If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or a podcast interview, please drop me an email. Drop Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to book a wedding photography package, or a family portrait session, please visit GoldenHourWedding.com or you can email the Golden Hour Wedding booking manager here.
If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.
If you want to purchase stock images by Billy Newman, my current Stock photo library is here.
If you want to learn more about the work Billy is doing as an Oregon outdoor travel guide, you can find resources on GoldenHourExperience.com.
If you want to listen to the Archeoastronomy research podcast created by Billy Newman, you can listen to the Night Sky Podcast here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography: you can download Working With Film here. Yours free.
Want to hear from me more often?Subscribe to the Billy Newman Photo Podcast on Apple Podcasts here.
If you get value out of the photography content I produce, consider making a sustaining value for value financial contribution, Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books all on Amazon here.
Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Today I wanted to talk to you guys about an Instagram TV post that I made. also kind of asking you guys what you think about Instagram TV. What’s it like for you to have put anything up? Is it useful to shoot a vertical video and then edited and posted on HGTV? I see some content. Whilst I don’t know producers’ providers, what do you call them now, creators? I don’t know, I see some YouTube stars trying to put up some things cut down to a vertical video frame and throw it up onto Instagram TV now, which is sort of a separate app. I’ve downloaded it, I’m trying to check it out. It’s kind of interesting. But I guess one of the things that I threw out there, I guess what I’m gonna run down on a few of these little podcast clips is I put together a handful of clips from a 360 video trip that we shot down at sister’s rock, Oregon, like when we showed up there, it was cool. But Gosh, we lucked out. I probably talked about it a few times at this point. But we lucked out with a beautiful sunset. And so we waited like right at about the time that the sun was right at that golden hour spot it was coming down to its horizon line to set. Right about then we walked down toward the beach, sort of on this long road that sort of meanders through like this big mountain over to your left-hand side. And then this big, sweeping coast that that kind of curves in and you seem like the shortcut to Washington, but was cool to get to see that in 360 when we shot it and edited it and rendered it out later. But it’s also really cool. what I was doing, I guess kind of in at that same time was shooting some clips of what it’s like to sort of go through a shoot 360 video. So I threw a few of those together of us doing some stuff on the beach and walking around and getting some shots. And I put that up as one of the clips for the Instagram TV video model. And it was cool, it’s kind of been put up, but you can check that up. over on Instagram TV, I have a few more of them coming up too. It’d be cool to put it together. But the main question is, does that make sense at all, you know, like this vertical video being this unnecessary? Do you guys need anything like vertical video, I’m testing it out a little bit because I like to put my hat in and try and a few of the newer pieces of media out. But I’m also kind of skeptical about some of the need for it. I don’t know, I guess this is the other thing I’ve learned about Instagram too, is that it turns out what I like or what I think doesn’t end up being that important. Or is that necessary, it seems that so many people have their phones that are holding them in a vertical position and anybody under 20 or 25 or something at this point is going to understand quite clearly what to do with a vertical video and how to interact with that. And it seems like there’s so much media and content being consumed being downloaded, that somebody who communicates effectively in a vertical format is going to be able to create an audience create or action, you know, generate something for themselves. So it’s kind of interesting, that won’t be me, of course, obviously, but it’s kind of interesting to see, you know, like how these different things sort of pop up. And then how over time it’s going to end up in something important even if it seems like sort of a silly thing people’s old as asked wouldn’t use
3:29
you can see more of my work at Billy Newman photo calm, you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think you 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 on camping, you cool stuff over there.
