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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 about the forest fires in Oregon, my parents called me they were living in Southern Oregon, and they were talking about the huge amounts of forest fires that came out, I think from a set of lightning strikes that occurred from a storm that passed through over the weekend, that’s a really dangerous thing about summer storms that pass through those hills and Oregon off the coast, is that they bring with them some charge. And that ends up in lightning. And then we end up with some strikes. And these remote regions have hills out in the Siskiyou mountain range. And those start fires. In those rural, I mean, just like remote wilderness areas of forest. And that’s where we’ve had a couple of burns over the last couple of decades that have been very seriously maybe some of the most serious forest fires in the nation of the United States have occurred in those locations outside of some of the places in California last year where we saw property damage, that sort of thing. But that is regions of acreage, I think some of the largest areas had been in the wilderness areas of Southern Oregon in the last couple of decades, I guess it is now but it’s been kind of tough. We went out on a drive recently. And we were in Central Oregon, which is probably a couple of fires out there, which is you know, there’s no shortage of timber and fire danger in some of those locations, especially because of you know, lightning strikes and that kind of activity like that. But last year was dense and difficult to get through the summer because of smoke and because of fires that were going on in the forest fire damage. But this year, too, it’s tough. So hopefully this is maybe a shorter-lived experience. And I hope that the firefighters can get a handle on it and get containment on here pretty soon. But it was something that was affecting our ability to get out you know, there was like visibility down to just a couple miles. It was nice that it was at least that but there was a lot of interference from the smoke. That was out even up in Central Oregon,
2:12
I was surprised. You can see more of my work in Billy Newman’s photo calm,
2:21
you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon, I think you can look at that Bitly numen 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. I ran into another guy out there. And he was like an agate picker. This is something I want to get into too. I was talking a little bit about agates, how they’re formed and how they show up and all that and I’d be interested to find out the geology of how some of these creeks have agates formed in him here along the west coast. I think it’s kind of cool to the land formation I would the geology is over here. And however, that goes back to the history of the agate formation of what went on over at the coast. But I think just north of Newport there’s a beach called agate beach, apparently a place where there’s going to be agates found, but this guy that I was talking to was saying what he was saying like if you kind of Prowl around town in this kind of these older, smaller, you know, coastal cities here in Oregon and probably in Washington or wherever they might be. But if you kind of Prowl around the town you’ll sort of see these almost kind of just it says rock shop or gem shop or something like that at some sort of little shack kind of place with the old sort of weathered sign on it that sort of looks goofy looks like an old-time prospector kind of just works there and kind of does it himself but I guess he did some of those people some of those guys there are some of the more invested rock towns in the area. And some of those guys if they’ve retired, I guess you know, the lead up some of their picking spots or their lead up some of their information on what they’ve done to collect some of these cool rocks and gems over the years. But some of those people in those local town spots, have some good kind of easy starter information for people that are getting into some of the rock counting stuff. But I was told recommended by a guy over Newport to try to find a man named rooster. So I could find out about the good rock hound in spots. Sounds fun, I haven’t taken it up on it yet, but the guy gave me an agate that he had collected and I guess he was telling me that the good time to go is in the wintertime after some of the bigger winter storms come in off the coast and then dredge up well I guess not dredge up but I guess they wash out the light I guess like we were talking about the wash out the sand, it’s kind of come into sandbars they wash out then it exposes some of the gravel beds, some of those rock beds that are a little bit lower down in the sediment, and that exposes some of the beds that have the agates in them and I guess those come out during low tied in the winter time, I guess after what January February, something like that. And that’s when this guy has found most of the agates that he’s spotted out there in areas like agate beach up to up to where I don’t know what’s up north of there is at the corner head or is that below it? I can’t remember now but it’s cool. Yeah, so it’s fun going out and doing some agate-hounding stuff.
