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0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.
0:23
Today I wanted to talk to you about Adobe Premiere. I just yesterday talked about Adobe Final Cut 10.4 and some of the cool 360 editing things you can do with it. I guess Adobe’s getting into it pretty, pretty good. And really, with a lot of attrition that’s been happening on the apple side. And I think a couple of days ago, I talked about the new MacBook Pros that have come out, that’s sort of the only Pro, does it? I don’t think a lot of pros are liking some of the stuff that Apple’s doing. So to cut to the chase of it, they’re moving over to PC stuff. And a lot of that hardware is quite excellent. A lot of those video editing rigs are very capable, outside of like, the macro, what are you gonna do with that? Now? It’s, it’s not, it’s not state of the art at least. And so you know, as fast as the world is moving? It’s, I don’t know, it’s apple’s fault to lose it like this. So with a lot of the, with a lot of the, I guess, diminishing effects that came about in Final Cut 10.4 or Final Cut 10.0 when they switched over to I guess what was it? Like the Final Cut Studio system? Do you remember that? And like in 2010, I kind of switched up the final cut x or Final Cut 10. Now we’re at 10.4. But when they did that, I think a lot of people were thinking, Oh, well, this is like they made it like iMovie. I don’t know if that was true. I used it for a lot of stuff. And I don’t know, it’s still hard for me to use, I guess. But there’s a lot of editors that yes, at that point time decided that for a lot of their professional editing needs, they really couldn’t have some tool that was sort of rolling over features like that in a way that wasn’t consistent for their needs. So I think at that time, a lot of editing studios tried to switch over to people that were cross-trained in Adobe Premiere. And that’s been the editing software that’s been in, in professional news, probably pretty directly for like the last decade for a lot of video production needs. So it’s kind of interesting, and they’ve been keeping up with a lot of the changes, I think Adobe has been doing and maybe even a little faster than Final Cut, or some of the other companies like they had 360 editings earlier on, I think they’ve had, you know better motion graphics and After Effects for a longer amount of time than well, or they’re just working at a higher level. And I think it’s it’s a higher level of proficiency with some of the stuff that they’re able to get done. So I’ve been interested in it. But no, it’s interesting to talk about to kind of separate some of the differences. I’m invested in the final cut system. So I’ll probably be staying there for just a little rinky-dink YouTube cuts that they make. Who needs Final Cut for that or Adobe Premiere for that matter? But
2:58
you can see more of my work at Billy Newman photo comm you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. And then 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, and cool stuff over there.
3:21
finished up that camping trip I was doing up there. The mountain Creek was there in the Cascades a couple of days ago. What was that like Wednesday, I think it was like maybe 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 an I don’t know, it’s a little bit of a misnomer. But it’s cool to see the thing to talk about happening every six months or so. It’s just kind of the oscillation of a bit of the eccentricity in the orbit of the moon that makes it I think about 25,000 miles closer than its maximum, and then maybe about 25,000 miles further away. And it’s distant maximum. But I think it’s 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 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 the moon has been this really big thing in the sky. And 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 super moon that night. It was bright. It was cool to kind of watch around and kind of look I was illuminating the forest in the trees in the mountains and stuff around me, that was kind of nice to see. The cold that night though, man, I tell you so have a 15-degree sleeping bag. And that’s great. 15 degrees is fine. But envisioning degrees is more than adequate for most circumstances that I ended up being in during the summertime. When it was done, I was just not too big of concern about how cold it gets. But when it says 15 degrees, it 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 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 are 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’d probably get a zero degree or maybe a negative 15 degree. And I could use the warm because man, what I noticed is even if it was just a little bit down to what it would have been probably maybe 10 or 29 or something like that it was you know, a bit below freezing. Who knows how cold it was, it was only like an elevation of 2500 feet and it was a canyon. I thought it was a clear night, but I thought it would be relatively sheltered. And yeah, 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 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 like 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 are 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 an improvement, 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 well to be an insulating material. And it doesn’t. Alright, that works well with moisture and stuff and all the other things we know about. Merino wool is cool. Everybody knows about that kind of stuff but we had like, you know, those terrible big cotton sleeping bags way back. Those arrived and I don’t know if they were even that insulating. Then they switched over to those synthetic materials, which are probably all oil-based Does that sound right? Like petroleum-based like plastic products that were made out of synthetics, I think that’s how they spin up a lot of those. This
