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0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Today we’re looking at a video or excuse me, a photograph that was taken on film on avatar film. It’s one of those Kodak films, there’s portrait there’s actor, I’m sure there’s probably a whole bunch out there like Kodak gold or whatever the cheap stuff that used to get for your, your disposable camera used to be or your little point and shoot back in the 90s. But this was shot on acti I think it was one of the professional-grade films. I have not never known too much about film or film stocks or like the difference between slide film or was it Velvia or porch, or active. But I knew I got into acting because I liked that contrast II just had a crisp look to it and pulled out a lot of blues and a lot of greens that I had trouble getting in some of the other film stocks I was using, like, like I think if you use Fujifilm, you get a lot of all of the tones, that sort of thing. So I liked a lot of the crisp look that I got into color reproduction using this film stock. And this was back in, I think 2014 when reality when we were out at Loma lo like in Central Oregon, or kind of the central cascades of Oregon, maybe sort of north of Crater Lake, but a cool spot up there. And I just kind of like the silver lining of the clouds and the width of the light sort of diffused amongst this photo. It was kind of cool. But I think everything in this role turned out. Pretty interestingly, I think it was from a trip around the token e falls area, which will probably run through a few more photos up.
1:49
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 if you look at Billy Newman under the author’s section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism, camping, and cool stuff over there. So 360-degree photo work over the last couple of weeks has been cool. And I enjoyed it a lot. I liked doing the 360 stuff. I think back in June of 2018 we had done a bunch of podcasts about some of the 360 photography stuff that we were trying to do and some of the video stuff we were doing with the GoPro fusion at the time. And that was all cool and I liked that video a lot this time I was working with a Ricoh Theta zone. And I was going around to a few locations to try and get the photographs. Specifically, I think photographs are a lot in this circumstance, but not so many videos. But yeah, really interested in 360 photography, stuff that I was able, to edit together and capture during that time. So that was cool. But I went out to an area in, Central Oregon, that was pretty cool and went up on like a hillside to do some 360 work. And it’s cool out there because you can see the topography of how the Great Basin was formed at the well I guess like during the whole era of the Pleistocene as it was for a long-standing period. Like a lake, it was just a big lake out there. And then as things started changing at the end of the Pleistocene, I think there were huge changes that ended the Great Basin stuff that ended a lot of the megafauna that was in the area. And that kind of changed the topography of the landscape over the last 10,000 years to be something much more of the high desert sagebrush Juniper tree exposed rock landscape that we see today and a lot less of the forested temperate kind of mountain climate that we have through the Cascades and three part of Oregon, I’m sure it was always more dry, given the rain, shatter the Cascade Mountains there. But I think for a long period, as according to signs posted on my drives, in areas where I go hiking sometimes but you know, like when you go up to someplace and it says, you know, this area so such and such time ago had these animals in it, where you see like giant beavers, or you see, like camels, or giant sloths, I guess, out of the area, too. There are all sorts of stuff that they had. That ended up being wiped out 100,000 years ago, 60,000 years ago, 210 20 10,000 years ago, or something like that. There are a lot of changes that happened throughout the Pleistocene, I guess, during what they call the quarternary period, a period of glaciations that the Earth has been involved in for the last 100,000 or 200, maybe million years. I’m not sure it’s its last couple of 100,000 years we’ve been going in these cycles of glaciations, or you know, we’re in an ice age period. So we go into an ice age like we have ice on the Earth right now. It’ll be more ice at a point and then less ice at a point. More ice at a point less ice. So the point, I guess that’s been going on for what they say somewhere around like 200,000 years, these 30,000-year periods of glaciation to nonglaciation, where like, I think we’re coming, we’re like on the far end of the Glacial Maximum now. So we had the, with the Glacial Maximum about like, what, 11,000 12,000 years ago? Or is that right? No, I must have been, like 15 20,000 years ago that we are the maximum, then it started receding. I suppose. That’s when we were able to know that does it make sense we had like the land bridge, like the Beringia stuff where people got over that was probably 15 to 20,000. sea levels were low, or they were like, 400 feet, they squared along the coastlines. They came over through the land. So that was a pretty long ago. Why anyway, at some point, like I was there, like I’m gonna figure out Wait, let me remember. Let me think back to 15,000 years ago, where was I? Yeah, I wasn’t here. So I don’t know what happened. But apparently, there’s been some recorded evidence that I was learning about. And I think it’s like Montverde down in Chile. And that’s a location where I think they carbon dated something to 15,000 years old, like human remains, the human element remains, there’s, there’s like a few locations here in Oregon, where they I guess, have evidence of the Clovis people that sort of around like the 1112 13,000 year mark. And then there’s other evidence of things that are I don’t know within like it’s time it’s like anything from like 7500 years to 15,000 years ago seems to all kind of be in flux have a date, because there’s not many,
