187 Photos From The Sierras – Watching the Supermoon
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0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I’m talking about another photograph of mine today this image comes from the Sierra Nevadas, down near Lone Pine, California. In Eastern California, that section of the Eastern cascades is really interesting. It’s really quite remote out there, there’s very few towns but this was an area called the Alabama hills. And there really an interesting kind of geological formation out there where the it’s it’s a certain type of sandstone I suppose. I don’t know, really. But it’s a certain type of erosion out there that looks really interesting set against the juxtaposition of these really sharp kind of pointed sets, or Well, I don’t know, point instead of the mountain range, the Sierra Nevada is just a little bit past that you’ve seen it a ton of times. It’s probably your Macintosh background right now. But it’s a really cool zone. And this photograph looks back to the south during a really cool copper sunset, where we had a lot of bright color in the cloud formations above as the sunset below the the Eastern or semi on the western horizon below. Below the Sierra Nevada is but a really cool spot. And I really liked this kind of alien look to it, which is something to try and push for, and a lot of my landscape photographs and stuff I want to try and get back to this year. I think it’s really cool. But I think this is from what 2012 this is years ago.
1:44
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 that Bitly Newman under the author’s section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism, camping,
2:01
and cool stuff over there. finished up that that camping trip I was doing up there. The mountain Creek there in the Cascades a couple days ago. What was that like Wednesday, I think it was like maybe like Tuesday, Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, I think that was the supermoon that was coming up that night. If I remember right. And that was pretty cool. It was cool to see the full moon up there. And they always talk about the Super Moon, which is kind of a I don’t know, it’s a little bit of a misnomer. But it’s cool to see to the thing they talk about happening every six months or so. Really, it’s just kind of the oscillation of a bit of the eccentricities in the orbit of the moon that make it I think about 25,000 miles closer that its maximum, and then maybe about 25,000 miles further away. And it’s distant maximum. But I think it’s really only like a little bit of a sliver larger than it normally would be. If you notice though, it’s a thing I learned way back and I think that they show it in a scene in Apollo 13. But if you put your hand all the way out and you put your thumb up at all times, you’re able to cover the entire Full Moon just with your thumbnail. It’s pretty wild, man. You gotta kinda always like visualize that Moon is being this really big thing in the sky. And really a lot of the time it’s, it’s just as big as your thumbnail at arm’s reach, which is kind of a trip but it’s kind of it was cool to see the supermoon that night. It was really bright. It was cool to kind of watch around and kind of look I was illuminating the forest and the trees and the mountains and stuff around me. That was kind of nice to see. Cold that night though. Man, I tell you so have a 15 degree sleeping bag. And that’s great. 15 degrees is fine. But envision degrees really is more than adequate for most circumstances that I ended up being in during the summertime. Where it’s done I was just not too big of a concern about how cold it gets. But when it says 15 degrees, it really means you’re going to be comfortable down to somewhere around 35 degrees but anywhere under 30 degrees is a pretty uncomfortable experience. I think it means you’re going to stay alive that until it’s about 15 degrees. So if it were me again, buying something for maybe I don’t know, a more heavy three season camping experience most of the time. Probably a lot of the nights out that I do. Even though I like to go at all times a year it seems like the majority of nights I go out or during the summer months or you know during like pretty fair weather seasons. But if I were going to buy again which I’m going to try and get like a two or three sleeping bag system going if I was going to buy again, I probably get zero degree or maybe a negative 15 degree. And I could really use the warm because man what I noticed is even if it was just a little bit down to what would it would have been probably maybe 10 or 29 or something like that it was you know is a bit below freezing who knows how cold it really was it was only like an elevation of 2500 feet and it was a canyon. I thought it was clear night, but I thought it would be relatively sheltered. And yeah, it was a lot of it was a lot of ice on my window when I woke up, and it was a cold cold night to sit through too. So So yeah, that 15 degree bag was was just holding up out there. But yeah, if I was gonna go again, I think they have like a zero degree bag. And then down below that they had like a negative 15 and then maybe like a negative 30 degree bag negative 30 sounds like a real warm, like down back. So