3:52
During this time, this tactic called feather sticks, do you guys heard of that it’s like a bushcrafting term I hate that word I prefer camping or hunting or something like that. But in the world of bushcrafting which I’m sure you can YouTube, there’s this and it’s an idea, and a lot of that stuff is great to have generated the skills that you need to run to manage yourself in the outdoors and the thing kind of the thinking behind it is the more that you know about how to work with your environment the less gear you need to carry with you and really the more apt you are to make proper choices in a short period that will help you out so that’s helpful. So you’re just kinda like having fire building skills or knowing what to do and how to set up camp or how to run a tarp or how to get water all that sort of stuff. Anyway, in this case, you take some of these sticks that I’m talking about some of these drier ones, you take your knife, your sturdy bushcraft knife, but people still like to talk about anything you take around 24 inches of that stick and kind of break them down at 24 inches or so. And then we’re supposed to do is take that knife and sort of what would it be like a kind of like peeling a potato or something or like you know if you got to like kind of peel it Carrot, what do you want to do is kind of start at the top. And then you want to peel into it, you kind of cut in with a knife just a little bit and then run a slice of that down to the end of the bar, but you don’t, you don’t slice off that flake of wood that you’ve been pulling up, you try and make it pretty thin, too. It’s called feather sticks for a reason, right? See, if you try and kind of make it like a thin strip of wood that’s kind of pulled up from it. And the wood will just kind of naturally curl up on itself. As you chop on it, it takes a lot of getting used to you kind of have to get the hang of trying to get those feather pieces down, you have to hold it onto the stick itself. So you cut down to the last like two inches or so of the wood and then you leave it and so what happens is I used to cut, you kind of rotate the wood and you cut down to rotate the wood and cut down. And so you get after doing that for a while. It’s just a bunch of these real thin flakes of wood that are all gathered up at the top end of this stick and then you have a nice dry piece of kindling, that sort of works down next to it. And so what you do is people a lot of bushcrafting and camping stuff is just doing a lot of preparation and a lot of work that sort of seems like a man should roll lighter or you know, should read some newspapers or something that would have done more. But if you’re in bushcraft and yeah it’s one of those things you can do if you have nothing, nothing around. But yeah, you make these feather sticks and then the good fire starting material if you get the right wood that’s trying if you can kind of run down and get these plumes of these kind of saw or Masada is but these little like plumes of wood flakes and they’ll burn up real quick when you get a fire going on them. But what I did for this one, oh the other fire tip. What was the one I heard? Cotton balls and Vaseline. here that’s like the fire starter ticket because it’s pretty, pretty neutral. You can use the Vaseline for a couple of different things and the cotton balls too but that petroleum jelly that makes up the Vaseline will rock fire and the cotton too. So yeah, you just need to take a cotton swab from the bathroom the Vaseline you put that in like a Ziploc bag and then you pack that into one of the pockets of your backpack and you can get a fire going with a lot of stuff or you can get the base of a fire gun with a lot of stuff like that would work great even with the gun was like a flint Flint rod.
7:21
I can’t remember what the other word is for it but those Flint rods that you strike and then you run a spray of sparks on to instead you can do that I always bring a lighter a couple of lighters with me I got one in my pocket right now but those are really easy Firestarter tools where you can like that you got a good flame going for a sustained amount of time running out the petroleum jelly and the cotton and then you can stack smaller twigs and sticks and stuff on it and then run bigger branches on that quickly and that that helps out a lot in my case I didn’t know that I had a couple of couple napkins from lunch and I had some Fern that I spotted over here and it had died out so there’s these dried out fronds of Fern leaves over I don’t know about 50 feet over here under the side of the road. So I went over there with my knife and I cut down a couple handfuls of those I came back over to the fire I laid out a better the smaller sticks at the base and then I stacked in a bunch of the dried Fern is a bad there and then I put some of the strips of paper towel that I had balled up in a section there and then I stacked up kind of a little fork like a little lean to four of some of the smaller sticks and then had some of the bigger sticks are ready to go but lit up the the what was it the paper towel and a couple in like two spots is what I tried to lift paper towel in two spots with the lighter and then real quickly I just