Then I keep those on jumping the bag as an extra level of insulation that it can still be cold at night, and then I remember that just being out in that bag in some spots up in the mountains in the wintertime.
So yeah, I can definitely see as a man if I had like a harmful 15-degree bag for probably a lot of this more straightforward winter stuff that would help out a lot or Yeah, I would definitely be a warmer man installation of what I’m into right now. Most of this stuff is working pretty good as some of the gear stuff I’ve been picking upon. A lot of the time, I’m making coffee with an arrow press. I’ve kind of set aside the French press, set aside the camping Moka pot for a lot of it, and yeah, they are press wonders occupy French press arrow press. Yeah, the arrow presses the right one. That one’s pretty good. It’s that one made out of Aerobie plastic. Like the Frisbee, the plastic Frisbee makes getting the 90s they Aerobie I guess they’re like a Lexan manufacturer. It doesn’t really have anything to do with frisbees, but they make plastic stuff, and one plastic stuff you can make is a little coffeemaker doohickey that’s made out of two pieces of plastic with a filter on it.
And a little rubbery piston D squish into it. So it makes coffee great. It works really well for that. It’s you know, it’s like that heat resistant or whatever sensitive plastic so you can mess around or you can get a high remember like the DPA stuff and all that nasty water balls I remember getting like these water bottles, he put you put water in it and then like 10 minutes later it would just leech a bunch of disgusting plastic flavor out of the bottle and into your water. Then you drink it to a man 1993 that was gross. Now, none of that you know you get the Lexan bottles that that are BPA free. They don’t have any of that kind of right or whatever that runoff. Whatever’s going on. Let’s say you’re getting some petroleum oil or plastic. I don’t know Polly, I don’t know Polly whatever, you know up in your water. But yeah, it was terrible. I hated the BPA stuff and the flavor and whatever that you get from old plastic stuff. So they got that’s gone.
Now with like Nalgene bottle, it’s easy to get a high you can drink out of pretty regularly; they say be careful with like aluminum. So be cautious with plastics. I guess iron or stainless steel is fine or whatever. But I’m sure it’s, or titanium is fine or whatever for like the camping forks and spoons and stuff you nibble on when you like copper. But there’s a copper foodstuff with copper bottom stuff, I think for absorbing heat or whatever. I remember having a copper pan. I was like it was sure copper on the inside. But yeah, a lot of that stuff’s working pretty good. The Jetboil is working well for forgetting stuff hot. Also, I have a little like burner stove thing on the side for if I need to warm up a pan.
Really a lot of time, I’m kind of trying to avoid that sort of messy mix-up stuff. Way of going about it. It’s not really like really super remote stuff that I’ve been doing. So I kind of, you know, just sort of put up with a lovely sandwich or some sort of cold cut meal. That’s not a hot made piece of whatever. So, yeah, it’s going good. But I’m having a good time. Yeah, kind of travel around and doing some camping out stuff and kind of make my Way about, but I’ve been kind of still putting up some black and white photos. You guys probably haven’t seen those on Instagram. I think I’ve been putting out a couple a day as it goes for black and white images from a collection of photos as putting together. Then I’m also trying to do that screen capture stuff of kind of going over the edits and stuff that I was making sure on the color version in the show the conversion over to black and white and style of talking about the process of sort of adjusting and tuning some of that stuff so you can check that out. That’s on YouTube; that’s my free phone.
Some of them are cross-posted over to Facebook or Instagram, but I think Instagram, Instagram TV, the HGTV stuff has some, some links to some posts, some of the content has been thrown out there. I’ve also had these, these captioned clips go up to. I’ve been trying to throw up some caption clips of the podcast to some different spots. And so I’ve been trying to caption these clips video. How do I say taking the audio from the podcast? I’ve made this graphic layout for it. Then I’ve tried to put captions in at the bottom of that so that it’s like a caption clip of audio from the podcast.
And then yeah, I’ve had that setup, clipped it, and then put it up into a couple spots on Instagram and Facebook. And it’s working well. It’s kind of cool having some clips of it posted up there. So it makes use of a scene. It’s kind of cool, but having that stuff set up. Let’s get it up has been working pretty good for me. So up, I guess coming up in February, I’ve got like a good bit of stuff going up onto the blog. As travel stuff goes. It’s pretty busy. It’s February, though, you know, so it’s pretty wintery. It’s been kind of like that a lot this year, or you know, kind of feeling the winter you kind of inside this. And that’s really why I’ve been trying to go out and talk about going out, and camping and or you know, kind of traveling and being out and trying to get out and about and stuff, but yeah, the ocean coast stuff has been really cool. And then, kind of through to January, it was cool sort of bouncing back and forth from the coast to some of those interior Forest Hills, camps and creeks and stuff. See, kind of go down one on one. And then you find this little town or creek or road or something that kind of cuts back up to the east of the ocean there.