8:05
bladder ledges 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 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, three 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 agness they made 10s most of the time though, right? Acting company, aren’t they? Yeah, the 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 I don’t even know if you get an order from anyone like that, 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 yeah It’s a larger sleeping mat than I had before but it’s a coated one with I think it’s kind of like ballistic nylon but it’s that nylon coating over it so it’s not just the rubber mat at the base of it so you can throw it on the ground or 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 and it’s 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 it for so long really should 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 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 to figure 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 yeah it 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 which is sort 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 coals and started burning down even I think by the time I was near the end of the 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 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 the fog. It just looks like a hard coating of just an ice sheet over the windshield. Great. I don’t have an ice scraper of the whiskey I was thinking tonight it’s a man who needs an ice scraper I’m taking a sip of coffee
12:58
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 off a 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 ridge point that you can kind of see off in the distance and I think I could see like 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 did in the last one. They were their kind of doing Brody’s out 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 this kind of beater. In the late 90s, four-by-four trucks spin out on dirt roads. So looks fine. I don’t know. But they were I think getting the fire going and stuff in the morning too 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 downhill. And yeah, it was cool. I took some photos and stuff that morning, walked around 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 take off down to a couple of other spots along the creek while it was still morning and then head down ultimately to the area where the lake 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 Greek has kind of built up and I guess now is yeah body of water out there. So drove down ways and took some photographs. of the Creek and the morning light and some of the water and stuff coming through a 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 things that thing 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 trout or something on her on her inner guy I know that’s where it leave it I guess but she pulled up with four or five trout so I figured the guys these guys were doing a little bit of trout fishing out there. Which sounds fun. It’s a nice clear crisp morning and stuff like I was saying so yeah, it sounds like it’d be nice to be out there for a couple of hours doing sufficient, and yeah look like they were up to where they were getting a couple of things. Let’s go to a sauna osprey that took off I think over the lake area just at that time and would kind of like pull up at certain spots over the water kind of back flap to hold in the same spot and look underwater 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 and try to take a couple of pictures of the area which are nice I like the photographs that I got that morning it’s good to get a nice look at it, you know, a lot of the time that the photographs 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 you know, set of trees and water, it just comes off a lot better when it’s it’s just the right type of light. It’s amazing 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.
17:44
It seems like the dynamics of the light change so much that you could get like a different look in the photo, which is always kind of interesting to pay attention to and sort of seeing 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 intimidate, 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 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 osprey and going over to the Lake area that’s trying to work on similar stuff to what I’ve done before but kind of that mirror look of that calm water as it spreads across the lake in the morning. And on the reflection of the bright blue, kind of pre-sunlit sky. 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 natural stuff that I like to go kind of capture you know ultimately though, there’s some nice stuff up there and I was like happy to kind of photograph some of the some of what I was looking for. But I was also frustrated in the area too. I think there was a there’s little more choked-off than what I normally like. Like there wasn’t as many opportunities as I had hoped for I had to try and utilize the ones that I found there weren’t as many opportunities as I had hoped for kind of an opened up wide scene that you could set up a landscape photo and there weren’t a lot of elements to 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 looks more than that. But it was fun though, even as it is anyway. Though I’m trying to I 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 If I want to get up to Mount Jefferson or Mount Washington or a couple of these other wilderness areas that have a few kinds of visual landmarks that would be worth taking an observation of. 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.