kind of held over the ferns was dried ferns and they lit up real fast here so that was a great fire started piece and that cuts you know cuts a big flame really quickly and then I put that over it and then that kind of got the lower ferns sort of burnin in some of the sticks going and then I threw on those smaller twigs over and then that caught and through the bigger sticks on there. So dropped a couple of logs on there. Yeah I was kind of scavenging them from some of the other fairings that I was passing along the way even though I’d gone out what was it a couple I don’t know it’s probably a month or so ago now and I collected a good bit of firewood up in some of the the areas outside of where I was working at and yeah I’d kind of drive around and if I see like some some downed dried out wood on the road and throw it in the back of the truck and then I brought it home and I cut it up and then I stacked it up and so some of its guys seasoning out now we’ve got a little fire pit at home that we’re kind of we’re kind of using it with but I was gonna bring some of that some of the twigs and some of the kindling that I had and then I forgot about it and didn’t bring any firewood with me which is fine to know you know it’s cool really almost anytime I’ve gone out camping in the past I’ve never brought firewood with me even probably at times I should have or you know places that you’re not supposed to scavenge firewood or that it’s been so used that there’s just no firewood in any capacity left to scavenge batch. Where was that Isn’t Wyoming yeah I was in Wyoming we were traveling we were camped out at a spot and cabbages go through there we were in September so I’m sure that you know he has been in constant use from you know April until the end right you know it’s just been constant use and it’s been like that for the last 100 years or how long you know we’re not the first but in that in that area out there there just been nothing available to burn so all the all those flammable resources has been collected by other other kindling hunters in the past and it’s kind of interesting to see how that goes so we kind of had to be resourceful and we had to kind of figure out how to gather enough stuff but we did pretty well you know, like we result in kind of go to like pine needles and pine cones sometimes those those were pretty well are often pretty dry and will burn well enough they’re not going to be a sustaining fire they’re not going to really like get up embers go into the degree that you can really cook on an effective way but but you can’t cook on it I mean, you can get some stuff going and in some other ways you can get you know enough of a fire gun that you can you can get a lot going so that’s that’s normally what I would have is you know, you have like one or two good logs that can kind of keep things kicking for the evening but to get that going you need to you need to have some smaller stuff and normally that day you’re just trying to find where you show up because you can’t be here there’s going to be stakes around so you try and gather that stuff up but man, if it’s a busy area, that stuff will happen scavenged shoot, but that’s not my problem now so I’m I’m loaded up on some firewood and I gotta get better coals go and that I can get this
11:35
stuff set Rockin with
11:43
you can check out more information that Billy Newman’s photo comm you can go to Billy Newman’s 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 forward slash Billy Newman photo.
12:22
I’m looking into like hard drives right now I’m trying to find something but I don’t know if I really need the collaborative accessibility that is provided by cloud storage and so much I think I need fast, hard drives fast data storage, and stuff. So I can kind of move things around. That seems to be more useful for me than the big cloud. I’m looking at eight terabytes and 10-terabyte Seagate hard drives right now a couple of other brands I was looking at like the G drives and those cooler aluminum metal cases, I was looking at other Lacie drives about Lacy stuff in the past. And but I’m looking for a bigger desktop drive, I have a couple of smaller, portable drives that are great with a laptop when you’re moving around. And that’s worked functionally for the last couple of years. But I am looking for something that probably what I want is a NASS or some network-attached storage device. I’ve been interested in those for a long time, they’re kind of expensive to get into. It’s almost like buying a desktop computer when you load it up with big hard drives, and you have to buy an enclosure and it’s a big project, just all as that as it is. So really picking up eight terabytes or 10 terabytes for 200 bucks seems, like it would solve my problem for the time being. But that’s what I thought five years ago when I bought a four-terabyte hard drive. And I thought that would solve my problems. And now I have four filled up. Four terabyte hard drives, one, two, those are the four pounds the two. Those are both. So there are four, that’s for sure. So yeah, I need to get a bigger, bigger amount of space to kind of do the data management stuff that I have in the background, the tough thing is, is like so you have