You know, from the west, you go inland a little bit up into the hills. And then you get into some really cool and pretty remote forest creeks. And it looks like they’re, you know, great spots to go fishing, great sites to kind of pull over and do like a car camp kind of thing. Many of those are kind of breakout into public land pretty fast as you go up in the hills in the foothills and stuff as the places decided. And it’s cool to even if it’s not like a great, excellent camping area, some of the regions are pre-populated around some of those waterways. It’s, you know, like the waters populated by the coast.
So you want to be by the river, you want to be by the creeks and stuff. But a lot of those parks are available and open and stuff. So it’s cool you can get to camp wherever you go, you know, go up this river, you know, go up into this little spot. You can find fishing spots, you can find little hiking spots, or hanging out spots, or camping spots a lot of time too. But yeah, it’s been kind of straightforward. There are a few wildlife refuges around, which are pretty cool. You can see some of these birds that come in and migrate over to these areas along the coastline, which is pretty fun to see
Now we’re finally starting to see some of the Eagles show up and spotting the Hawks up in the trees; for now, weeks, you know, they’re up all the time, but they’re kind of fun to spot. The Eagles that when they move in there, they’re like obvious the big, bold black body and the bright white cap of the head and see a lot of those and then also seeing a bunch of them, the juvenile. I know the jacks are like, you know, it’s whatever. It’s like a juvenile Eagle. They’re kind of big, and they’re pretty bulky in size, but they have sort of a brown textured feather color. Like they’re not black. They’re not like full, like that bright black with white head mature Eagle that we see it sort of looks like a big brown Eagle or you know, like a golden eagle or something.
It’s sort of what it is sometimes kind of. I think Miss interpreted as I’ve done that before too. Right again, is that like a golden eagle or what you know, now it’s a juvenile bald eagle that hasn’t grown its white head feathers yet? I guess? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s even true. I just heard that I think. But that’s kind of what I’ve understood that yeah, it’s kind of cool. It’s about these birds out here. In. In Oregon in the Willamette Valley. It’s they used to be like, none of them. And now they’re all over the place this time of year. It’s like a lot. I’m talking about last year, so to see like, six of them swarming around up in the street, kind of like balancing each other out of these little spots on the limb where the person you know, they sort of try and fight for dominance over who had the excellent perch spot. And who got to look at over the field. But yeah, you seem like a bunch of the map of the fields. That’s pretty cool. So it’s kind of nice; Washington return, and Washington do that cycle and stuff through the area here.
It’s been kind of fun. Kind of getting some pictures of them. A lot of the time, I just let the birds sort of fly around there. They’re real distant to you got to get real close, and you have to have an incredible telephoto lens to get up on that stuff. That’s where like a lot of avians. What was it like? The Audubon Society. What was it? I guess the guy’s name was Audubon. He was like the guy who first did a bunch of the drawings of birds as they kind of travel across the west? They did. I think it was like what it was, right? Like the guy. I don’t know, the bird guy. Is it an ornithologist? I don’t know what it is. But the bird guy came across, you know, the 1800s. And they drew a bunch of birds put that in a book. And then it was like a representation of the birds of America.
I think they tried to do that, again, with like, the large mammals of America, which ended up being more difficult, but the birds of America thing was cool because they were like, scaled right to the page size. So you’d have these massive birds that were, you know, scaled up to the size of giant birds. And they’re intricately drawn so that a lot of their species detail was represented in the photos or the drawing images. And I think it was one of the first, like, sort of more comprehensive naming systems that they did over in the new world, as they got here and started doing more or complete biological science is no, no, I don’t know what it was. It’s kind of like that zone, where it’s like, was that like, it’s, but it’s biology, you know, they’re kind of like studying the status of the nomenclature that we use today for, like the naming conventions of how these animals are categorized.
And a lot of that was still pretty accurate. But, you know, it’s kind of adapted and molded a little bit since then, but not like a really fundamental way. It’s so like a binomial or trinomial nomenclature, you know, you have like the, I don’t know, like Homo sapiens, or something for us. But it’s like this, these two names and stuff, but it’s like this category, this Way of categorizing different organisms that you are trying to classify. And I guess it’s some of the stuff that they did with a lot of this like bird stuff, but what I was talking about is they were trying to draw these birds, they had to go across the country find these birds, I think a lot of times they shot the bird went over, pick the bird up, and then try to dry it again, you know, as it as it was alive.