5:32
You can check out more information at Billy Newman photo comm you can go to Billy Numan photo.com, forward 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 Lightroom stuff, I’m gonna try to like develop a lot of photos like with the travel stuff that we did the trip and like the trip that I did with my dad out to Christmas Valley, and some of the stuff around like the teepee rings that I was photographing. We’re trying to like edit a few of those. And I’ve been doing most of that in Lightroom. But I’ve been trying a couple of different other pieces of software and haven’t gotten super far with it. So we got to do more research, this will be an ongoing segment for our podcast, which will be fun, too, we should try out some betas I don’t know where we can get a hold-up. But there’s Lightroom. And see like, there’s some news about how like Lightroom is switched over to the Lightroom Creative Cloud, which is going to be sort of a cloud-based photo editing system, I think it’s going to be a little bit more lightweight, I think it’s going to be a monthly subscription system. And then there’s also going to be Lightroom classic, which is going to be the current Creative Cloud, a professional Lightroom system. And I think that’s going to be like your disk management system, like how to put files onto your computer hard drive and how to edit them, and then how to like process them out and put them somewhere. So that’s still going to be around and I guess going on, but it’s only going to be a subscription system from now on. I think that’s kind of pushed a lot of people including myself to consider what other editing options are going to be out there like file management systems for your photographs. And there are a few new other systems that are coming up that also seem a little bit more modern, in some ways, too. But I think it’d been kinda interesting. And it’s been cool, checking them out a little bit. One of them was Capture One. And you and I had looked at that one a little bit.
7:46
Yeah, you showed me that one a little bit. When you put on your computer.
7:49
It’s cool. I want to learn a little bit more about it. I know there’s a lot of content out there about it. There’s the phase, the phase one camera system, have you heard a little bit medium format, digital camera system, it’s really expensive, real nice, apparently, I only know like a little bit about it. But those raw files, they’re immense, medium format, digital, raw files. And so the processes, they kind of constructed their editing software, that was this Capture One software, and I think it was supposed to be a more modern system of rendering your raw file adjustments. And I think it’s supposed to be kind of tuned specifically to the raw files produced by this phase one camera, which is an interesting piece of software, you know, it’s technical. And I see like a lot of professional photographers kind of shifting over to it, but at least I see I see it popping up a little bit more in sort of a higher-end fashion system or like people that are using phase one systems or a lot of Sony systems because I think it’s so specific to the Camera RAW file that’s produced. It’s sort of strange, right? I think it’s built for the phase one camera. Right and like for a lot of other file types, yeah, for those file types and a lot of the Sony file types. So I think a lot of like the Sonyadditionalographers are getting the Capture One Pro software, and they make like a free Sony editing software that’s a little bit stripped down. It’s like the Sony Capture One express or something like that. Who knows what it is, but I pulled that on my computer, I’ve been messing with it and I pulled a demo for Capture One Pro. And it was cool kind of messing around with a different raw editor. It’s different than Photoshop different than Lightroom. But it’s, it’s still kind of like the same panel and slider idea. You have a panel you have like hue and color and sharpness and haze and whatever. And you can kind of make some adjustments to it. But it was interesting, to do something different with the raw processing. And I guess it’s supposed to be faster. So the idea is supposed to be a more modern system. It’s one of those things where Lightroom was built years ago like back in 2006 and 2007. I guess there wasn’t the ability to throw a lot of processing I went to the graphics processor. I don’t think it was as important back then they use your graphics processor for rendering and processing and crunching some of the graphics stuff, the editing. So I think a lot of that was built to like run and process the raw files through the, just the main processor. So I guess there are a lot of things about Lightroom that just aren’t made to run slow, given the modern computer architecture that people are using, and other people are developing. And so I think that’s where like there’s an advantage to maybe some future new Adobe software, but also for some of these current players that are trying to do some of this photo editing software stuff like the other one. Affinity Photo, which is one that I think you’d see
10:42
a little just a little bit. Yeah, I really, I’ve not put anything on my computer.
10:50
Yet, I haven’t put anything on. I know, it looks like a lot is going on there It looks like and I hear a lot of people talking about how impressive the iPad app is if you have an iPad Pro, I guess the affinity pro app on an iPad is really powerful for tablets, tablets. And you can do a lot of stuff like with the pencil, the Apple Pencil, or with your finger to do like healing adjustments, a lot of stuff like that, that you really couldn’t do with software outside of Photoshop before. So it’s cool that they made some progress on that. And I guess Affinity Photo is also producing digital file management software to go along with Affinity Photo, which I like the Lightroom part of
11:32
it. Yeah. Yeah, kind of like Lightroom.
