Winter Photo Projects
Billy Newman Photo Podcast | Winter Photo Projects
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
Website Billy Newman Photo http://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About http://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
Billy Newman Photo Podcast Feed http://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/billynewmanphotopodcast
If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or a podcast interview, please drop me an email. Drop Billy Newman an email here.
If you want to book a wedding photography package, or a family portrait session, please visit GoldenHourWedding.com or you can email the Golden Hour Wedding booking manager here.
If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.
If you want to purchase stock images by Billy Newman, my current Stock photo library is here.
If you want to learn more about the work Billy is doing as an Oregon outdoor travel guide, you can find resources on GoldenHourExperience.com.
If you want to listen to the Archeoastronomy research podcast created by Billy Newman, you can listen to the Night Sky Podcast here.
If you want to read a free PDF eBook written by Billy Newman about film photography: you can download Working With Film here. Yours free.
Want to hear from me more often?Subscribe to the Billy Newman Photo Podcast on Apple Podcasts here.
If you get value out of the photography content I produce, consider making a sustaining value for value financial contribution, Visit the Support Page here.
You can find my latest photo books all on Amazon here.
124
Hey, what’s going on? Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the billing and photo podcast and billing. I’m here with Marina Hanson. How you doing Marina? Hey, I’m doing well. Thanks, Billy. Thanks so much for doing some podcasts with me. It’s December 4 2017. It’s coming into winter pretty strong now. Feels pretty strong here.
Yeah, yeah. nice and cold today.
West Coast cold stuff the heaters been on all day? Yeah, it’s been really cold. It’s been like, pretty winter. Yeah. Or like the it’s like
it has it’s really misty in the morning. Yeah, everything’s icy. Yeah, I got into start my car this morning. And all of the dew on my windshield was crystallized.
crystallized do? Well, yeah, I’ve been kind of running into a few of those things, too. In fact, like when I’m working outside, like, if I’m not prepped for it by wind chill, terrible. It gets too cold. I don’t like it at all. But this time of year, I’ve always had like a hard time with it’s like, it’s this through December and through January. And really in february two is sort of like a terrible time. But I’m trying to like make myself not notice it for a couple months. Like, like I fool myself. And like I it’s like, January 14, already, I didn’t even notice it was it’s been terrible this whole time. thing where it’s tough. Like, I really want to try and get a break from it or something like somewhere around like the first or the first couple of weeks of January. I want to try and get out of the Northwest or out of the snow and the rain and the the gray of it. I want to get somewhere nicer, we got to get somewhere cool for just like a couple days. I like that plan. Even just California, I’m sure we have some photo projects that could require us going somewhere nicer. We got to do Marina, we got to get an expo or something, we got to go to Vegas. Yeah, go to some networking event, we got to try and find something cool like that some outdoor show. Yeah, funded that idea. We got to do something. But we I want to try and break out the gray kind of cold stuff that we got going on here. So things we got to find those but like a lot of indoor work that that’s like a thing about this time of year, that section for a lot of stuff like after Thanksgiving as like kind of you ran into Thanksgiving. And then really like through, it’s like the Christmas holiday, the Christmas break. And then everything like that through New Year’s, it’s sort of all like slows down at this part of the year. You know what I mean? A little bit. Yeah, especially for a lot of people that are like running their own businesses or something that that’s really already structured out so that everything’s kind of done for the year by this point in the year. And then a lot of people like in their careers are going to take off a lot more time around this part of the year. And I find that a lot too. Like as like photographers, like if you’re working professionally, it’s probably a really slow time of year. If you’re unless you’re doing something like holiday event related, you know, you’re going to be working on some set of weddings, right? Like that’s all going to be like summer season based, but it’s probably not going to be Thanksgiving weekend and right after that. Right during like the Christmas season stuff. Not as