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183 Photographing Landscapes In The Wallowa Mountains, Sony Camera Systems For Multi-day Landscape Photo Trips
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183 Photographing Landscapes In The Wallowa Mountains, Sony Camera Systems For Multi-day Landscape Photo Trips
0:14
Hello and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.
0:23
But yeah a couple things going on for the podcast today I just put up a photo of the world our walls, the wall Loughborough the allow mountains up in the ego cap wilderness. You guys have seen a ton of those photos from me so far. I like that place a lot. This was another photo from the backpacking trip that we did there back in mid September. And real cool trip, talked about it a couple of times in the podcast, but this photo was it was right where the the cabins were set up. There’s this whole this whole side of the ironwood Lake area that kind of coves around and it’s sort of above the waterline of the lake and over in that area probably 100 years ago before there was like a wilderness area or before there Well yeah, I guess before it was like a nationally designated wilderness area. Before we can build structures there they put up a couple like half a dozen of these log cabins that were just way back in there and I’m not sure where they what they do with them all together but it seems like a cool destination spot. So we kind of walked over there and this photo where it was taken was right over there in in that area but it was cool spots to walk around through there lots of trails that kind of cut through the side of the lake and then up to the backside and stuff that we try to check out for a little while but it’s fun hiking around there and taking photos and stuff it was cool that that first morning that we got up because I think the other there was just one other set of hikers at least that we saw that were camped out there and I think they had it taken off by the time that that we were like walking around checking stuff out was cool we came up on like the boats these like aluminum. These this aluminum boats that were that were hauled up there next to the lake and put up next to a dock and they’re chained in but they’re not locked and we really tempted since we were the only people up there to snatch one of these boats early in the morning paddle out to the center of the lake. Hang out check it out and then paddle back. I thought it’d be pretty fun. Yeah, it was kind of funny actually on the way back when we were hiking back we saw another group hiking up and on their back they had they had a paddle at least like a kayak paddle and it looked like they had like an inflatable kayak or some kind of kayak like set up and wrapped up in their bag but I thought that was kind of an interesting idea of taking taking an inflatable kayak that was light enough to backpack and then carrying that up to to some mountain mountain lake to go do some remote backpacking. Be Kind of a cool way to get around if you if you packed it up in there. I could see it working really well if there was like a way you could use it sort of continuously. You know like if you could hike in a ways and then hit it hit a body of water and then paddle across it and save a lot of time and then pack up and then keep hiking and then keep paddling you know sort of a thing like that or you know hiking and then and then take a river down a couple days that’d be really cool. But man I don’t know if I’d really want to hike up a mountain with a with a kayak on my back probably be a bummer
3:21
you can see more of my work at Billy Newman photo comm you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think you can look at Billy Newman under the authors section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism, camping, cool stuff over there. And I think I just been going through editing a handful of photographs and I wanted to talk about a few of the ideas that I had around that it was cool I was gone through through an archive on a hard drive that I have for a bunch of the images from a lot of the camping that we did during September while we were out this this past year and it was cool working with with the newer Sony cameras like like I talked about a handful of times in this podcast so far and and working by like traveling around and camping and stuff work into the track and all that so it was really cool but so with a lot of these photos a handful of or you know in a waterways they really haven’t been processed to to a final outcome yet. So one thing that I was working on was trying to go through some of the photographs from imnaha, Oregon and Emma How are I going to talk about on here a bit was that area that’s east of of Joseph and enterprise Oregon as you get up toward Hell’s Canyon, or Yeah, I guess up there like right on the Snake River and the Idaho border. And it’s a cool spot. It’s a really interesting little town and the geography out there. Really changes quite quite dramatically like right there out next to the Snake River and out next all those hills and mountains that are over in that area, but it looks like it used to be way More full of water out there just the amount of erosion that he can you can see that seemed like it ran through there to create this giant gorgeous that we see now that’s that’s a lot of Earth movement that had happened out there so it’s a really cool area out there but once you get out to him now there’s no services there’s no gas there’s no store really I think there might be some type of thing if you if you could call ahead and knew what to call ahead for but there’s a road that cuts out in the in the high River Canyon where the river flows through and then there’s a road that cuts up and it would go out toward Hell’s Canyon or toward a viewpoint at least have at the top of Hell’s Canyon as you look down into the Snake River and the Oregon Idaho divide really cool area up there and definitely worth the drive if you can get out there but at a certain point there’s a viewpoint that you’re able to kind of walk out to the shows all of the imnaha Canyon and really interesting way just the angle of it I think everything starts to line up really nicely in that way and that’s something I’ve tried to kind of look for us on try to put together some photographs so that area was was really cool you know it’s designed to look really beautiful but I tried to get real low and bring in some of the some of the contexts and texture the grass in this this dry grassy field that the guy stressed off on a steep slope down the hillside as it went down to the bottom of the ravine or at the bottom of the canyon you know the M the high River Canyon that’s out there but the contours of the land and the distance it kind of all flowed into the same vanishing point as as in how river you know sort of worked its way up back toward the horizon but really beautiful area up there and it was cool I just sort of focusing the camera and trying to try to frame that up to sort of capture that immense pneus of edge to edge what it what it was really light is sort of feel that the way the just the amount of angle there is to that and so one thing that I was working on with this photograph was an A handful that is from from them now River Canyon was trying to try to work on some some more advanced black and white conversions of these photographs and I know there’s there’s different different like high contrast filters and stuff for for good black and white images and in a lot of ways I could really help a ton of images especially if they’re shot right or you know cleanly with good light now you know the files are clean, there’s a huge amount you can do with that with things like that, but Gosh, yeah, just trying to like go through an ad. Black and White conversions that are a little bit more specific, a little bit more adjusted to some of these photographs, especially ones that have like structural context to them or a compositional element that’s really just defining landscape by the structure of the land and by the the angle of the land I call it I try to mess with that a little bit so it was a school working on it now like the the way that it turned out, it kind of pulls some of the yellow color out of it which is really just almost sometimes distracting. And then the strips it down to the kind of sharp angles that come in from the top of the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame. These these other sharp diagonals that are kind of mashed up in parallel with the two so I kind of like that part of the composition elements that come about with when you’re you start working on stuff when you when you kind of work
8:19
or just when you kind of start getting a little bit more trained and stuff and when you’re able to sort of make things a little bit more easily that starts to come around a bit better. But yeah, what’s cool working tonight on a handful of photographs from from them and how ruber came in and try and make some black and white conversions of them.