I think mine’s a synthetic bag. They talk about this sometimes where there’s like differences in the thermal insulation qualities of the material that your sleeping bag is made out of. And I think that the for it was it was an improvement actually, you know above what and whatever cotton we were using for a while they were using wool stuff which was pretty smart that that works really well to be an insulating material and it doesn’t or it works well with moisture and stuff and all the other things we know about. merino wool is really cool. Everybody knows about that kind of stuff but but we had like you know, those really terrible big cotton sleeping bags way back. Those arrived, I don’t know if they were really even that insulating. Then they switched over to those synthetic materials, which is probably all oil based Does that sound right? Like a petroleum based like plastics product that was made out of synthetics, I think that’s how they spin up a lot of those. This
6:50
bladder just as synthetic types of materials that they’re making these nylons out of. So I think that was how a lot of this this synthetic stuff had been made. But really, I think what they they talk about being the superior insulator is down and that’s what I’d hoped to try and find as another zero degree or negative 15 degree sleeping bag would be a negative 15 degree down bag which is normally a bit more expensive you know when you’re looking around at the price points for these different sleeping bags if you’re trying to get into some colder weather camping stuff, where you’re gonna find is that those name brand or you know, don’t even name brand necessarily but just a bespoke manufacturer for quality, technical outdoors product is going to be very expensive. And so that’s where you get to find out you know 399 for a sleeping bag 299-490-9699 I’ve seen like a lot of pretty expensive prices out there. I think MIMO makes some bags that are looking pretty cool that I’ve seen recommended a few times. I’ve heard of big Agnus they made 10s most of the time though right 10 company Yeah, stone glacier is one that I keep hearing kind of pop up here and there now for some sense Marmot I think has bags alright guys is you know a retailer of recreational equipment they’re closed right now though so I don’t even know if you get an order from anyone like that but but they have some bags I think that’s where my synthetic bag was from that I’ve been using for the last I don’t know seven years or so. So that’s it’s been fine but I also tested out the sleeping mat I got I got a new thermarest sleeping mat no big news it’s pretty exciting guys stay tuned it’s a yeah it’s a larger sleeping mat than I had before but it’s a it’s a coated one with I think it’s kind of like ballistic nylon but it’s a nylon coating over it so it’s not just the rubber mat at the base of it so you can throw it underground or on the bathrooms semi abrasive materials that it would be outside and it’s working great I think it’s about one inch thick or so it’s about 25 inches wide at the shoulder point is long enough to fit my whole body which is probably the one for me so yeah I got a solid camp man I think for the last like three years I’ve been sleeping on one that goes flat about four hours after you start sleeping so that’s kind of nice to swap out I don’t know why I put up with a result long really shouldn’t do that. Sleep is like one of the best things you can get you know if you can figure out just like a couple easy things to take care of when you’re out camping or out in the woods and stuff it’s probably sleep I mean that’s like the thing that takes in and it’s frustrating too because when like even this last one I’m talking about didn’t sleep very well. Way too cold part of it, you know, no shelter, enough stuff that was kind of comfortable but really as it is yeah, it’s like I need to I need figured out a couple other extra things to kind of throw in there but yeah there’s just a couple things you can figure out when you’re going camping like how to stay warm or how to be comfortable when you do go or like when you’re asleep and it’s like one of the most important and most effective things you can do to kind of improve the way that a trip goes because like I can be like it can be brutal the next day if you don’t get any sleep the night before which is probably the first half dozen camping trips of the year like you know this first half dozen or so overnight to the year I’m just always kind of groggy and like oh what I have to get up right now we just sorted out was Wednesday morning when I woke up I popped up and I think it was probably about 5am or so that I that I got up I think it was just about first light the sun had come up Yeah, but there’s a little bit of light up in the sky and the stars were kind of washed out by the blue sky. So I have to up and the fire was out I think from the night before like I was mentioning how those the sticks had worn out and the coals that started burning down even I think by the time I was near the end of my last podcast I hopped out and the back windows were clear there wasn’t any frost on it but the front window the windshield was ice over pretty hard really I mean it looked like it was you know like coated or water and then froze over solid so it wasn’t even just kind of like a fluffy bitter white frost or something that had built up on it through fog. It just looked like a hard coating of of just an ice sheet over the windshield. Great I don’t have an ice scrapers of the whiskey I was thinking tonight it’s man who needs an ice scraper I’m taking a sip of coffee