heavily, you know, yeah, so it’s kind of interesting, like this time of year instead. And there’s so many other professions that are sort of similar to that. But I think about that, even as like personal work goes like when you’re trying to think of like, exciting personal work to fill in, and maybe whatever slow down and professional time you’re having. It’s pretty tough this time of year to unless, unless you’re somewhere like on a ski trip or something and you can really take advantage of something that’s seasonal of it. But if you’re like maybe a lot of us that are on the west coast, it’s a really bad time of year just the light is bad. It’s it’s like really flat. It’s real flat. It’s real oak, we’re just oak trees that have dropped their leaves that are really sticky. And they’re just like, it’s just sticks. And moss maybe is like some of the most interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah, it’s not a lot to work with and like, and just very little vegetation that’s like, that’s how much growth to it, there’s just not there’s not a lot of there’s just not much going on. You know, it’s it’s a little bit to put out again, something that’s really nothing going on. So it’s really just like a lot of the worst things to work with like nothing interesting. Around a nothing kind of subject matter. And then nothing kind of scenery place, it’s really hard to like make something really come together that’s interesting out of that unless there’s something that kind of interesting about like interesting around it, like when it snows or something or when you get up to the mountains, and you’re up in the woods sort of thing for the winter. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that you can start to pull out there. But it’s not stuff that like seems to be right around here for like some of this personal project things like there’s nothing that I could pop out and just go on a walk and photograph today. Yeah, definitely. That sort of that sort of stuff is gone for this time of year. And so really like if you think about it, it’s probably a good opportunity to take that time as it is. Anyway, if there’s some advantageous thing you can do then I guess probably get into that and do it but given the weather Given the market of stuff as it goes, it’s really a good set of weeks to not focus on photography, so much like, you know, the personal projects of photography that you’re trying to produce, and you know, get out and shoot sort of stuff. It seems to be a great time of year, though, to get into like the back end stuff, the computer stuff, the hard drive stuff, some of the publishing stuff that you’ve not gotten to that sort of thing. And so that’s why I like you. And I’ve been going through our hard drives really heavily over the last couple of weeks. Like sorting them out a lot. Yeah, doing a ton of that. I mean, like a new archive for 2000. I guess it’s like everything from 2017 and back. And it’s like an A complete archive. And you’re doing this to on your hard drives, right?
Yeah, I am. I’ve got, I’ve got everything backed up on on a four terabyte now. And I’m still at that point, though, I think I haven’t gotten as far as you have, I still have a ton of duplicate files in my archive. Yeah, which is what I’m now trying to weed out,
I was finding a lot of duplicate files also, like, there’s, there’s some thing where I guess the file had existed in some other location. So there was just two copies of the DNG file, like a lot of the stuff from our trips that we did, like our photo road trips that we had, we take a lot of photos on, those existed in a few places, and then they would just sort of end up getting merged together. And then so those exist in their full resolution in a few different places. And that was kind of confusing to sort out. And that’s like, you know, stuff from like, seven years ago, or something like that. So it just got it got copied out of there and put into a more modern file architecture. But those originals, I think, because I was scared to delete something that seemed like the originals of all the trips that we did, those originals kind of got backed up to some other folder and then put down under, in some other sub file architecture, like, you know, a couple folders deep, but then there’s like a 80 gigabyte folder of photos there. Yeah, fold really well, well, this is huge. So it’s weird to find all of that. That’s duplicate. Now, the other problem that I have is everything that I had gone through and I processed. And then I export it as a JPEG with like a matching file name, or or, you know, some of the resize of that project. It’s interesting, because I have like, you know, the one landscape photo and then a JPEG version of it, and then a version of it with like a weird white border on it.
Yeah, and I’m on that’s like resized for online published somewhere.
