Show notes for the Billy Newman Photo Podcast.
Communicate directly with Billy Newman at the link below.
Make a sustaining financial donation, Visit the Support Page here.
If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work or a podcast interview, please drop me an email.
Send Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to see my photography,
my current photo portfolio is here.
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you can download Working With Film here.
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Visit the Support Page here.
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About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
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Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Communicate directly with Billy Newman at the link below.
Make a sustaining financial donation, Visit the Support Page here.
If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work or a podcast interview, please drop me an email.
Send Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to see my photography,
my current photo portfolio is here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography:
you can download Working With Film here.
If you get value out of the content I produce, consider making a sustainable value-for-value financial contribution,
Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books on Amazon here.
View links at wnp.app
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/
About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.
0:23
Think yesterday I just recorded some of it, where I got into some more information about 360 videos and some of the interesting stuff that I’m going to be doing with the GoPro Fusion 360 it’s going to be interesting. I think that’s coming in today, I’m going to try and go out and build a quick portfolio of 360 video images and see if I can put something together over the next week to kind of try and show off some of the interesting things that 360 video could be used for. So that’s one thing that I’m going to be working on part of the other projects I’m working on is considering selling off so am I using Sony equipment? Should I go with K h or add a ram and one of those other use sellers? Should I go with something like eBay to sell it off? Should he go to craigslist to sell it off the Facebook marketplace? I haven’t used some of those. So
1:10
you can see more of my work at Billy Newman’s photo calm. You can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think if you look at Billy Newman under the author’s section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism on camping. You cool stuff over there. Last week, I made a trip out to Central Oregon, and it was still really nice. You know, we had a little bit of rain, I think out there last Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday, Sunday, we just it brightened up a ton. It was super crisp, super bright, and really cold though. I think my friend David just got out to Eastern Oregon, I think got towards Smith rock. And he said it was super cold out there too. But yeah, this trip, we did like an overnight trip out there. And I think today I just posted a photograph of something I thought was cool. It’s one of the archaeological remains that are out in Eastern Oregon. And there’s a whole interesting history about stuff in Eastern Oregon. But the photo that I posted to Instagram and Facebook and all the other places today is a photograph of this rock teepee ring. That’s still in very good condition. It’s out in Eastern Oregon in this area in between. I sort of knew where a dry lake bed where once just a lake would have been now what we see in our modern time is just a dry lake bed. But the cool thing is as we kind of look around you can see the remnants of an old Indian camp that was quite established in that area. I think it’s it’s just amazing to get to go see you’ll find other artifacts from Indian populations out in Eastern Oregon. Once you start looking around you’ll start noticing obsidian chips that are on the ground, or you’ll start noticing really in like some places you through a lot of Oregon through a lot of the less developed less forested areas of Eastern Oregon there’s a lot less erosion that’s taken place natural erosion has taken place over the last few 100 years like over here on the west side of the coast with all the deciduous plant matter that comes up. There are a lot of turnovers that seem to happen like a lot of the vegetation is going to end up hiding or overgrowing. Some of the older encampments or establishments that were made, I mean right now I’m in the canvas Valley. I’m in the Willamette Valley where the Tallapoosa Indians were I’m sure out here in front of me in this big field out toward the Willamette River. There are tons of Indian artifacts, and tons of old Indian cans, but none of that’s visible because of all the deciduous organic material that’s been developed over here. over the many hundreds of years since it’s been that there was an Indian population in the area. Now what’s interesting about Eastern Oregon is that because it’s way more remote, there are very few people out there there are very few people to disturb a lot of things and really, sagebrush doesn’t grow very fast. Things don’t move around very fast out there I was there I think maybe more than a decade ago and it was almost the same as it is now very little has changed out there you know, there’s no new house there’s no new development maybe a fence around the thing. That might be it. But it was cool so you get out to this area. You hike out to a spot then you can see all over the ground. It’s just a ton of black obsidian sharks, these unworked pieces of black obsidian that were carried in by people and then dropped there at some point, and all these pieces were used I think in the camp to chip out arrowheads and a chip out of the tools that they would use but it’s cool this tip ring is the only rule there’s a few TP rings like a few smattering of like piles of rocks this teepee ring was the one that was the most established still it was most upright and you wonder like how far back did these go like how far back to these. These stones that were laid into the ground go but they were usually sort of like a foundation for the tent or the height of the teepee that they would have established there and then work out of it, they worked out of it on a bluff, and then they would look out over the hill to the Lake area. And yeah, I don’t know, they just have a whole system out there. But it’s amazing when you start to, come in and sort of understand the layout of the land and where people would sort of go. And it’s a very interesting man, surreal, really to get out. And like be in a spot like that, or sit in a spot sit in the center of the teepee ring where, you know, there’s people, other men 1000s of years ago, that were doing work and trying to survive out in really what is now a very harsh environment. And back then was still probably quite harsh, at least hundreds of years ago. But man, if you start going back 1000s of years, even a few 100 years ago, I guess 500 years ago, a lot of those dry lake areas out in Eastern Oregon still had at least a marsh or at least a wetland or, or something like that. I mean like similar to summer Lake now you know, parts of the year strive parts of the year, it’s filled with water. So it might be quite a bit more like that now, but I think in the past, it was really