11:43
so yeah, I don’t know I grabbed a box I think it was a piece of cardboard out of the back that I could kind of flex around a bit through that over the windshield tried to run the truck for a bit try to warm it up and took a while to but yeah scraped off some ice scraped out the hole big enough to kind of get started on the drive and then prep to take off but yeah take some photos and stuff around the campsite for a bit first in the morning nice draw in the valley like I was talking about that goes up to that that ridge point that you can kind of see off in the distance and I think I could see like the the fire from the smoke or the smoke from the fire of the neighboring campers over there. I don’t know if I’d mentioned it well Yeah, I definitely didn’t the last one out they were they’re kind of doing Brody’s out in the on the road around sunset. I think I got a little clip of it on video. But yeah, it’s like four or five of them. And these kind of beater. Late 90s four by four trucks doing spins out in the dirt roads. So looks fine, I don’t know. But they were getting getting the fire going and stuff in the morning to or whatever they had gone from the night before. You can see a plume of it coming up from that area they would have been camping in over by the creek bed down hill. And yeah, it was cool. It took some photos and stuff that morning, walked around and kind of cleaned up the camp a little bit but the fire stuff out and jumped in the truck had that little hole in the ice to see through and then yeah popped on a podcast and cruised down the road and so what I was trying to do was was take off down to a couple other spots along the creek while it was still morning and then head down ultimately to the area where the lake and started to build up and so it kind of how it works is like it kind of flows down the creek and then there’s a dam a point ultimately and then back right behind the dam is a reservoir where that Creek has kind of built up and I guess now is a body of water out there so drove down aways and took some photographs of the creek and the morning light and some of the water and stuff coming through I really like that kind of affected the sort of early spring kind of fresh snow melt mountain Creek stuff that just sort of looks really crisp and forested and natural and then it came down a ways further to a bridge that kind of cuts across the span of the creek as it starts to sort of widen out into the reservoir area and it looks like you know a big stretch of calm water out on the edge of the bridge where I think two different groups that were doing some fishing in the morning and yeah seems like people are still out it was a busy area up there is still still definitely pretty fully populated set of people you know, even during this lockdown period, there’s a bunch of people out there hanging out and fishing. I think it was two different different groups to maybe they were they were all kind of connected but yeah, they were they’re out there with a couple lines over the bridge. And they were picking up a couple of things. I think so. I saw a lady that was pulling up and a little a little blue kayak to the ramp on the first day and on her What is that thing you know when you you run it through the gilling you got the fish and stuff anyway she pulled up with like gardens like four or five times. Do something on her on her inner guy, I know that’s where it Leave it, I guess. But she pulled up four or five tracks, I figured the guy’s these guys were doing a little bit of trout fishing out there. Which sounds fun. It’s a nice clear Chris morning stuff like I was saying. So yeah, it sounds like it’d be nice to be out there for a couple hours doing sufficient. And yeah, look like they were there up to where they were getting a couple things. Let’s go to a sauna ospreay that took off, I think over the lake area just at that time. And we’d kind of like pull up at certain spots over the water, kind of back flap to hold in the same spot, look under water and see if there’s something I didn’t see enough, or I didn’t see a prime opportunity. And then we’re going to swoop off and then take off to a different section of the lake, then do it again. So watch that about three or four times, try to take a couple pictures of the area, which are nice, do I like the photographs that I got that morning, it’s good to get a nice a nice look to it really, you know, a lot of the time that the photographs really look a lot better when you just select the right time of day to be somewhere which you know, is obvious, but just the types of colors and the types of saturation and dynamics that you get in the look of a pretty simple set of trees and water, it just comes off a lot better when it’s a it’s just the right type of light. It’s really amazing to to kind of see what differences it makes when it’s a cloudy day or a sunny day or a morning or an evening, or midday.