Yeah, yeah. So there’s a bunch of in the pop up, and then really what’s ended up happening. And an unfortunate turn of events is that I can’t find the best version of the DNG, that’s back there, or the you know, the one that you would want to make the edits to, I can’t really find that in an accessible way where I can just jump in and make the edits to the file the way I want to pull that out, you know, as a full resolution, I just don’t have the originals as much as I want to I keep popping into or I keep bumping into these resize JPEGs. Or maybe if they were full size even but they were the ones with the edits that I’ve made years and years ago, I think it’s probably going to be really valuable for me to try and find those photos if I thought they were the best. Or if I thought they were like what I like to use, and I should really go in find those raw files again, and make sure that I have those set aside somewhere special. So anything that’s like super important, or you know, that was like, Oh, this was the best picture I took that year, that raw file, I’m going to make sure that I have a copy of with me almost, you know, like on my current working files, anything that I have, like from the last 10 years or 14 years, I want to make sure that there’s like super best ones, those raw files. Yeah. And I want to make sure that like I kind of cut out, oh, how about a hard drive or you will put them in cold storage, right. But I want to cut out everything that’s not that like all of these JPEG resize duplicates. I want to put those on a on a hard drive, and then almost kind of forget about this. Yeah, sure. And I want to try and go through and like clean that up. So it’s like just some of the best stuff that ends up kind of staying with me or you know, the stuff that I’d have ready to edit on any given day. For the last couple years I’ve been carrying around a hard drive, that’s a duplicate of the whole catalog of photos. And there’s like tons of stuff from like seventh grade or something 1001 that’s all like really unnecessary stuff given like the data that I need on me get during a normal work day. So everything so I was just trying to think about that well, more like okay, I need to move this set of things out to an archive that exists still for me, but is out and separate from me now. And then I need some of those best things, even from all time collected together with me on storage, and then put into a catalog in Lightroom. So I can pull those raw files, I can put them through luminar like we were talking about. So running through Lightroom and Photoshop and do all the major editing I need, make resizes and put that out. But that’s the stuff I need around way more often. I bet I could use it more to
definitely Yeah, I think it was really important to have the raw files for everything still. That was part of what you were just talking about as part of what I was going through to have me arrive seeing like this was this was the one that I re edited. That’s a smaller JPEG for Hootsuite to be personally like yeah, and then I was in its own folder. And then I had the originals in their own folder. And then there’s the other edit. That was not the one that was resized for Hootsuite, but was a different edit that was smaller than the original. And yeah, just a ton of a ton of the same things or, or even stuff from, from like my family’s cameras when I was Yeah, like a kid when I was like 15 or 14 when I was kind of first starting to do a lot of photo stuff. Yeah. And it those are duplicated, because those went through like iPhoto Sure, or something or whatever, whatever system my family’s computer had on it. Yeah. Or had going. And those are, those have really been like a huge thing to go through it. those are those are funny, though, because those file sizes are so much smaller, just because of the cameras. They don’t even they don’t even take up a huge amount of space, but they’re like, five of most of the photos, which I definitely
Yeah, I really noticed that. I mean, the raw files for my D to h for years were 4.2 megapixel images. Yeah, it was a it was like a five megabyte file is super small for the raw file. Now, like I hear that the 850 like one of those new cameras that came out the raw files from it are 100 megabytes apiece. It’s way bigger to store. Yeah, the first 10 years of my photo archive is smaller than each of the following years. Whoa,
whoa, yeah, that’s crazy. That’s a funny part of going through the archive and seeing the Yeah, the different the different sizes, that things end up being.
I totally feel that Yeah, I was really surprised like how I different, like the file sizes are but how much exponentially bigger, like the amount of data that’s captured is with with some of the stuff. So I definitely get that like going through old, like iPhoto stuff, old Lightroom catalog stuff that came out and sort of got imported weird from a few years ago. I have a few of those catalogs. It doesn’t it doesn’t get pulled in, right?
Sure. Or like, you make your own catalog. Yeah, I had a lot of that to where it was like, like before I was even using Lightroom. And then also after I was using Lightroom. But a lot of stuff where it was like I made a folder system. And then also after that Lightroom made a folder system.
Yeah, so I pulled some software A while back when I was running into this problem. It’s called Gemini. And this is Dee duper program. There’s other software out there, probably this software was out there from MAC. And I thought that it worked pretty well. For me it was it was an easy user interface, it was a couple bucks to download. I bet I bet there’s other ways of doing it. But this one worked out pretty well, it was worth it to spend a couple bucks to have something go through and scan a file, and then identify a lot of similar files. So even if it was a different file name that would like so there’s like a couple of different versions of you can have a duplicate that is the exact same file and file name existing in two different file directories, that aren’t known about since like two folders that contain file a. And it’s the exact same name and stuff. And so those are pretty easy to find those duplicates, yeah. And then you decide like which one you want to get rid of. But the other one that’s a little bit more insidious is where it’s a, it’s a different type of file. It’s a different file name. And so what asked to do, and I think it does a good job of this is making like a hash of the photo, where it renders down, what we see is the image into like a math hash, if that makes sense, like just numbers, but it’s able to kind of compare those against each other. So things that are pretty similar to it, it’s able to find pretty well, I guess, so it’s able to run through and so say you spray it off 40 photos that were raw of something that didn’t really end up coming out, you know, like when like if you held down your shutter or something like that, like I like there’s a handful like basketball games that I shot for it the barometer, and there’s like, there’s like a spray of like 25 raw photos of something, somebody’s like running up a thing. And it was it’s whatever it is, but it’s not really like what what I need, I don’t need that stuff. So like a lot of those that are duplicate those can go it finds all this for me, it finds all these similarly, stacked images. So you can go through and pick like which ones you want, and then ditch a bunch of the others. I guess I don’t really recommend that like I don’t really recommend cherry picking through a photo archive of stuff at the photo came out. I think like you should keep keep it in an archive somewhere. But but also though, to the point of D dupe, and you really got to go through it figure out which of these duplicate photos and then which ones can you get rid of, especially like pure duplicates where it’s a duplicate, re rendered version of that photograph, or like a different color editors, something like that. It’s like, Okay, this isn’t the stuff I need to keep its archive, but I don’t need to keep it and understand that part is like it’s worth it. It’s definitely making a big difference in my archive of stuff for Lightroom.