And then but they preserve the species. And then they kind of review it for science, right? So I guess, like a lot of the like, if you go to the Smithsonian, like a bunch of the Byrd pieces that they have in storage at the Smithsonian, were shot by Teddy Roosevelt, you know, cool, is shot by Teddy Roosevelt for study in sciences, he was trying to review the different bits of varied science and stuff. And it was already pretty well fleshed out even by the 1850s. And they had, like, all of the little bits that you’d be surprised to learn about now. They had all that stuff figured out, you know, 100 years ago. So it’s kind of a trip, and you think, Oh, well, I guess they’ve been kind of figuring out pretty complex things, for now, hundreds of years. It’s not; it’s not just brand new. It’s not just yesterday that they were trying to figure out how to accurately and pretty precisely categorize and name things. But yeah, it was kind of cool. Excuse me, learning about the stuff that they’re doing with the birds. But for doing bird photography, you need an enormous scope.
And I guess it’s kind of what it turned into later on. Right. It’s like, you know, a lot of the birdwatchers and stuff they had like big binoculars, they have big bird watching scopes, which is pretty cool. It’s like, generally on the contents, you know, like the symond scopes, and like the vortech scopes, or the loopholed scopes that, that, as hunters would use typically, you know, it’s monocular, once you put it on a tripod system, it’s really stable, you can get in there like a telescope with one eye, and you can scout in, zoom right up into, into a bird or an animal that you’re watching. So a lot of time, like countries, they’ll use those to scope out whatever kind of animal or game is creeping and crawling around up on the other side of a mountain, you know, across from you. But, but yeah, for a lot of the bird-watching stuff, the bird watchers really just run like a few 1000 feet with it. And that’s even still kind of hard to see. Because, you know, they’re pretty small animals, if you really want to get up close, and then make a sort of more specific observations about their physical features and the nature you know, like, where locations have particular colors or color feathers or particular spots.
I think that’s sort of the fun of the bird-watching hobby out there of what people are doing. You know, like, they’re trying to identify trying to look for trying to observe and appreciate the differentiation they see in the species they spot. So to kind of try to look at the different plumage or the trying to look at the other spots or colorings and then sort of seeing like, Oh, that must be like a more mature one, like I was talking about, right? Like they observe the bird, the particular feature is present or not present that kind of represents it’s a mature or juvenile bird at that species. So there’s always like little bits of things that they find out, and I guess it clear optics are sort of one of the things that they used to do that. Now get back to the photo stuff of it. For me to take photos of it.
I had to have such a such as tight zoom lens to really get those images; a lot of the people that are working on working on types of bird photos, they really work between 400 millimeters and 600 millimeters and sometimes even put a doubler on that. So that they have like that, that 2x magnification that 2x doubler that they can clip on to a 400-millimeter lens. And now they’ve got an 800-millimeter lens, and I think it cuts down a bunch of the light that you get to collect. So let’s say if you’re at f4, you Put on this 2x converter, now you’re all of a sudden at F eight when you shoot or at least like the brightness of what you’re capturing is it f8. So it makes it a lot slower. But it does add a lot of magnification and zoom to it. But I think it cuts down on the amount of light you’d need to capture to represent an 800-millimeter image that is zoomed in. But sometimes, I guess they need it for some of this wildlife stuff they’re putting together.
I mean, that’s really where you see a lot of these, these big zoom lenses go into, you know, if you look at like a dedicated Nikon 600 millimeter lens, I think it looks like a telescope that needs like its own tripod and whole mechanism to keep support, I don’t even think it’s something you can just attach to the front of the camera and then you know, go about your business with the 300 millimeters, you can pretty well do that fixed 300 to eight lens for Canon or Nikon, they’re big. They’re they look like a tank on the front of that camera. But it can handle it pretty well. And it works pretty well. And you can move around and take pictures with it for a lot of wildlife stuff. So that sort of seems to be what people use a lot is a 300-millimeter lens like a 2x converter. So they can hit up to that, to that 600 level zone when I was working with that Nikon camera that was like an 80 to 400. And that worked great for a lot of wildlife stuff. Pretty cool for that. But to get close on those specimens of a bird that’s maybe six inches high, you know, for a deer or an elk, if you’re looking at 100 yards and you zoom in, it’s gonna be like eight and a half feet, that you’re kind of viewing in that.