6:06
it was just accepted that there was going to be some amount of water in the lake bed all year round, instead of it being you know, a dry lake bed. And I think it’s supported by the watershed of a few creeks that are in the area. And in that area of Eastern Oregon, there’s really, I don’t think there’s that many, that many drainages is that go all the way out toward the coast. So I think there are a few parts that are like land black watersheds, where the water flows into an area and then and then kind of pools up and makes a large lake there. And, well, I know like there’s the Klamath lake and then that runs out to the Klamath River. So that ends up getting out to the, to the ocean, but I don’t know if like places like goose Lake or are just like these inland lake areas, I think they’re just fed by the body of water. And that doesn’t know if a lot of that would get back out into the water cycle to head back out to the ocean, and then you know, come back up or something. So it’s kind of interesting thinking about just some of the old watershed stuff that used to be out there, how populations used to try and try and work around all that, you know, like, you go to a place like a fort rock and you read some of the signs. And you look at how back in the Pleistocene area there, that whole region out there was part of, I think, what’s called a Peruvian lake. It’s like a prehistoric Pleistocene-era lake that took up a huge amount of land out in Central Oregon what we think of now is just a large desert area covered with sagebrush, which very few lands features just all underwater, the land feature of Fort rock that we’ve used visualize now, I think came about geologically during the Pleistocene era, an era before the Ice Age, and, and probably a while back before that, but during that time, it was underwater, it was under a lake bed. And so that’s where you get that formation is it was underwater, and then it kind of eroded around it this aquifer and lava or lock Aqua, for a Magneto I met at a certain time I made this big ring, this big guy. It’s a big fort rock-style formation. And that’s still what’s out there now. But it’s amazing when you get out there and you go see it. And then you kind of start racking with the perspective that this all was once underwater. This is like an inland sea. And then after the ice age or before the Ice Age, there’s some evidence of kind of, well, I don’t know. Who knows. But there’s evidence to show that the Clovis people, the Clovis tribes, which I think were the ones that at least in modern archaeology have been identified as the group that was first to come over the land bridge first to come into the Northwest and populate parts of the West Coast and into the south and onward and such. But I guess these Clovis people had had a specific type of way of building their tools or stone tools that they would use. And that’s a bit of a way that you can track some things. If you do find an archaeological artifact, you can kind of identify it by the technique used to build the stone tool. Like there, there are different measures, I think one of the oldest ones looked for is fluting. And that was a technique used by the Clovis people where they, they were sort of making an arrowhead or spear point spear points, I don’t know if they had had flying bows and arrows at that time that far back, but they build these spear points, and they would flute the end the bottom of it. So like if you were to imagine that it would be kind of this concaved slope that was those sort of dremeled out of the bottom base of the rock so that you could you could kind of fit that down in the center of a stick really and then and then wind that up. So you kind of make both ends kind of taper off to a point and then you would jam one end into the stick and then wrap it and then you know put SAP on it or, or whatever you can do to fasten it down. But I guess that was one of the techniques that was used early on, and that’s one of the things that they look for when they’re trying to find really old populations in Oregon. Sometimes it’s fluid. And that doesn’t always mean that it’s really old though, I suppose. But I guess there are handfuls of, of different technical or technological generations of stone tool building out there. And you can kind of tell a little bit, but it’s very fascinating stuff. And man, was it not amazing to get out there and to recognize that, you know, I was around a natural human manmade, while a semi-natural, but a man-made artifact of a home or of an establishment that’s as Oh, I don’t know how old it is. Maybe it’s as old as early Rome, or late Rome, who would know how old it is in comparison to Europe? I’m not sure maybe it goes back even further than that. It seems like there’s population in that area of Oregon for 1000s of years, I think was it the Piute those out there could be different, but I know the pie you
10:55
the pay, you were south of that area. If it were in Lake County, I think like through heart, mountain, Alvord, Nevada, the now your area, all of that was pie. So maybe this was still in the pie section. But I know that that, you know, like what we’ve noticed in the last few 100 years, if you were to look at the changes of the map, even within the United States over the last, say you take 600 years, not even 7000 years, take the last 600 years of the United States of America and then look at all the different maps that would be the territorial ranges of those people who ended up being in power during that time. It’s really interesting to see and to kind of take note of how something that seems permanent, or seems to have the nature of permanence in it when you speak about it like the that was the range of the pie you Indian? Well, was it for 600 years? Or for that long? Did it move around? Do they have one? I don’t know territorial engagements. Was it that many of them? Were they there all the time? I don’t know any of that information. So it’s got interesting when you sort of think about it, but it could have been any number of large groups of people that probably would have no idea they were called the pie you Indian. But all very interesting stuff. And man, was it so cool to get out there and see, see a real teepee ring. It’s really fun. It’s one of the cooler pieces of archaeological artifacts that I’ve run into. I mean, you know, you see Patrick glyphs, you see a lot of things, but, you know, you were sitting in the home of someone that lived 1000s of years ago, that lived out in the same place that I do now. Yeah, fascinating stuff, but had a blast going out there and getting to check it out.