Yeah, that’s cool. That’s great. That’s what I need to run all my photos through.
Yeah, I know that you’re doing a bit of that. Like I took all my photos that are kind of mismatched. And one of my external hard drives, I try to put everything there too. I put everything in this in this folder on my external hard drive, and it’s kind of I’m organized. And then what I had Lightroom do is I had it select that folder where I had all my photos stored currently on an external drive. And then I had another external drive external drive B, let’s say, and that plugged in, and then I made a new catalog in Lightroom, that would pull everything out of that folder, and then re file, name it and give it a new file architecture for, like the month and date that the photo was taken. And I was able to store all of those images, again, into a new photo archive folder. And I think this is really gonna help me out. And having a photo archive that I can go back to and get to stuff pretty quickly. But not having to deal with some of that mismatched sort of layered art or layered cataloging that goes on when you have like a computer as so many photos for the last six months. And then that gets kind of like, rendered into the already existing archive, but there’s a couple misses that sort of thing. And then those really never get reconciled. So it’s like a few few different layers of photo archives that I have since 2015, when I made my last really big one, right. And so I tried to figure that out. It’s just always been really iffy, like, Where are those exports that I had from May of 2015? Do I have those around? Do I know how to get to those? It’s like, I didn’t really have like a great answer for that. So doing this, again, it really helps me solve that, like, Oh, where are those photos, the raw files, and the JPEGs, that I would export it, those are all going to be right here. I know how to get that because of the Lightroom directory that’s been built. So that part of it’s really cool. Having that like collection of stuff. And having everything kind of filed for me is like, super useful. Because there would be no way that we could do it manually by cataloging all this file, there’s not a chance of that and you so you’d have to batch process it in some way. And that’s where labor is really great for it, at least in this situation of taking, like those 100,000 photos, and then categorizing them. And then putting them into a folder that you can kind of you can kind of deal with from here on out, like from Yeah, I can pull those those good dng files out, and then make my new catalog for, you know, my new future best ability stuff. And then I can just put everything else on the back. hope it works.
Yeah. Lightroom is awesome for that or for its cataloging purposes or uses. Yeah, I really, I really appreciate it for that. The problem that can happen with that, or the thing that I know I’m gonna have to do after I set up my 2018 catalog is that sometimes the camera that I’m shooting on is not set correctly tied on date, or in the past, this isn’t the problem that’s happened for a while. But in the past, there have been times that I was shooting on a camera where I hadn’t set the time, or I didn’t even know what that was. Because I was still new to photography stuff. I totally understand. So I I noticed a lot of things from like, there were like, there were a bunch of photos I was going through the other day that were from like, April 2006 is what the catalog. So it was, but it’s actually something from like three years ago. Yeah, I believe that. There’s a lot of that. But that’s really easy to weed through after you’ve gone through that first part.
Yeah, there’s a few of those where it says it was taken, like in February of 2000. And you’re like, oh, like yeah, some some little clock out reset. And it was just like set to set to way back set to the turn of the century. You know? Yeah, it’s funny when you pop into those things, and you’re like, What, did I take photos? Then I didn’t take these photos. These are like, you’re too old. So how that happened? Yeah, it’s kind of it’s weird. Dealing with the catalog goes. It’s been good, though. I’ve been happy kind of spend some time trying to figure out some of the filing stuff, making it backups. And
yeah, it’s so worth it to be on top of your filing stuff. Yeah, it makes a huge difference. It’s a good time of year for it. And it is an excellent time of year for it. Yeah, great time of year to be inside doing studio laptop work.