21:00
So I was looking around at different options. I liked a lot of the Nikon stuff, but I also noticed I liked the Nikon stuff, I’ll leave it at that. I just noticed that sometimes some of the accessory equipment outside of the body that you might buy a bit of the lens are expensive, or they’re a little more expensive than maybe some of the commensurate lenses that might be available over in canon. I remember back in college someone was mentioning to me that they were going to switch from Nikon over to canon because the canon was a bigger company. I don’t know if this is a reason or not. It was interesting logic though, to kind of think through at the time but that canon was a larger company selling more lenses making more cameras making more equipment. And so they had more resources, more staff, more designers working on cameras, building cameras, and doing research and development to kind of bring that forward. And I think even maybe now that’s still perhaps true if you look at some of the technologies in Nikon versus canon like we were just kind of to take a base idea of it though I love Nikon stuff a lot if you were to take like the D five I think that’s a 20-megapixel sensor. Whereas if you were to look at the newer Nikon or Canon five D Mark four that’s I think like 3136 I don’t know if it’s out there in the third maybe I think it’s a 30-megapixel camera. And I think perhaps the five D Mark three is a 23-megapixel camera. So it was interesting just kind of noticing a couple of those things now I understand that there are benefits to the lower megapixel rating for some of the low light performance that you get a high ISS and I think that’s maybe sometimes where Nikon performs well but then there’s also Sony who’s producing 42-megapixel cameras and they’re doing incredible things in low light but also even better stuff with a seven s which I think is the version of the camera that’s specifically around some of the higher end video features. And I think it’s a 12-megapixel camera that does incredible stuff and low light like almost like you know 100,000 so you can get amazing low light images and low light video. So it’s interesting how that kind of sensor technology works. But all that being said it’s just interesting that for a long time even way back in history like to the beginning of the digital SLR I think canon was way ahead and what they are producing as far as their sensors go and what they’re able to produce like megapixels or in fidelity have an image I think they had a what was the first one I think Nikon did not have a full-frame digital SLR and tell the Nikon d3 came out which was a fantastic camera and I had that one also as a used camera that about later loved the d3 but it was interesting that they yeah like they didn’t have a full-frame DSLR camera option until 2007 I think when that came out, whereas, on the Canon side, I think that the EOS one D The one DS is that right? I think it was the DS was the first full frame camera produced by Canon and that was way back and I think that was still like around eight megapixels or maybe 10 megapixels for the mark two and then they had some technology that was just far more advanced for the time 2000 to 2003 2004 than what canon had gone or is before when Nikon it you know what I mean right? So anyway that fast forwards to me in the fall of 2018 I’m looking around for another camera purchased because I was going to be moving I was going to be taking a job where I was I was going to be working every day doing family portrait photography and a lot of like wedding photography stuff to where I needed it. And on the memory card system that would be in the camera was like on the Sony side as I had mentioned before. There were some limitations to it and one of the other limitations was that it only accepted SD cards which right now I’m kind of learning are fine you know you can use an SD card for just about anything but I also liked the opportunity or the option to have a compact flash card or maybe it’s a USM USM USD. That’s $1 I’m not sure but with the compact flash card system that goes in, I always felt that was like a little bit more professional when you put that in. And I just wanted more memory options so with I think the five D Mark three that I decided to pick up use that had the Compact Flash slot and also had the SD card slot and you could record to NADP video and you could take photographs you could do like high frame rate burst series for photographs and it’s just seemed like it was a great workhorse camera that the five D series and I think that’s what people have been talking about. Even since like the five D Mark two when they announced the HD video recording features on DSLRs so I think that when even before that, you know it was just it was one of the top-use cameras for wedding photographers and stuff so for me, I was trying to find something that would be like a good workhorse camera where I could always kind of count on it and the battery system and the memory card and the lens arrangement that would be available to me that I could really just be hammering away on frames and then be bringing those in editing them and then kind of delivering them to clients in a pretty fast manner. So I thought that would be something that would help me out and I think I was right I think was a good choice though there are fantastic options like the ACE seven Mark three, or the seven three and then a seven are three. I think both of those have kind of solved a lot of those issues that I’ve been talking about where they’ve adjusted the battery system and they’ve adjusted the just some of the blackout problems that I was talking about before but I was happy to switch over to the Canon side of it. I think also the reason I was talking about two words Yeah, no blackout, and I liked being able to use the through-the-lens viewfinder of the SLR as opposed to the digital SLR or