12:29
It was really, I don’t know I just love I kind
12:33
of love this stuff with the story with the background to it, where you kind of get to attach something that you recognize with it with, with what you get to talk about what you get to show with it. So I thought was a cool story, and it was really fun to get out there and go see it. I remembered it from years ago. I think I’d seen it about 10 or 1112 years ago. And I think I tried to go back to it, but I didn’t see how to or where it was and I wasn’t sure it was not something on the map.
13:03
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 cents 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.
13:42
But the holidays were kind of an interesting time because I ended up sort of thinking a lot about what But well, what photographs are, you know, I’m getting a little bit older now. And I think there’s sort of like a change in the vision that I have of the way that I kind of think about photographs or you know, what, what is their purpose? Why are we making them in a big way, like
14:05
maybe propagated by the Instagram culture or the sharing content creation culture that sort of seems to be out right now, especially for those you know, photographers or artists, I think they feel the pressure to be content producers now, and that maybe is a little bit of a different job than the photographer or the real artists, that kind of person. And so I’ve been trying to sort of thinking about that a little bit and then sort of take a look at the trends of Instagram and are those my art is that what I need to pursue. And a lot of the time I sort of noticed this and even in my images, this like super sharp, super crisp, everything has to be perfect or edited or meaningful and dramatic and he’s images. And what I’m noticing a little bit especially as I review my older images is the photographs that I’m drawn to. They’re the photographs that represent the truth more. They’re the photographs that kind of have them I don’t know what it is really, but they have a little bit more of an essence of reality. Or maybe it’s its reality. But it’s also a little bit of grit to it to like this really happened. It was magical, it was interesting, I liked the surrealism in the photographs that I take, and I have for a long time, but there’s a little bit more. And I’ve always I think a lot of stuff I’ve done kind of pushed for the Unreal. And some of the stuff that I’m kind of noticing last couple years, as I looked at like the photographs and how they changed it sort of how that shifted from the Unreal of landscapes of the world, you know, kind of trying to select things about landscapes, you know when they have unusual colors to them, or unusual dynamics or phenomena like clouds, or weather or water or something like that, that makes it sort of feel like a different look or a different image than like what we’d see midday at noon if we looked at the same thing. So I think that’s still part of photography. But one thing I was thought, about since the holidays, and through reviewing a bunch of my old photographs was how much the stock value of a photograph goes up over time, over one year, it’s a bit over a few years, it’s a bit more, but over a decade, you get, you get to see the change that happens in time, you know, I get to see, like much younger relatives, and these photographs they took 15 years ago than they are now and it seems like kind of an obvious point, or seems like something everyone should know. But really, there’s a huge amount of value in the photographs because they capture something at the time that it was and you get to hold on to that after the there people or the moment or the event or the experience changes, at certain to notice as I’m getting older is that life does sort of change, it changes, then it’s an obvious kind of the point of fact that everybody’s sort of known about for a long time. But in my naive sense, I’ve been so focused on photography or image creation or the product, making something that’s kind of crisp and sharp and perfectly usable today. I don’t know if I was thinking so clearly about how the nostalgia factor or how the value of something you know, from a family or just sort of a small moment that’s captured this, this more real, how that escalates in value over time. And like coming at these photos. 15 years later, even like seven years later, from some of the stuff that I had, it’s really interesting to see, like, wow, like I took a ton of photos of this type of topic. But I didn’t, I didn’t take as many photographs that sort of represented my artistic experience of my life. For that humanity, I want to try and show more of that in the photographs, the humanity that kind of the way you feel about a photograph. And I think that’s so much about what a photographer is there to do is sort of being able to kind of pick and select which moments to capture and which ways you’re going to be able to share that stuff in the future. That’s going to become more nostalgic, more meaningful, or just a way of kind of knowing that this was part of my life. Wow, that’s cool. So I’ve been trying to think about some of those ideas around photography for the new year a little bit. But along with that, I’ve been going through the last like 15 years of photos, and in my big super catalog that collection of Lightroom photos I made that’s kind of trying to pull in every phone photo, every phone video, every different camera I’ve had since 2002, I’m trying to get all those photos together, put them in there, I think it was like 120,000 images, something like that, which isn’t that many photos for someone that’s been doing so for a long time. But I went through those and I tried to like punch those down to a lot of the Select so out of the images that I kind of want to keep from and