I was trying to get pumped up. I was trying to get inspired of some stuff. I just could never really do it. There’s like,
we need to get to somewhere where there’s like more, more interesting weather in the least. Like that’s really like the big part of it. But I’d say it’s hard for especially for like the type of photography that we do, which is like outdoor photography, landscape photography, everything’s great and nothing is growing. Nothing has much of a texture to it even that’s really what I have a hard time with. It’s like the skies just really flat gray, like thick with clouds, but there’s no, there’s no texture in it. And then that really creates a pretty unflattering light through the day. That’s just not, it’s fine. But it’s not what you photograph.
It’s that’s absolutely true. It’s not what you photograph. And that’s it. That’s a hindrance in our careers. I really want to try and overcome whatever this thing is of like, there’s only 40 shootable weeks out of the year. You know, travel. Just Yeah, that’s the answer. We got to we got to get that mobility up on the road. You know, we got to figure out some way to be like Somewhere where it’s gonna be really cool. Or, you know, there’s still we’re still gonna have that texture in the weather and feed. Yeah. And a photograph that seemed novel to us or even just city areas that are interesting and cultured.
Yeah, I really, like, more cityscapes are cool for wintertime. I’m sure that Yeah, I remember like, it was this time in 2012. And we were still out on our road trip. Yeah, doing photos and stuff, because we were just out in more spots. It was winter then, too, but it was. It was in places where it looked interesting stuff. That’s really the which is really what the difference is.
We got to make it happen. We got to get to somewhere wintry and cool. Marina. Got it it. I think we can make some plans. Yeah, I really want to No, I don’t know. We’ll try and make some stuff up to like, up to like, well, lammott pass or, or hoodoo sometime soon. I want to try and get out there into the Cascades into the snow. We have the truck and stuff. So we should pop up there sometime soon.
Yeah, I’d love to do a snow shoot. stuff to get you out there that we haven’t really been meant to get to.
That’s what I was thinking about, too, is that there’s a handful of things out there, we probably really not gotten to so there’s probably some fun stuff we could get involved in for the winter time. If, if we start thinking about it a little bit. I want to try and make use of the coast too. It’s really not.
Oh, man. We’re
a long drive out to the coast. Yeah. So I want to try and do some stuff where we go go out to Florence and then a bit north to some of those rocky beaches that are out there. That’d be really cool. Yeah, try to work on some stuffs work on some some projects with some tripods and take some time making photos and stuff out there. I think that’d be really cool to try out. Yeah,
I think that’d be super cool. I’d love to get out to the coast a few times during this winter. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. That’s really another good location for for winter shooting.
I was thinking yeah, there’s, it’s, it’s similar. You know, there’s an opportunity out there what we can do, yeah, there’s some stuff. We’ll see what we can do at that, but it’s not super far. And I was thinking that thing to where we really got to set up some weekends where we kind of commit to it to go somewhere a little bit remote, get a motel. Yeah, set it up as a studio for the day. And then just try and produce like a bunch of stuff out of like a little hotel space through the winter.
I love that idea. I think that would be a really cool way to get to explore more remote areas a little bit more during the wintertime, because really, it’s hard, it can be really hard to commit to going and being somewhere for a weekend when you’re just camping, and it’s just raining and it’s just cold or it’s snowy. I love camping a whole lot. I don’t want to do a ton of it in the snow, it’s hard to snow, it’s hard and it’s not. And also more to my point is really like you can kind of let yourself do more kinds of things. If you have a little like warm home to go back to that’s basically you can stay out later you can be out in you can like let yourself get more cold even for like shoots and stuff because you have resources to resolve the problem that that would create that’s totally true. Yeah, that exposure like you can really kind of you can do a little bit more with and just the nature of having somewhere that’s a little bit more concrete you can continue doing stuff working on stuff going out to stuff Yeah, you can go you can come back
even minimally being being tapped into a town is kind of a cool idea. You know? Yeah, go work for the day. You know, shoot a bunch of stuff. Come back at it order dinner sort of Yeah, man make some videos.