just looking at it on the screen. So I don’t know if all those reasons were kind of why I wanted to get back to the DSLR system instead of the interchangeable lens camera system. But it was great so so back I think in September I was looking around a lot I sold the seminar off and then I was trying to hunt around for options for me to get a well-priced canon five D Mark three and then I also bought one from Marina so she had a five D Mark three body and then we could kind of share lenses for two so I wanted to get up and running. And I wanted to talk about like some of the lens stuff that I was interested in too It’s interesting kind of switching over to Ken and now just kind of seeing you know what’s available and what’s available in the US market which for me and you know someone that doesn’t want to spend a ton of stuff, getting a pretty high-level professional level set of photography equipment, it’s interesting to kind of comb around through the US market and figure out good pieces to use. I think almost every camera system I’ve ever had it’s been something that I’ve made a purchase of off of the US marketplace in some manner you know, I haven’t bought a new film camera that’s for sure. And so it was interesting kind of trying to figure that out a little bit and I’ve always had really good luck with that I hear some bad stories out there but it seems like a lot of photographers take pretty good care of their camera equipment in a way that at least seems quite usable for me so what I ended up with it at some point and I save a ton of money doing it too and I don’t have to deal with the heavy depreciation because like by the time I I end up wanting to sell it hasn’t moved that much in the marketplace. A lot of the time you know it only ends up being like a few $100 to purchase that camera because when you sell it again you get a lot of that money back and as opposed to well I’ll get into that story a second but like when I purchased it that camera was quite new. And it had appreciated a lot and value from the new price the new sticker price from the in the store in the camera store price to what it was when I bought it used so so it was a fantastic deal to kind of pick it up and find like a good one out there. So so yeah back in. Was it back in September I was hunting around in Oregon trying to find a good five D Mark three body so I was trying to debate a little bit I was looking around on eBay for five D Mark threes that would be available. And I was looking around on ke H and those are two locations that I kind of made purchases from before when I was making a purchase online. I like eBay and I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay. I sold myself a seminar on eBay. I sold my d3 when I had made a purchase the d3 I think from K h and I sold that d3 on eBay and I made my money back it was great it worked pretty well. But when I was looking around I didn’t find the price point that I wanted for the five D Mark three line I think those are all running around 18 or 1900 bucks for the five D Mark three bodies that are being sold but I’m sure I don’t I seem to like the market was a little lower than that at the time and then when I looked on kth it was sort of the same story where once we were in bargain condition you know where they’d been pretty beaten up or probably had been you know, someone’s wedding photography camera where it really hammered out 100,000 or 200,000 frames already had a few seasons of weddings over the last couple of years and the person was trying to offload that gear and then you know an upgrade to their five-year mark for their one dx or something like that. So I kind of wanted to stay away from those in a way I’m sure they would have been functioning cameras and the way that they had been reported but there’s really no way to like get an observation of the camera and its function in your hand while you have it to see that it’s really like as clean or as in good condition as you’d want it to be for something that you’re going to spend 18 $100 for when I was buying used cameras it was sub $1,000 purchases so it’s like well you know, it’s got a couple of scuffs on it or something like that, but they were always quite nice in their physical condition. So what I ended up deciding to do was instead of purchasing on eBay or kth what I decided to do was try and check out the local marketplaces so I went on Craigslist to look at the classified listings that were there in you know, photo and video equipment for sale listing in my area. And I kind of scoured across Oregon to find you know a couple of good pieces so I was trying to look in the Portland area. I was looking over in the bend area I was looking in the Eugene area and I was also looking up into like the Seattle and Tacoma area as well because I thought well you know if I need to then I’ll drive up little ways that I might save hundreds of dollars trying to purchase a nice camera system so I thought that might be a good idea. And then in addition to Craigslist, I was also getting into the Facebook marketplace where I was selling a ton of mag my stuff from a house when I was trying to set up this move over here to Maui. So I was looking around at that I was saying well maybe I can check out and see if there’s camera equipment that is also listed there too. And that worked out well I was pretty impressed with it. So for the camera bodies, I found two canon five mark three bodies one of them I found over I’m banned for $1,000 flat which is an incredible deal I think I think I got that brand on that one. It had been used I think for just like a single project that someone had I think they did to have a business or they’re paid to do it so they made a purchase of a five-day Mark three and then they shot like a series of web instruction like instructional videos for YouTube for a company that had purchased it and then they hadn’t used that equipment