I was trying to pull out a lot of good photos but photos that were kind of irrelevant to me for this sort of future moving forward catalog of stuff I want to get rid of like product photos or word photos that are hundreds and 1000s of photos even that kind of fill up space and memory in the catalog. I’ll keep those definitely but those will be backed up on another hard drive. But what’s active to me what’s in my library currently, I want to be like the last I think I’ve talked about this for like the last two years or so photos and whole in total so I can get back to that library and edit any one of those raw files that have but for stuff that’s older than two years like 2015 and before I kind of want to pair those down a little bit so that I’m a little bit more specific and unable to get to those photos that were selected a little bit faster and then, especially for older stuff like pre-2010 or so I want to around really have those pared down to like the 100 photos I you know I need to have around two to get to for whatever kind of stuff I need to do. But it was cool that going through the old photos and you just kind of do it in this pretty quick way You know, this is a one star This is a two-star kind of thing. So you kind of punch through those pretty fast and then and then I have another round to do or I’m going to try and punch it you know from one star to two stars those are going to be what I keep for a while and then from that, I’m going to try to render that down to select all the three-star photos all the that’s kind of like I would pick this photo and sort of put it under review and then and then my system at least is a little bit of the four-star five stars out That’s for this is going to be published or this is going into the portfolio or as content sort of thing. So yeah, I’m gonna try and push on that stuff a bit more and get some photographs sorted for the year, but is cool going through all these old trips that we’ve done. All those different places that we’ve gone to. And of course, I’ve seen Well, one thing I’ve noticed is good Lord, how bad at Photoshop I was. And I want to, I want to say that I’m going to put a little blame because I remember this happened at the time, but I want to put a little blame on how god awful my laptop monitor was like a 2006 2007 2008 laptop monitor just had no color gamut against what we know now in like modern o l, or LED Retina Display monitors like Apple puts out, or like any kind of modern LED, more color accurate monitor that we have now. But I was looking at it and there’s like, it’s just so muddy, there’s, there are so few colors that it can represent. So you have to push things a little further out of the gamut. Or at least I did at the time, kind of not understanding what I was compensating to. So I look back at some of these photos and go, Oh, I would never make it this yellow and green. In the modern world. So it’s kind of interesting what you know, whatever was going on, or whatever I was thinking about at the time visually, that sort of drew me to that place. But it’s interesting to see how that changes, how your aesthetic sort of changed. And also a little bit of how your tools and calibration systems changed and sort of seeing like, wow, off was that way back, then. So all stuff that you kind of learn and you get better at and it’s interesting, at least to the benefit, you get better over time. And like a decade later, I see changes in the kind of creative or the style that I would lay out just if I started working you know, out without actually having to try and implement a style, you know, try and lay with Oh, I’m going to make a photograph that’s black and white, and of events and personal or something, instead of trying to go out with, you know, a set intention of that which you should or could in any set of photos. But if I just go out and am shooting what I am drawn to the photographs that are capturing get in the way that I kind of perceive what they look like and how I want to show them to people, that’s all kind of changed and evolved. And it seems like my choices in that are better than they once were. But it was interesting to just kind of see like man, how many years and years and years, it takes me to take photographs, before any of these photographs got good or got to the point where they were more than snapshots are more than just kind of data collection. I sort of thought of myself as an archivist for a long time where we’re like the job wasn’t really to be a photographer where it was editing to select like a moment and character and sort of like nuance between things that have like emotional pull to them, I didn’t understand that type of composition stuff, I just sort of understood the camera mechanically functioning as a light capturing tool. And so that was like that was probably the first four years of photography was sort of thinking about it like that, like I’m capturing data of reality. And then that’s going to be processed into something else later. And it wasn’t really for years until I understood like emotional vision or you know, like having some way to kind of tie the way you feel to the way that you see something and that was interesting kind of learning about how some of those things work and it’s still such a long road and I still have you know, no, no real understanding no real experience in that by anybody that’s trained just self-taught. Little Billy out here and nowhere Willamette Valley So yeah, that’s some of the stuff about making selects.
23:37
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 a few new things up there some stuff on the homepage and 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’s new ninja photo calm. Thanks for listening to this episode and the backend.0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.