16:30
Really, it seems like the dynamics of the light change so much that you could get like a totally different look in the photo, which is always kind of interesting to pay attention to and sort of see how that how that goes, What changes about it. And sort of how that affects the photographs that you’re making. I mean, even now that you know some cool at any time of day, but it’s kind of cool to figure out how it works for you or how it works, or what I’m trying to do is how to figure out how, how it works for my photographs and what I’ve tried to do, which is nice. It was cool going out there and climbing around the creeks and stuff in the morning and taking a cup of photos and water and ospreay and going over to the Lake area that’s trying to work on so much stuff to what I’ve done before but kind of that mirror look of that really calm water as it spreads across the lake in the morning. And then the reflection of the bright blue, kind of pre sunlit sky. Or how is it you know, like before the sun is actually up over the horizon, there’s not a lot of intensity so it’s just kind of a softer blue glow and a lot of ways and then there’s still enough illumination that you can see the greens and the trees and sort of the soft calm water in the morning before it gets kind of agitated through the rest of the day. So nice kind of peaceful looks to the photos and sort of the the natural stuff that I like to go kind of capture. You know, really ultimately though, there’s some nice stuff up there. And I was really like happy to kind of photograph some of the some of what I was looking for. But I was also also frustrated in the area too. I think there was a there’s a little more choked off than what I normally like. Like there wasn’t as many opportunities as I had hoped for I did try to you know, utilize the ones that I found. But there wasn’t as many opportunities as I had hoped for for kind of an opened up wide scene that you could set up a landscape photo and there wasn’t a lot of elements to really work with it was just sort of like some rolling hills off to a Green Hill. So sometimes I’m trying to find some stuff that’s a little bit more dynamic and it look than that. But it was fun, though, even as it is anyway. Though, I’m trying to think maybe like I was mentioning last when I got stuck and turned around but the snow and I didn’t want to deal with any of that right now. But in the next weeks and stuff I want to get up to Mount Jefferson or Mount Washington or a couple of these other wilderness areas that that have a few kind of visual landmark landmarks that would be worth taking an observation of
19:06
you can check out more information at Billy Newman photo comm you can go to Billy Newman photo comm 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 feel more comfortable using Patreon that’s patreon.com Ford slash Billy Newman photo
19:46
I’ve got the Sony A seven are going through its paces it’s been really cool using it for the last. The last couple of weeks. I’ve been trying to figure out its idiosyncrasies and there are a lot of them. There’s a lot of them with these newer cameras and I can see definitely where From the a seven, R or you know, from the first series of the A sevens to the a seven to and you know, so on and so forth with the better and different accentuated camera models, they get better, they really do get better. There are some things with the first renditions of the electronic viewfinder and the system of how that takes photos, how it kind of interrupts when you’re taking photos that don’t quite seem to the level of professionalism that I’m really trying to hit for. So I know that there’s a lot of custom settings that I have to go into and sort of tweak how that a seminar is going to be grabbing it photos, and then how it’s chipping. You guys heard of that before jimping. It’s, I don’t know what it really has to do with but but it’s referring to when you take a photograph or you take a couple of photographs. And then you look down at that screen on the bottom of, of your digital or into the back plate of your digital camera, you look down and you see the photo, and then you come up, you recompose and you shoot again and come down and look at it. And it’s I guess I don’t understand it completely, it just seems sort of like, like a modern approach to something that the technology allows you to do. So I think it’s totally acceptable. But for whatever reason, it is sort of an interference in the creative or in the photography process sometimes, and I know that there are many pros, all of those pros coming from a past world, that’s no longer here, a film where it wasn’t really acceptable to do
21:25