in a while since then. So they were going to sell that camera off and get some of their money back. So I got the camera for $1,000 even which was fantastic it barely even had like rub marks on it on the base of it you know like when you look at the camera body physically, the rubber was in fantastic shape. And the base plate like where the tripod would go I think was the only area where there’s a little bit of a scuff but it was fantastic. It was cool that it worked out so well for me so I made a purchase of that camera for 1000. Then I was looking around and I found another one up in the Portland area that a real estate agent had bought to take photographs of their property and then I think they’d found out that they didn’t want a five-day Mark three but they wanted a Sony camera and so they made a purchase of a Sony camera just a few months after that. And then to make up the cost of that purchase they wanted to sell off the Canon five D Mark three that they had and so I saw I got the box too which is interesting. I got the box for the five D Mark three and had the receipt from the camera store that they bought it for it was you know 20 $600 when they bought it maybe 12 months ago or 11 months ago and I looked at the shutter count of it. There are maybe 1900 pictures that have been taken on the camera body when I purchased it it was almost like a brand-new camera. I think it was put 1000 frames on a day at the job that I had so
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yeah, it was I’ve already broken it in quite a bit more than it had been when I purchased it so it was cool getting such a new camera for such a low price. So saving $1,000 trying to put it put the these this package of equipment together was excellent and I was really happy to do that. And that was one thing I noticed about the Canon US market is there’s just and this is sort of back to that thing. It’s a bigger company and they’re selling more cameras out there. So it was cool that there’s just so much used gear out in the market where as opposed to you know if I was looking for a D 100 on the Nikon side or a D four or something like that, it would be pretty hard to find those bodies I guess in that condition or you know in that way and then for that price it seemed like and same goes for like a Canon one dx that I was trying to find that on the US market those were held by professionals or sports photographers and those bodies were really and still very expensive when I was looking around for them but it seemed like there were so many people that were interested in doing wedding photography or doing photography as a hobby that they would kind of lean into the higher price range and pick up a five D Mark three and then find out why maybe I don’t want it or maybe I want to switch over to a five D Mark for now. And so they were ditching those and offloading this for way lower prices so it was excellent time to kind of come in pick those cameras up and and kind of start getting set up but the other thing I noticed is that Okay, so now we have the five D bodies now we’re going to need lenses to work on these so what I was looking for was the the USM what was it the the 24 to 70 f two eight lenses that were for like the professional full frame cameras and I was fortunate to find those again on the Facebook marketplace I think I found one in the Eugene area and I got a USM 124 to 70 which was a great price and then I also found a USM to 24 to 70 that had been used more I definitely could tell that it had been used more this even though it was a newer version lens that it definitely had I think some more where I and that’s that’s probably the lens that though still works great still has great optical clarity but it’s probably the one that seems the most tired when I’m using it sometimes so it’s interesting sometimes but but I’m sure I probably put a ton of work on it to just kind of racking it back and forth trying to get all these different photographs I was trying to shoot so i don’t know i lenses don’t last forever and they’re mechanical pieces but but these are really well built you know these these professional hourglass systems are really sturdy and well built and I was really impressed with how they were working so I had a great time using it and I didn’t really seem to run into any problems while I was trying to produce produce photographs with it but I found yeah I found one of them one of the lenses in the Eugene area and then I found another one up in Portland and so I drove up to pick that lens up and then add you know add to five D Mark threes and 224 to 70 f two eight lenses to throw on there to do a bunch of the family portrait stuff and a bunch of the you know kind of lifestyle images that I was trying to do so it was a great starting setup for me to kind of get and then move out from and so I had been working with that for a couple months and I’ve been trying to kind of expand from that since then. So the stuff that I’m looking for now well so I started looking into like some things for like real estate photography and one of the things that are always required for that stuff is is like a really wide angle lens. So when I was looking around with the company that I was working with they were looking for images between 17 millimeters full frame and 20 millimeters on a full-frame camera and so I went ahead and I purchased the 17 to 40-millimeter f four lenses it was quite inexpensive I mean you know, again coming from like the Nikon so what I thought like wow, that’s gonna be more than $1,000 to pick up a lens for it was a low price I think was about $520 to buy a new 17 to 40 millimeter