11:36
I think it’s the Lightroom part and the part where you can apply adjustments to multiple files at the same time. Oh, sure. Stuff like that. I think it’s like a lot of those features that they’re trying to build out this year, because of the changes that Adobe has made to the Lightroom system. And how they’re changing over to like the Creative Cloud system and the, you know, kind of Lightroom Express system.
12:00
Yeah, not as much of a pro tool.
12:02
That’s what I’ve heard it sounds like yeah, so I think that’s why a lot of professionals are a little bit unhappy with that adjustment into their workflow, you know, they’re just looking for that, that professional system that they have to increase and get better in the ways they need. Yeah, I think I think Adobe is trying to hit a wider market of hobby photographers or Instagram, you know, kind of it’s more about adjustments. Yeah, yeah. One-click kind of adjustments. Yeah, sort of thing. Yeah.
12:29
It’ll be interesting to see how that ends up going.
12:33
Yeah, it will be interesting, you know, that that’s sort of the shift in modern computers in a lot of ways. And if you were working on an iPad, I bet it’ll swell a bit. It’ll be pretty cool, you know, to run a bunch of photos off on an iPad through that system. You know, probably they work. Okay. I don’t think it’s the direction that I’m gonna go. I don’t know, I just actually seem like it’s the right, the right zone.
12:57
That was what I was thinking. I’m hoping that the change encourages these other companies to Oh, yeah, develop theirs, their products were,
13:07
I was, yeah, I
13:08
was hoping they’ll be there’ll be something to kind of replace what Lightroom is right now. They like Lightroom.
13:15
Before Lightroom, there was an aperture that was built by aperture, and then they stop producing aperture. I don’t know what’s gonna happen with Lightroom. I’m sure that it’s going to stick around. And I’m sure it’s going to be like the top of market share for a long time for photographers editing software, it’ll likely kind of remain in my workflow for a long time, too. I was looking around at Capture One, it’s not the thing I want to use. Yeah. affinity there’s some future, you know, but I haven’t any, there’s not the thing that I’m looking to use in the way that I use Lightroom right now,
13:47
that was what I noticed when I was looking through other photo editing software. There really, there are a lot of things that look cool. And like they could be something useful. Yeah. But it’s just not realistic. It just doesn’t seem like it’s there yet. Kind of editing. I’m trying to go for it.
14:06
We’ll see what pops up in the next year. And I you know, I guess the cool thing is like the given version of Lightroom that I have right now is it’s totally fine for me.
14:15
Yeah, this old version of Lightroom. Anyway,
14:18
yeah, they come out, but I’m still always happy with the older ones for a long time. So I’m kinda interested. I’m only interested in buying software that I own. I’m not interested in leasing software, even as a working professional, even if I’m making money from using the software. Yeah, it’s got to be a really special kind of business software license that I’m working on. But it can’t I don’t want to rent software. It can’t be my color correction software for my photographs. I need to own that database. Yeah, it’s a really good thing. Yeah. And for as much as I’m working it, I think I need to I mean habits, no service.
14:56
Right? Yeah. It’s just something that is part of your daily
14:59
work. I get Paying for storage, paying for the website paying for hosting paying for processing, and something like that. But then I don’t want to pay for the thing in total, if it’s just raw processing and color correction, cropping, and exporting of a file like there are a lot of image editing systems out there. And everything I can do, I can do on an older system. But I’m interested if we go forward with some new software, I’m interested in trying like, like affinity, or you know, one of these other more modern just buy outright systems. It’s like, yeah, it’s like $100. It’s not like there’s Pixelmator Pro. That’s it a new program coming out. Yeah. And that’s supposed to be kind of a Photoshop-level replacement for stuff. I think that’s like, definitely when you’re like, working with layers working with, you know, textures. And so yeah, you can do a lot with it. Yeah.
15:45
I think that I had looked at that one briefly. And yeah, that one is more like Photoshop. Yeah. Or has more Photoshop capability? Yeah.