four terabytes, wow. And so it’s like a lot way more than I would have ever thought in the past. But I mean think about 20 years from now. But in the data we’re going to be talking about, we’re talking about AR files or photogrammetry projects or something, it’s going to be insane data. Four terabytes, I got to back that up somewhere, right, so I need a second four terabyte hard drive to have all that duplicated over to so now I have two full four terabyte hard drives, which is kind of the problem that I seem to run into. I’m going to get this eight terabytes hard drive and then I’m gonna need a second one to back it up to so the idea is that it’s just gonna be this one big tank drive, that’s gonna be the archive area for all the stuff to go and get backed up to. And then we’re gonna have the smaller you know, four terabyte hard drives that are maybe a little faster. I’ve been doing black magic speed tests on them though, and they are not that fast, like 100 megabits a second. I’ll get to that in a second. But yeah, try to get the four terabytes I have right now to be more active, like for video projects or for the photo libraries or something like that, maybe I can break it out and have that run a little bit more stable on some of those but the interesting thing the thing I was gonna mention is that these drives are USB three, right? USB three, that’s fast. Hey, maybe soon they’re gonna be Thunderbolt three or the USB 3.1 USBC connector. That’ll be great. That’ll be what when is it? 10 or 20 gigabytes a second incredible speeds Wow, that’ll be awesome, or USB three what that’s five gigabits a second gigabytes a second slippin. Now, slow hard drives are the weakest link in the chain. So you’re sort of throttled back to the speed that the drive can write to. So these 7200 RPM drives the spinning disk drives, which used to be kind of state-of-the-art video drives 10 years ago. And that is kind of considered slow, they are slow their data write speeds are somewhere around 100 megabytes a second, which is below half of what was advertised for that even USB two speeds of 250 megabits a second, megabytes a second. Okay, so we’re running 100 megabytes a second on a USB three, four terabyte hard drive, it’s good. It’s cool. It’s I think better than the USB two connection. Agnew does. So it’s faster than a USB two cable, happy to have USB three. But Wow, that is not the same kind of performance at all. So that’s really where you’re going to see the performance increase when you go to an SSD hard drive. So let’s try to consider that about any like future stuff I was thinking about, like, getting like a pro desktop computer and trying to build out some stuff like I was saying network, storage device or other stuff that I could use when thinking about Okay, so for performance with like a higher end computer, you’re going to get slower speeds with that. But you would get really fast speeds if you had an SSD or if you had the right type of enclosure that was built to work with it quickly. So that’s kind of been crossing my mind for future-proofing. What I’m up to for the 2020s as we’re getting into it. I think though, round, most logically, the answer probably got the reasonably priced eight-terabyte drive now and wait some years into the future that pick up
17:20
some multi-terabyte solid-state drive of the future that can transmit things at faster speeds. I’m sure we’ll get there sooner than later. Well, thanks a lot for listening to my kind of ramble about computers that I have installed on my laptop. That’s pretty interesting, right? But all of that is in service of the greater goal of trying to get some photo stuff put together, which has been going pretty well I’ve been going through a bunch of images in the catalog. And I’m trying to get together I think I’ve been trying to talk about it in so many ways a few times. But I’m trying to get together a couple of sets of portfolios sort of structured into like, let’s say, easily landscape, commercial shoots, portrait shoots, wedding shoots, something like that. And so there’s kind of a collection of each second have so if people are to look at those photos, so see, oh yeah, there’s the there’s this and then there’s that. So that’s kind of the plan which is close to coming together pretty fun. And other than that I’m getting into video stuff I’ve been editing a lot more in Final Cut, I’ve got the big monitor up, I’ve got the weakened toppled out I’m trying to go through and kind of get used to using the pen, it’s probably easier to do that in Photoshop or Illustrator or something like that to get used to the pen. But if I don’t, that’s a cool tool. Also, you get to kind of you know, flow the pen back and forth. Using a tablet, it’s a faster way of working than with a mouse in some ways and is sometimes a little more accurate but it is a bit of a learning curve in some ways. So try to tighten it up. It’s coming
18:53
thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast Hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman’s photo comm few new things up there some stuff on the homepage, some 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 noon in a photo calm. Thanks for listening to this episode and the backend.