8:39
You can check out more information at Billy Newman photo comm you can go to Billy Newman photo.com Ford slash support. If you want to help me out and participate in the value for value model that we’re running this podcast with. If you receive some value out of some of the stuff that I was talking about, you’re welcome to help me out and send some value my way through the portal at Billy Newman photo comm forward slash support you can also find more information there about Patreon and the way that I use it if you’re interested or if you’re more comfortable using Patreon that’s patreon.com forward slash Billy Newman photo.
9:19
But the holidays was kind of an interesting time because I ended up sort of thinking a lot about what but what photographs are you know I’m getting a little bit older now. And I think there’s there’s sort of like a change in the vision that I have of the way that I kind of think about photographs or you know what, what is their purpose? Why are we making them and in a big way like maybe propagated by the Instagram culture or the the sharing content creation culture that sort of seems to be out right now especially for those the you know, photographers or artists, I think they feel the pressure to be content producers now, and that maybe is a little bit of a different job than the Fatah ographers or the real artists, that kind of that kind of a person. So I’ve been trying to sort of think about that a little bit, and then then sort of take a look at the trends of Instagram and are those my art is that what I need to pursue. And a lot of the time, I sort of noticed this. And even in my own images, this like super sharp, super crisp, everything has to be really perfect or really edited, or really meaningful and dramatic. And these images. And what I’m noticing a little bit, especially as I review my older images is that the photographs that I’m really drawn to, they’re the photographs that represent the truth more, they’re the photographs that kind of have them. I don’t know what it is, really, but they have a little bit more of an essence of reality. Or maybe it’s its reality, but it’s also
10:47
a little bit of grit to it to like this really happened it was it was magical, it was interesting, I really liked that surrealism in the photographs that I take, and I have for a long time. But but there’s a little bit more. And I’ve always I think a lot of stuff I’ve done kind of pushed for the Unreal. And some of the stuff that I’m kind of noticing last couple years as I looked at like the photographs and how they change this sort of how that shifted from the Unreal of landscapes or of the world you know, kind of trying to select things about landscapes, you know, when they have unusual colors to them, or unusual dynamics or phenomena like like clouds, or weather or water or something like that, that makes it sort of feel like a different look or a different image than like what we’d see midday at noon, if we looked at the same thing. So I think that’s definitely still part of photography. But one thing as though since through the holidays, and through reviewing a bunch of my old photographs was how much the stock value of of a photograph goes up over time, over one year, it’s a bit over a few years, it’s a bit more, but over a decade, you really get, you really get to see the change that happens in time, you know, I get to see, like relatives that were much younger. And these photographs I took 15 years ago than they are now and it seems like kind of a an obvious point, or seems like something everyone should know. But really, there’s a huge amount of value in the photographs because they capture something at the time that it was and you get to hold on to that after their people or the moment or the event or the experience changes. starting to notice as I’m getting older is that life does sort of change, it changes, then it’s an obvious kind of point of fact that everybody’s sort of known about for a long time. But in my naive sense, I’ve been so focused on photography or on image creation or on the product making something that’s kind of crisp and sharp and perfectly usable today. I don’t know if I was thinking so clearly about how the nostalgia factor or how the value of something you know, from a family or just sort of a small moment, it’s captured this this more real, how that escalates in value over time. And like coming at these photos. 15 years later, even like seven years later from some of the stuff that I had, it’s really interesting to see, like, wow, like I took a ton of photos of this type of topic. But I didn’t I didn’t take as many photographs that sort of represented my artistic experience of my life. For that humanity, I really want to try and show more of that. And the photographs, the humanity that kind of the way you feel about a photograph. And I think that’s so much about what a photographer is there to do is sort of be be able to kind of pick and select which moments to capture and which ways you’re going to be able to share that stuff in the future. That’s going to become more nostalgic, more meaningful, or just just a way of kind of knowing that this was part of my life. Wow, that’s really cool. So I have a chance to think about some of those ideas around photography for the new year a little bit. But along with that, I’ve been going through the last like 15 years of photos and in my big super catalog that that collection of Lightroom photos I made that’s kind of trying to pull in every phone photo, every phone video, every every different camera I’ve had since 2002, I’m trying to get all those photos together, put them in there, I think it was like 120,000 images, something like that, which really isn’t that many photos for someone that’s been doing so for a long time. But I went through those and I tried to like punch those down to a lot of the Select so out of the images that I kind of want to keep from and I was trying to pull out a lot of good photos but but photos that were kind of