15:52
Yeah. I’ve heard people are really into that and are like really surprised with the level of quality that they can do and the speed that they’re able to process that stuff. As an as like were we talking about? It’s built to work on metal? Like, I think a couple of these things that we’ve been talking about are Apple apps. And I think metal is that system where it writes, it writes quickly to the graphics card. Right? Yeah. So what is that I can’t remember, I can’t remember the names of these, like these graphic layers, these graphic options used to work. But yeah, this is supposed to be a way faster system of processing some of that graphic stuff. And guys, this was to be a big benefit. But that’s the sort of thing I want to try out with you is that, and I want to try to kind of invest in that stuff, just because we would own it, we have a license, we get to use it for as much as we’d want to. But yeah, we should try and check it out a little bit. Also, I kind of think it’d be kind of fun to get some of the software, and just do like little videos about
16:46
it. Oh, that’d be fun. Yeah, I’m just like, trying it out checking it out. Like hey, like we’re, yeah, we capture one. Yeah.
16:55
We just kind of check out. Yeah, yeah. But I want to try some of these. I want to try, like, you know, tech checks out and, and see if some of these other tools are better, or more modern, or kind of make a different, more creative result. Yeah, a bit of that in Lightroom, where you seem to kind of fall in like a little bit of a rut of like, how Lightroom edits a photo? Oh, my
17:19
gosh, Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, you can get a little stuck in routines, or just like how you kind of have to adjust it?
17:26
Yeah, yeah, there’s a little bit of that. And I’d like to see if there’s some new thinking around that workflow that makes it a little bit or breaks up my creativity a little bit, make something a little different. So I think it’s worth it just in the sense of that kind of investment. But, but yeah, overall, I think I mean, you know, everything’s fine. So I’m one of those people that kind of says, Yeah, I usually use the old or use. I don’t know, Adobe Camera Raw, if you have to, it’s probably like most of the adjustments that you need to do anyway, I think I’m not big into retouching stuff. You know, but like, I think you need to like work a raw file. Yeah. process its color. Correct. It makes sense it. So yeah, I think there’s a lot you can do just with about anything, but it’s kind of interesting, just seeing like, some of these new software’s come out and how they’re being developed. There’s another one like one, it’s up in Portland. Yeah. Seems like a Lightroom competitor. So the idea behind it, I’ve not gotten into it, I think that like a beta comes out. And I was a little confused about how to use some of it. But, again, like that’s the main thing I’m saying is all these new photo editing software’s it’s like, I’m kind of confused how to use them. So grants are ingrained in using the stuff in Oh, yeah, just the layer? Yeah. Yeah. It’s been cool. He’s just been like, what I’ve gotten used to for a long time. So I know, we’re kind of making a transition. But it’s that bad.
18:46
Yeah, it’ll be interesting. Just check out some of these new things. Yeah. Alright,
18:51
check out more stuff with you. I don’t know. We’ll have to figure it out. We got to figure out some new editing stuff. But really, I think for a long time, I want to want to jump into a bunch of these raw files that we have from the last month or so. One of them is I want to try and compare presets. This is something we haven’t done much before. But I want to try and get into some presets for Lightroom stuff. Yeah, and I want to try and do a little investment into like affinity or into Pixelmator or you know, one of those other alternatives. I think with affinity at least there are a bunch of preset systems for the photo editing stuff there too. I want to try and compare them a little bit or run some of our other photos through it and see what kind of creative results we get. I like working with some of these preset packets over in Lightroom or some of the new stuff that you could do over in affinity just be kind of cool to try and experiment a little bit with that.
19:40
Yeah, I think that would be cool to get into the preset stuff a little bit. I see that as like a huge part of a lot of photographers’ workflow. Yeah, I’m curious about like, what, what that is like to use
19:51
um, yeah, I’m pretty interested too I see tons of people on the Instagram kind of promoting their preset systems.
19:57
Oh yeah. selling their preset time.
20:01
I don’t know if I’ll do that so much as watching a YouTube video about how one built such and such preset package.