6:47
not many perfect ways to date that. And if it’s a cultural artifact, like, an arrowhead, or a pot shard, or a scraper, there’s some indication of how those things are going to be created, or how those artifacts are going to be created and how there’s are going to remain like Folsom points or Clovis points are pretty distinct from each other, but they’re not culturally distinct from each other. So it could be like a variation of many different tribes and languages and peoples. All well unrelated to each other but related with a similar vein of technology for a few 1000 years of you know, their tool use shape was kind of similar because they’re all kind of from a similar descendency. But I think when you get like more than 100 miles away, your language is separate over like a couple of generations, you just got to speak different languages. But man wild stuff anyway. So I don’t remember where we started with this. But I was out in Eastern Oregon, exploring the Great Basin, I went up on a hillside and public land and I was doing some 360 photography work with the Ricoh zeta Oh, Ricoh Theta zone. That’s what it is. And yeah, I was capturing some stuff on a hillside really beautiful areas up there where those ridges kind of drop in and out. And so it’s cool when you get like up to a higher elevation, you can kind of see the pockets of where these lakes and pools of water and kind of sat and rested for what seems like I think I was saying something about recording some 360 photographs up on some public land in the high desert, in the Lake County in Great Basin area of Eastern Oregon, beautiful spot over there. I enjoy it. And yeah, it was awesome to use the Ricoh Theta zone to be capturing some images up in that area, it’s cool when you’re at a higher elevation. And with a 360 camera, you can kind of it provides a little bit of a different perspective is seems silly to see like wider, but when you re when you kind of replay those images, and you’re able to sort of look around in the context of what’s the left and to the right of you, you’re kind of able to put together the context of the landscape a little better, a little faster than you could if you just had a series of individual photographs that had segments of the wider landscape captured in it. So it’s cool at that higher elevation, you can you can kind of look down to areas that we had been hiking around earlier in the day through some of the ridges and troughs that would be over in that area. And you can look down you know, it’s like 500 feet down in elevation to what we thought was kind of the mountain top pass and then pass that as another maybe 1000 foot or a couple of 100-foot drop in elevation as it goes down toward the lake basin area. So all that was pretty cool. And what was also cool about it is just sort of visualizing how populated that area had been in the past, I think, you know before the Western expansion of the United States and as 1000s of years passed by, and This region of land and the Northwest that had been populated and that region specifically been populated by nomadic tribes that had been able to travel and subsist off of the wild game that was there, I think a lot of like antelope and deer, and it looks like bighorn sheep by some of their planning some kind of sheep, but it looks like that from some of their, their pictographs and petroglyphs information that they left then the dynamics of some of those populations of animals have changed in the time. Now given like modern day, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’re gonna see a lot of sheep out there in Lake County. But there’s one drawn on a rock out there. So they must have been trying to look for it. There’s a lot of them in the southwest as he moved into the I think the Mohawk tribes. For him, that’s more of a 3000 to 25 2000. I don’t know, it’s probably bad. It was 3600 years ago, so everything but 100 years ago I think it was like Captain jack over there Captain jack’s stronghold for the Murdoch Indian Reservation area. That was like in the Indian Wars of the 1850s. So the last to tell them but yeah, there’s some information about some of the pipe, the Piute Indians, I think the Northern piute that were in that area of Southern southeastern Oregon, Nevada, then into Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico if I kind of understood, right, but I know there’s some fluctuations in there. And differences in timing and stuff. But yeah, dollar, is pretty cool stuff.
11:35
It was, it was awesome to get out there, it was cool to get out and kind of walk around in some areas of some public land, where we still have some access and still get out to try and do some photography stuff, even in this period where you’re supposed to stay home and there’s a lockdown it was, it was cool to kind of get out and try to do some exploring and some social distance conscious. I mean, that’s fine with me, I don’t, I don’t have to be around a lot of people, it’s better to do landscape wildlife photography work while you’re sort of in some type of isolation. I’m sure like a lot of hunters are kind of considering something like that to you know, hunters, fishermen, people like hiking or you know, a lot of those solo activities, it’s cool that you know, this kind of this time, sort of is provided a little bit of a reset for probably a lot of people out there to have a bit more time to invest in some of the things that they’d want to, I suppose a lot of folks are probably stuck more in their local area but it’s a great time too, to get to invest in some things that seem more important to you. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I hope you guys are doing well. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. You can check out more at Billy Newman’s photo calm I’ll be doing a ton of updates over there. The airplane is taking off. Sounds like prop plans are about to fly over my head. It’s like that scene in North by Northwest or Cary Grant starts getting run down by that biplane. That’d be scary.