irrelevant to me for this sort of future moving forward catalogue of stuff I want to get rid of like product photos or word photos that are hundreds and 1000s of photos even the kind of fill up space and memory in the catalog. I’ll keep those definitely but those will be backed up on another harddrive. But what’s active to me what’s in my library currently, I want to be like the last I think I’ve talked about this for like the last two years or so photos in whole in total. So I can get back to that library and edit any one of those raw files that have but for stuff that’s older than two years like 2015 and before I kind of want to pair those down a little bit so that I’m a little bit more specific and unable to get to those photos that were selects a little bit faster and then especially for older stuff like pre pre 2010 or so I want to around really have those things down to like the, the 100 photos, I actually, you know, I need to have around to get to for for whatever kind of stuff I need to do. But it was really cool to have gone through the old photos and you just kind of do it in this pretty quick way, you know, like this is a one star, this is a two star kind of thing. So you kind of punched through those pretty fast. And then and then I have another round to do or I’m gonna I’m gonna try and punch it, you know, from one star to star, those are going to be what I keep for a while. And then from that, I’m going to try to render that down to select all the all the three star photos, all that that’s kind of like I would pick this photo and sort of put it under review. And then and then my system at least is a little bit of the four star, five stars zone that’s for this is going to be published or this is going into the portfolio or as content sort of thing. So yeah, I’m gonna try and push on that stuff a bit more, and get some photographs sorted for the year, but is really cool going through all of those old trips that we’ve done. All those different places that we’ve gone to. And of course I’ve seen Well, one thing I’ve noticed is good Lord, how bad at Photoshop I was. And I want to, I want to say that I’m gonna put a little blame because I remember this happened at the time. But I want to put a little blame on how god awful my laptop monitor was like a 2006 2007 2008 laptop monitor just had no color gamut against what we know now in like modern ol or LED Retina Display monitors like Apple puts out, or like any kind of modern LED, more color accurate monitor that we have now. But I was looking at it and there’s like, it’s just so muddy, there’s, there’s so few colors that it can really represent. So you have to push things a little further out of gamut. Or at least I did at the time, kind of not understanding what I was compensating to. So I look back at some of these photos and go, Oh, I would never make it this yellow and green in a modern world. So it’s kind of interesting what you know, whatever was going on, or whatever I was thinking about at the time visually, that sort of drew me to that place. But it’s interesting to see like how that changes, how your aesthetic sort of change, and also a little bit of how your tools and calibration systems changed and sort of seeing like, wow, off was that way back, then. So all stuff that you kind of learn and you get better at it, it’s interesting, at least to the benefit, you get better over time. And like a decade later, I see changes in the the kind of creative or the the style that I would lay out just if I started working, you know, out without actually having to try and implement a style, you know, try and lay with Oh, I’m going to make a photograph that’s black and white, and of events and personal or something, instead of trying to go out with it with you know, a set intention of that which you should or could in any set of photos. But if I just go out and am shooting what I am drawn to the photographs that are capturing get in the way that I kind of perceive what they look like and how I want to show them to people, that’s all kind of changed and evolved over time. And it seems like my choices in that are better than they once were. But it was interesting to just kind of seeing like, man, how many years and years and years, it takes me taking photographs, before any of these photographs really got good or got to the point where they were more than snapshots or more than just kind of data collection. I sort of thought of myself as an archivist for a long time where we’re like the job wasn’t really to be a photographer where it was editing to select like a moment and character and sort of like nuance between things that have like emotional pole to them, I didn’t really understand that type of composition stuff, I just sort of understood the camera mechanically functioning as a light capturing tool. And so that was like that was probably the first four years of photography was sort of thinking about it like that, like I’m capturing data of a reality. And then that’s going to be processed in to something else later. And it wasn’t really for years until I understood like emotional vision or you know, like having some way to kind of tie the way you feel to the way that you see something. And that was really interesting kind of learning about how some of those things work. And yeah, it’s still such a long route and I still have, you know, no, no real understanding, no real experience in that by anybody that’s really trained, just self taught.
19:02
Little Little Billy out here. And nowhere Willamette Valley. So yeah, that’s some of the stuff about making selects. Thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com a few new things up there some stuff on the homepage, some good links to other other outbound sources. some links to books and links to some podcasts. Like this blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy new Ninja photo.com. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode and the back
19:37
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