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the lens that was like that Yeah, the f4 that I was talking about. So I picked that one up to do some of the real estate photography and that amortize pretty quickly to get into it to use that for real estate jobs. It kind of paid for itself just in a couple of jobs alone without the cameras themselves and the 24 to 70 sort of paid for themselves by hammering out a bunch of family portrait sessions with them. So both of those things kind of worked out pretty well but in addition to that what I’m looking for is like the 50-millimeter f one four lenses I was looking at that too and I’m looking at those new because and this is what I’m saying is it’s just it seems like Canon lens prices are sort of dropping down a bit maybe there are newer lenses and I know there’s you know the there are way higher end lenses but the 50-millimeter f one for kind of lower end lens perhaps is I think 299 which is super cheap I guess that’s what I paid for 35-millimeter dx lens on my old camera system, you know on the Nikon stuff so so I was I think what was it like that? The 28-millimeter f two lenses I had for my Sony camera were like 450 bucks when I bought it used right? So it was awesome to find that 50-millimeter f one four for 299. And then in addition to that, for other portrait stuff, if I wanted to do it, I could pick up an eight 85 millimeter f one eight for 299 also, and I was like, wow, these are way more reasonable price ranges than what I thought so it really for not that much, you could probably put together a full range of prime lenses that I would want to use. And I could put together a full range of zoom lenses that I wanted to use that were all kind of higher-end glass, that that would be great for, you know, professional staff, or the lifestyle stuff or the, you know, whatever kind of photography stuff I wanted to expand into. And then on top of that, I was looking at the
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dough, I would love an F to eight, I was looking at the zoom lenses, and one thing I’ve kind of learned from this job that I was working with is when you’re working with compression, and like when you’re working like with zoom, and you’re using the compression of the lens pass, you know, 70 millimeters like into the 80 millimeters or 100 millimeters or out to 200 f two A is soft. And a lot of times especially if you’re taking pictures of a couple of people together and you’re not trying to just rack right into to focus in on an eye and even when you’re taking a picture a portrait of someone, you have to kind of crank it up to f4 f5 to get a depth of field that’s thick enough to get their, their nose, their eyes in their ear in focus in the way that you’d need to. And it seems like well, you know, like, love the super shallow depth of field, but it seems like you want to get the person in focus, so you got to get a few parts of them and focus. Remember taking self-portraits, you know, like I hold the camera out in front of me with the Canon 50 millimeter, one eight, and try and take a picture of Marina and me somewhere and I remember Marina would be just on the plane in front of me, you know because we’re trying to stand right next to each other. And maybe I would be in focus. But then Marina, just one or two inches in front of my nose would be completely out of focus, it would look just like a super blurry kind of washed area because the depth of field was so shallow. That’s where I was trying to, you know, kind of finally learning like, Oh, yeah, okay, so maybe f1 eight isn’t absolutely what you have to have for every photograph that you take or f1 for whatever it might be. So I was kind of finding that part out where Okay, well I’m gonna have to rack this out to like f5 or f8. Anyway, to get a sharp photograph of the thing that I’m trying to get an image of. So I have kind of rounded out that I’m going to be fine for a lot of the landscape photography that I’m interested in doing, I’m going to be fine kind of jumping into lenses that are around that f4 line. So I was looking at the USM 70 to 200 f4 lens that they have. And so I think it’s, I think that the two eight, the f2 eight lenses that’s 70 to 200 is like around 1500 bucks. But then the f4 is about 600 bucks, I think it’s like 599 to pick up a 70 to 200 USM lens. Now it doesn’t have the image stabilization on Nikon, they call it vibration reduction is that right? But it doesn’t have image stabilization. And I think it is probably lacking some other additional features because I know there are two versions after that, that escalate in price quite a bit. But if you’re looking for that older one, it’s still available on Amazon for 599, which is a great price. If you want to get a 70 to 200 I think that was cool. And there are a lot of things you could do with it. Again, like I was saying with the compression, if you’re going out to 225 millimeters and you’re shooting it at four, that’s going to give you a nice bokeh in the background. And you’re going to get the person in focus if you need to if you’re shooting a portrait and if you’re shooting some kind of landscape or wildlife scene, you’re going to be able to do a lot with that too. You’re just gonna have a lot of flexibility in what you’re able to do I love fast lenses, I’d like to always push for you to wait or have 1.2 or something like that. But I’m loving the fact that there’s an opportunity for me to get a whole range of focal lengths as I’m trying to transition over into new gear for a much much lower price than what I was expecting so I think that’s pretty cool I’ve been pretty happy with this transition over into canon equipment so far. And it’s been interesting you know the thing that I’m I’m
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thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo
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podcast. Hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com 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 this blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy new minnesota.com. Thanks for listening to this episode and the back end