13:04
So that’s that in the future. You can check out more information at Billy Newman’s photo comm
13:14
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 feel more comfortable using Patreon that’s patreon.com forward slash Billy Newman photo and I’m happy with the seminar so far I’ve been looking at trying to pick up a battery grip for it you know I did a wedding this weekend which is great shooting a wedding and those are really fun events to go through and a seven I did a pretty good job in almost every capacity I love the low light of it. The way the sensor works is great and super high quality all of those things fit the mark for what I need, but it was interesting I was noticing that in low life the autofocus for that camera doesn’t function in a way that I need it to or I’m missing some stuff that I want and that’s where I see the real benefit and in some of the older systems I mean even like Can’t I contrast base autofocus systems that were in the Nikon or Canon systems for the last like 15 or 20 years are superior to what I’m seeing in some of the expression of what the early Sony autofocus stuff can do. You know it’s like in focus, right you’re looking at a frame it’s in focus your autofocus point is on the thing. It’s a contrast point, there’s plenty of light on it. You go to auto focus and then your lens just spins out and it does not for like four seconds just spins out to infinity and to see just blurriness you lose the moment completely it comes kind of back in maybe it finally grabs focus and then you take the picture but you kind of miss everything or you just I don’t know like there’s a lot of times where you’re waiting for the camera to focus who really should just be like pull up to your eye it sees focus hit it grab it click it go I’m having a harder time with that than what I thought I might and I think some of that could be because of the lack of the phase detection autofocus system that like the the newer a seven r two has the a seven to a seven as to a nine or a nine right yeah that’s a that’s a Sony one and like a lot of the new Canon cameras they have this phase detection system is supposed to be some better multiplexing system of finding autofocus but there used to be systems that worked pretty good like my d3 at 53 autofocus points and they can pull up I think I don’t know something like that but you know, plenty autofocus points and they can grab your autofocus point even in pretty low light they could kind of get oh that’s at infinity or that’s pretty close to right next to me so I’ll stay there so it’s interesting kind of learning how that behaves. But overall the photos from the wedding came out really well a lot of this stuff worked out very nicely I’ve been really happy with it but another thing that I noticed is with running was running a camera as a device like more like an iPad or like more like your phone you know where it’s got it’s got some screen on a lot of the time it’s got processing stuff going on it’s moving gigabytes and gigabytes of data to a card it’s just drawing from the battery almost constantly I mean like during a wedding I guess to kind of think of power consumption like this I wrote 48 gigabytes of data to SD cards and so that’s going to take some amount of battery energy you know stored energy to write all that data to a card and so in that capacity I kind of do get that it would take a good bit of power to write that much information down to capture it and then write that much information if you think about everything that has to do so in that way and then run a screen and you know run the processing and run it visually and all that so I kind of forgive it and it capacity but what I noticed though is that I really did go through a couple batteries shooting and just sort of a regular fashion at this wedding for for most of the day is like a full day shooting but it really was burning through those batteries pretty quickly like you look at it like oh Whoa, I just I just use like 10% in a pretty short amount of time. And so with that, I was kind of thinking and as it’s been the plan for a long time for just I don’t know the kind of like a best use case for professionalism what I want to do is get the battery grip that goes in accompaniment with the seminar and the battery grip I think it’s it’s you know it’s like a Sony piece that fits yeah I haven’t seen a battery grip before but you know the one where you can throw the two camera batteries into the battery grip you can get an extended amount of life from your camera that way and you get like the portraits or what is it like the vertical shutter release? You know so you can flip the camera up and shoot in portrait mode and try yeah like the size of it the look of it, it’ll be an awesome kind of compact professional
18:14
What is it not SLR I keep wanting to say professional SLR but it’s an Interland interchangeable lens camera that’s rolling right off my tongue isn’t it so yeah, it’s gonna be interesting I want to go for the battery grip though and I think that could kind of solve some of the problems that I’m having with battery usage issues of the camera kind of coming up dad after two or three hours or whatever it is? So I don’t know I’ve heard plenty of other people about wedding photography kind of complain or grass a little bit about some of the features that are associated or some of the things that make the workflow of a wedding work of a wedding shoot go by a little bit more difficulty with a featured camera like the seminar, I’ve heard of people that are really into it, too. So you know, it seems like a couple of different things. But low light autofocus is an issue on that camera, I can tell that some stuff doesn’t do now. So with that, and with the concept of like what I like to shoot or you know, like, kind of still moving things or landscapes, low light firearm stuff, if I try and get into that more, I wouldn’t run into that same kind of problem with as much repetition because you know, you’re not shooting a high volume of frames, you’re not shooting an event based situation. So it’s kind of a different sort of scenario and you don’t seem to you’re you’re wanting to manually focus and take time and take multiple frames of the same thing. And in some of those, some of those more set up Fine Art situations or landscape situations like you’re trying to take your time and those squares in with event and wedding photography, that kind of process. It’s just it’s really fast. You’re trying to move different moving elements into different places and get photographs of You’re just doing a lot all at one time over a short amount of length of the amount of time that the, you know the event. So not enough is all right. I did great and had a great time at the wedding. How about you are, you know, savage people out of it your food, got a bunch of great photos, brought them home started processing them. That’s a really interesting part of me. I’ve gone through like a big batch of photos and I’ve gotten kind of used to that over time of getting through a big batch of photos, but it is always sort of overwhelming when you’re like wow, that’s a lot. That’s like a whole big data project I got to go through now again, you don’t realize how much it takes to get through a bunch of stuff when you finish it. 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, good links to other outbound sources, some links to books, and links to some podcasts. Like these blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy numina photo.com. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode and the back end.
21:08
Thank you