20:10
What I’m interested in,
20:11
there’s lots of stuff out there, we can find that that could kind of be a creative start for us to find something to do. But it’s interesting to see the levels of editing that go into some of the color corrections that happen on these photographs. Oh, yeah, yeah, some levels of editing that I’m not familiar with. So I guess there’s a lot that I should learn about it. You know,
20:29
really, like, that’s a big part of why I’m interested in seeing other people’s preset packages. Yeah, I just want to understand like, four presets that are for photos that I think look better. Oh, yeah, like, Good, right. I’m just, I’m just interested in seeing like, what does that look like? I’m trying to figure out when someone else is putting a photo together. Like,
20:50
I’m trying to figure it out, too. Yeah. What is the system of stuff on the side that you’re looking at? What are the adjustments that are going on? Like, what hue and tint stuff is being pulled around? It seems like there’s a lot of stuff going on in there. Like there are a few kinds of granular changes in color correction stuff that I’m probably not getting into, in my photographs. And I bet there’s a lot of stuff that could be pretty cool.
21:12
Yeah, I think it’d be really interesting to get into
21:15
Yeah, I want to do some imagination, some photographs that have, yeah,
21:19
I’ve been going back through really like my portfolio, I guess, and trying to reevaluate what my best photos are, and also just re-edit a lot of stuff. Oh, that’s great. Yeah, but yeah, I’m trying to get into better finer editing.
21:36
See, yeah, I’d like to try and figure that out, too. Yeah, I’ve noticed that that’s like an element of the post-processing, post-processing stuff that I want to get into, more heavily is like the level of editing stuff that I’m able to do, or just the level of choices I’m able to make when I get into something like Lightroom, or affinity in the future. So it’d be cool that we should develop on that it’d be cool to try and push ourselves on that a little bit and see if we can learn some new tricks. Yeah, man, I like that I process probably 200,000 and 300,000 photos, and the last couple of years. I usually export stuff. And so with that, I don’t know what I did, or, you know, there’s not, it’s just, it’s just sort of automatic. Or, you know, like there’s a lot of things that like aren’t setting now. It’s a weird thing. Like, I’ve just kind of moved through Lightroom for a long time.
22:25
Yeah, I know, there’s a lot of stuff that you probably kind of just like, auto-work through. I know, that’s how it is for me. Yeah, a lot of pictures. And I think it’s fun as much time on.
22:35
It’s like, it’s when like when Tiger Woods was playing golf. And like halfway through, he needed to get a new coach for swing. I don’t know, golf. But yeah, you’re like any coach, because he was like hurting his shoulder. After all, his swing was wrong. So we need to like to correct his swing. But it’s one of those things where it’s like muscle memory, right? It’s like so ingrained in like the way you do something, I should hold something. So it takes a lot to kind of break that habit of yourself that muscle habit yourself and then kind of figure out a new way to do the thing that you do. So we got to kind of break ourselves a little bit, but I want to do a bunch. Like as we get more and more into wedding photographs, I want to try and figure out some interesting stylistic things that we can do in those photographs through our post-processing.
23:16
Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve been really because that’s what I’ve been doing for photo editing. Yeah, mostly the last couple of months as well like wedding photo stuff from work that we’ve been doing. Yeah. And yeah, I want to get into more of a stylized way of doing that. A little bit more of a particular kind of quality. Yeah, I like their photos are awesome. They’re so good. But I want to, I mean, that’s kind of what I like about going back to like the Sony cameras and stuff like, like, they don’t even have to be edited. They look beautiful, already. But I want to get into making them look a little bit more like a style. Yeah, not just that it’s a really beautiful photo, but that it’s like,
23:58
No, I want to work in a good way, I want to be selective about our lens use.
24:04
Oh my gosh, I
24:05
think there’s a lot that we know to do in that that we’re not able to execute right now for some of our projects. And that’s something I want to change, you know where we go, we get some stuff in there. But that’s that, that right piece. So I want to focus on that. And then I want to focus on our post-processing element on top of that, to get the right kind of texture in the file when we make it and the right kind of colors and you know, just that the right photo. And then I want to try and do a great job in Lightroom or our post-processing stuff to kind of pull that out and make it the most and make it look a little style is a little different, and a little better. Yeah, it’ll be cool. I think we’ve got a pretty distinct style with the things that we’ve been working on over the years. I want to try and push that visually into just the new directions.
24:55
Thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Hope you guys Check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com a few new things up there some stuff on the homepage some good links to other 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 at the back end.