It wasn’t freezing wintertime, but I loved when we were doing stuff. Like out in Alabama hills. Yeah, that kind of shape. And we were like, I guess we were like we were camped out there. Yeah, but it was cool being like, in a really incredible remote feeling like outdoors area, but then also just being attached to that cool little town. That was right there. I love you. Great. Yeah, pop in and get a milkshake. Hey. Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, yeah, I love I love the idea of doing some motels and cabins and some cool remote areas that we wouldn’t maybe be able to use as easily
Yeah, I want to try and do that especially like through the winter and through parts of the spring and stuff. I think that’s going to be a really smart even in the summer too. I think we should kind of have have a day where we have like a little post of someplace where we can do some processing and then and then that kind of frees up a little bit of stuff where we can get up super early get in the track get jammin out there and you know and get to whatever whatever kind of stuff we want to we want to do but I want to try and have it be like a little bit more professional and more structured. So instead of just like a like a dirt bag in a van. So everything you know
it’s Yeah, it’s a little it’s a little bit easier to be bright and on top of it. Yes, resources
Yeah, just with some goal or is well there’s that there’s a hindrance that comes with that and that’s that I want to stop doing like the camping and get up and then take the photos thing. But there’s like a little bit of a hindrance of just how much how much you have to mechanically invest into getting by when you’re doing Yeah. Or there’s just so much where it’s like, oh, like, I really have to like set up my house and I have to get up and I have to like, get myself moving and stuff to just even start with these photos in the morning. So it’s like a tough or it’s just like a different kind of thing. I’m trying to figure out how to make that materialize a little bit more strongly. If that if that if that makes any sense. Just make those mornings at 5am work better? You know what I mean? Yeah. And I hope that we can do that as something like what we’re talking about?
I think so. Yeah.
Yeah, be cool. And yeah, trying to do some more photos, stuff that’s a little bit more specific and high end like that would be pretty fun. But I’m kind of looking at that. And I’m trying to follow some of the patterns and stuff of the photography that I really want to try. And do. You know, like, I was telling you, I had a phone call the day about like a product photography job that was about, about some stuff that maybe it doesn’t relate to me as closely. Yeah, so it’s kinda interesting, where it was like, Oh, yeah, like, we are kind of specializing in a certain set of skills with this. And I really want to try and dig into that a little deeper, and make that work for us better. So if we are doing this kind of thing, I really want to try and produce in that line of stuff, I want to try and make new stuff that like looks cool in that way. Yeah. And, and really try and dig into it in the way that I see as being like, the most professional like, you know, most clearly like working on personal projects, developing new work making stuff that like looks the best that our art is, and and not really focused on trying to make these like ancillary portfolios for.
Yeah. Other work? Yes. not related to what we’re really trying to do.
Yeah, I’m really not trying to put together like a commercial photography. portfolio of shoes. I’m not trying to do that as much. Yeah. So yeah, like that, like apparel product stuff I’m really not trying to do. Or, you know, that’s like, not what I’ve had had any. It’s not your passion for photography. Yeah, if that comes up, I guess like I participate in it. If there’s something that sounds like it relates to me, but But yeah, I don’t think like going out of my way to dig into that is what I want to do, I want to go out of my way to dig into this thing, like what we’re talking about where we go out to a spot, or, you know, we kind of, we do some research, we invest in it a little bit for ourselves. And we really, like make some stuff out of like an assignment that we sort of develop, we write out our own, like, go to the Oregon coast and make new Fine Art images of the rocks and stuff on the coasts during doing whatever you things are something that can be really cool. There’s a lot of like, there’s a lot in there, I could get into. Yeah, there’s not a lot I could get into on some of the other side of stuff. So I don’t know. It’s interesting. Like, I’m probably a finicky artist in that way. But I think it’s probably good to specialize.
Yeah, definitely. I think it’s smart to be investing more of your efforts and developing, like, what you’re really specifically interested in
what we are into and best at is what is the most in photography? Does that make sense? People aren’t like set out to be
Oh, yeah, no, people want to be outdoor adventure photographers. Yeah, we’re in that, like, people want to be artists, artists that
are focused on super high level things that are interesting to, to lots of people at least, like, but it’s not going to be like a shoe catalog.