That circle that we’re talking about a bird, it’s maybe 12 inches, or, you know, tops 24 inches, we’re talking about a giant bird, you know, and so really even like their physical masses, they kind of take out the space of the photograph, it’s sort of challenging to do that one of the adages is let’s go to a goof for beginning photographers is the name of the game is filled the frame is sort of this idea where if you’re taking a picture of something, have that something be most of the space that occupies the screen and French film stuff, it’s called meezan sand, it’s like what’s on screen. And I think that’s like a big part of the attitude or the feeling that you get the emotional sensation that you get from what’s sort of what the impression is of what’s visualized on the screen is what’s on screen. And it’s sort of like this French Way of like, if you want to, if you’re going to film noir, this like, it means a dark film, right. So like it’s a detective story kind of movie. But the viewing of it, the Way that it is visualized on-screen, is dark.
And that is sort of representative of its dark storyline. And so did this thing of what’s on-screen is supposed to represent what’s in words is sort of connection of it, or what the meaning of it is, is defined on-screen. So the same thing in this with what is in the photo is the photo on the screen. And that’s sort of this same thing where you take in a lot of wildlife photos; I’ve taken a bunch of these to where it takes up in your real far away from because you can’t get that close to wildlife. And then you have a picture of a bird or a coyote or something, and it takes maybe the amount of you know, like, the space, the visual space of a fingernail or something, you know, at arm’s length and a photo. And so it just isn’t really that much visible mass to observe unless it’s sort of constructed in a way where you can kind of have some context of the landscape or the environment and the goal of the animals. So that’s really cool. And you can kind of describe that as like if it was like coming at you as sort of a diagonal angle, and you had some sort of a landscape and a target of it. And frame two, you can kind of have like, oh, here’s the subject, here’s the action. And then here’s like the destination, I’ll kind of represent it in the photograph, that’s sort of calm when you can do that. And you can get back and have some space to sort of mean that.
But a lot of times, if you’re kind of getting something close of just like an individual specimen, it’s really difficult to do that. So if if you don’t have that kind of deep zoom that you’re going, for now, I’ve sold all the big zoom lenses that I have, like I had that like that Nikon 80 to 400 I was talking about that got sold when I switched over to Canon or Sony stuff way back. And then that’s when I switched over to canon stuff. Now, way back, so yeah, I haven’t had a telephoto like that in my possession for a long time. And one of the reasons for that is I noticed when I had that 400 millimeter Nikon one, I’d leave it in the bag, for like four months at a time there would just be like these only these kind of specific instances where that’s what I need, I need, I need an actual big zoom lens to take a picture with now interesting photos, incredible photos, I love the compression in the Way that I sort of reconfigures the thing that I’m visualizing as different from the kind of 50-millimeter world compression that I see things in now.
So it was really cool to like, Oh, I want that image or I want that thing out there. And I want those trees up there, and I can kind of compress those things together by using this zoom effect. That was really cool. And there are beautiful things you can do with the compression to sort of make landscape images sort of stand upon themselves, you know, some kind of getting those simple flat horizon lines, you get in some wide-angle photographs where it’s it’s just kind of half the photos land that Real flatline and half the picture was sky looks through my photos, you see a million of them. With compression, you can sort of kind of, you can add more elevation to the image a lot of times. So if there’s like distant mountains that would usually with a wide-angle just get flattened out to a thin little line on the horizon, you can kind of zoom in to those mountains. And they’ll kind of get back their visual mass that we sort of see them with, as we observe them across the landscape, our eyes, you know, we kind of pinpointed with their phobia, we kind of see just that, that bit that spot that we’re really looking at.
But there’s so much of the 180-degree angle around us that we see, but we don’t really capture in the viewpoint that we’re taking. And that’s sort of difficult in photography to relate because we want the wide-angle ness. But we also wish to that presence of the thing that we’re really focused on. And so it’s kind of challenging to figure out how to do that for a long time and photography, a lot of the time though, it really means you just have to edit out what’s wide and flat, and you have to zoom right into that one bit. So that is the subject that is part of the phobia. So that is what you’re looking at. And it works pretty well; it’s fantastic. And when you’re doing that landscape with a zoom lens, you can really make those flat landscapes kind of stand up those more minor features and stuff that can be more compressed to take up more visual mass on the screen, which is, which is pretty cool.