to do half shutter press autofocus, like you have to do autofocus from the back. And then and then shutter is its own system. And then with that there’s all these kind of silly rules about how you can use focus how you can use composition stuff, how you can set up your frame, when you can look at the screen, or when you can review the images, I guess these film shooters, they thought it was uncouth to be able to review or see the photograph before the film was developed, or before it was later on. Interesting. And I see kind of psychologically, there’s this, there’s this path that does seem to create better work or more intuitive photographs. And those are better, they are more needed. And I can see where some of these tricks might get you closer to that. But the idea of just looking at the back of the screen that doesn’t impede you so much. And it doesn’t, this doesn’t really stop you, if you’re a pro and you know you’re doing you look at the screen, you’re looking at the screen, because you know why you’re looking at the screen, it doesn’t really seem to make sense that there’s these sort of sideways rules about features you can and can’t use that are put into your camera. But to speak about efficiency with a problem that I noticed about the a seminar is that it will display the image to you for about a second and a half, two seconds. And it will display it on the screen. But it will also display in in the electronic viewfinder for your eye. And you can shut this feature off, but there’s still a little bit of a hiccup around the time that you hit the shutter button. And the problem with this is if I’m framed up to take a photograph, let’s say of a situation. I remember back at OSU when I was shooting sports a lot. Let’s say there’s a football game, I’m out in front of the action. And I see that the beeves set up a play, they throw a pass the guy gets it, he’s right in the pocket on the third of the frame that I have. And I have focused tracking on him, I want to take a series of shots with a high frame rate. So I can get that whole run of action as he moves towards me. And so the issue that I’m having is, in photography, you’re trying to select moments that look good, that’s kind of the point aesthetically, you want them to be choices that are appealing. And that has to do a lot with gesture a lot with movement a lot with kind of positioning and framing and composition and sort of thoughtfully considering what does the person look like? How are all these things in the frame relating to each other? And is it going to work when you press the shutter. And the difficulty is with these a seminars or even with the Sony A 6000 when I’m looking at it, and I take this series of photographs, I’m almost blind that whole time. Whereas before in the past when I would have been working with an SLR the there’s the shutter flap where you see black for just a moment, but it comes back and it’s optically correct immediately it’s optically correct to what you’re going to be shooting but with the Vf there’s just enough lag that in high action you seem to kind of miss where the gesture is assessed moving around it seems like you almost have to kind of guess or assume that the next moment is going to happen and then try and take it but you can’t see it. That’s weird it’s like it shuts off the viewfinder right at the time that you need to be looking through it. And so in some ways like that it’s a little bit complicated of Am I framed up right? Am I looking at the thing right when I take the picture just shows me something else all of a sudden, and I know that they’ve solved a lot of these problems like if you look up the Sony A nine and some of the features that it has if you if you bring that into high speed shooting, it’s got this interesting system where instead of having the electronic viewfinder, blink, black or cut out, cut out completely have the processor moved Have all of its attention to processing that image that it just captured and then bring back the electronic viewfinder. momentarily later, what we see in the a nine is a system where there’s, there’s the bracket, there’s like, let’s say, like a red focus bracket that kind of goes around and you’re shooting, you’re shooting you’re shooting. But what you’re seeing is instead of instead of the electronic viewfinder, blinking out black, and then showing you a frame, or just blinking out black and then coming back on, what we see is just that bracket that red bracket, blink, yellow, or blink from black to yellow, or black to red or something like that. And all that’s indicating is that it is firing frames, but you’re just still seeing it completely normally, like you would view any action on a screen. And that’s a really interesting process. I think it’s like, it’s like 20 frames a second or something like that. It’s almost video at that point when you’re shooting RAW frames. Are you kidding me raw frames on a Sony A nine. God knows what almost 50 megapixels that is shooting at. And you can do 20 frames a second, just looking at the thing and then seeing a little black bar blink yellow, and that’s signaling that you’re, you’re capturing all that data. Thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.
26:16
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 numina photo.com. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode and the backend.
187 Photos From The Sierras – Watching the Super-moon