Like those rim rocks and Eastern Oregon or mountains or trees or whatever it might be, you can kind of get those to boom, pop up in the picture and be sort of filling the frame as it is. But now, as it is like if I want to zoom in on the image if I’m working on some landscape stuff, I’m even planning that for March or maybe in April; I’m not sure yet. But if I go back out to Eastern Oregon, and I’m going to do some more kind of landscape-based stuff, or more wildlife-based stuff, which would be kind of cool to try to what I’m going to do is rent that length. So that sort of helped me out a few times in the past, like when I’ve gone in to do paid jobs like a wedding or something, I’ll kind of hold off on buying that wedding lens, I really only use those, those times that I’m at work doing a wedding. And I’m trying to kind of shift that price off to the package of the wedding. So like if I take on a wedding or something that well, I’ll put in this much money to get the right lens for it.
So I have this really great buttery lens that I can throw under the camera; I can shoot these photos with I can get that pumped that upgrade or that that lens feature quality that I’m looking for. It doesn’t fix everything. But it also does fix things that don’t work with the lens I have. And that’s kind of the nice thing about it. So you can go in, and I need that feature; let me grab this specific thing and use it for this task. And I can amortize that I can make my money back on it with the landscape photo stuff. So, you know, it’s just something I’m interested in. But I like investing in it. And it’s excellent, though, when you are doing something kind of more specific for some time to throw in a little bit of money and rent the lens out.
So like I was saying, I leave that 400, you know, that zoom lens in the case for a couple months at a time, it just doesn’t pop out, it doesn’t make its Way into use for months at a time when I’m just taking kind of personal photos around the house or whatever it is. So I ended up kind of getting rid of it for that and not replacing it sort of because of that same reason, even though it’s pretty cool. And I liked a lot of the images from it. And I’d use it to do zoom stuff a lot, or you know, zoom in and get that compression a lot. So it just was something I figured, well if I’m going to do it on those times that I do, I should really rent. It probably cost 80 bucks or 100 bucks to get a seven-day rental and sort of around the price of most stuff. It’s an actual news item. It’s more than that. If it’s kind of a beat-up item, it’s less than that. If it’s not in use that much, or it’s not that expensive thing, it’s a lot less than that. So there’s a lot of bits that you can kind of pick out that you usually don’t have, that would be kind of cool photo features to have on a specific trip, or something that’s kind of what I’m trying to think of is OK, like these seven days, I’m going to be out, I’m going to be traveling through these landscape areas. And I don’t have a zoom lens, I want to do some wildlife stuff, I want to try and capture some birds, I want to zoom in on like, you know, when or whatever the kind of stuff I can find. And to do that, I’m going to get this 300-millimeter cannon to eight or whatever. It is now probably kind of expensive, but I could grab that.
It would be available to me in just a couple days. And then I can do all the photos and shooting that I want with it for the period that I have it, and most of those rental deals have all worked out really well. For me, I take real good care of the lenses and the equipment while I have them. And it doesn’t really get banged up or rained out too much. So I’ve never really had a problem with any like the rental contracts and stuff. But I kind of try and keep it pretty light, pretty simple. And it’s gone. It’s gone. Well, so far in the past, I’ve rented cameras, camera bodies, and lenses, and bits. And it’s all been pretty fun and worked out pretty well. So it’s an option for you. If you want to get some lenses that you don’t have access to yet. It’s best when someone else pays for it. But it’s OK, too, if you need to invest in a specific project that you’re trying to put together.
Like if I’m trying to do this outdoor desert stuff. I need that for just that period, and then I’ll just kind of spend my money to have it for that period, and then I don’t have to worry about maintaining it or watching it depreciate over the next 10 months that I don’t use it, you know. So, that’s, that’s the truth of it. So, I appreciate you guys checking out this episode of the podcast as I’m talking with you this week and probably be doing a little bit more coastal hills stuff and forest stuff, kind of trying to stay out of the real deep freeze stuff that I might be getting up in the Cascade Mountains or out in the Eastern Oregon stuff for February.
But I’ll be back at it soon. And hopefully, I’ll be back over into the excellent sagebrush sections of Eastern Oregon for wintertime; man, it’s kind of brutal out there in the wintertime, though, but it’s cool over here on the Oregon coast and stuff kind of going up and down the highway one on one to sort of check out some stuff over here. It’s been pretty fun checking out some forest D creeks. It’s a pretty good, pretty easy, mild climate stuff here and in February, but until next time, I have been Billy Newman, and you’re listening to the Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate it. Check out Billy Newman photo com for more thanks.