No, it’s different than
so. So like, at a certain point, like it really shifts over into, like communicating stories, and meaning and stuff and photographs. And I really try and like show that part of it. Yeah, or, you know, we should get more specialized in what is way more valuable and more interesting as artists and photography, instead of like the products of just like, well, I guess I can produce this kind of product photography and my garage studio. Right. I think that’s like a different kind of thing I met people that are really into that are like that is sort of their theirs zone for photography is a production medium. It’s not an art medium. Yeah, you kind of have you mean like different thinking and stuff in this. And I run into that before where photography is like, it’s like, it’s just like a product that you buy, like you go it like kind of like, it’s like a cattle cart system almost. But it’s a little different than that you meet like really genuine people in it that want to shoot the beads for the bead catalog. And that’s like a career in photography. Yeah, but but that is not I think, the art side of it. And that’s what I’m focused on. Hey, so we’re gonna try to get I guess, as much better that as we can. But one of the ways that I think to do that would be to kind of schedule out or figure out some stuff that sounds really interesting to us some personal project stuff, and try and invest in that a little bit ourselves. Yeah, definitely. I think that it’s important focus. Yeah, well, I it’s probably the only focus you know, if or like the the being a photographer part I’m like making the making new images. And I mean, I know like, it’s all the business stuff aside of that, and the sales and stuff, but I want to get into like, some other like stock stuff around that, like I want to try to put up those two spec images that we go out produce in natural areas, I want to try and put up all that stuff as work on like the stock sides. But I also want to try and see about investing in like a drone this year. I know we’ve talked about before, drone. And I was looking more into 360 cameras, I was looking more into like what we talked about yesterday of making 360 content, as it goes for photos that are 360 is not it’s not a big draw. And it is actually pretty difficult to develop, at least like the stuff that we have, like I think,
Dean, sorry to interrupt you, I was gonna ask if you needed a special camera gear for that.
Or special equipment it does, it looks expensive, but not impressive. It’s sort of a bad zone for it to volunteer. So I think for like the 360 photo stuff with the gear that I saw recommended was like these really wide angle lenses, where you have to, you have to have it on a tripod, and then have this like 10 millimeter, take for photos of all four sides. And then that’s stitched together into this spherical thing and then inverted so that it bla bla bla bla, it doesn’t seem like the way to do it to me, I guess. Or it seems like it would just be better than to buy the thing that does that so that you can record, video and photo and whatever. But like, you can just make all your stuff with that what I was interested in was trying to get the lenzing that you get with like compression and lenses to make to make a spherical image. Yeah, that made sense. That doesn’t seem to be like what, it’s not really how it is seeing is it’s not what I’m seeing at least. And I’m not that into it that I would really want to go about doing that. Yeah, there’s another thing to specialize in. Yeah, I want I want the 360 camera that I can put up on a selfie stick, you know, like get get the content sort of thing. I think that would be really cool. Or there’s a lot of opportunities to get like stock 360 video content for these, these VR environments, I guess that’s like a need right now is they’re trying to get these files where, you know, they can do some interesting stuff with it. So there’s probably some opportunity for some things that we could try to develop around that that I’m kind of interested in, I’d like to do some of those, you know, those, like the new media project sort of stuff. And this is sort of like the visual side of that, you know, some of the 360 an aerial stuff.
Yeah, cool. I
know, everybody’s got a drone right now. And they’re all produce a spec video, and put it up online. But I think we could do a good cinematic job, even with like probably pretty inexpensive equipment. I’ve just tested stuff out, getting cameras up in the air a little bit getting a perspective, that aerial perspective. And like kind of working with some of the the understanding of photography that we have to try and build some images and some videos of some of the outdoor places that we go to. Yeah,
I think it’d be really cool. And really like, I think that a lot of the places that we like to go to or that we know about are places that I’m sure there’s not aerial or photos of that’s what I was thinking is really dark places that there should be we have like access.
Yeah, we have, we really are people that have better access than other people do with a lot of this stuff, that would be the 360 content. So I think that like if we really invested in it, you know, if you like thought about making 100 stock videos for 360 VR content, yeah, we could move, you know, or like it would be something, you know, totally exists. And that’s probably a lot more than other stock videographers are making for that type of content right now. Yeah.
I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m really into the into the aerial stuff.
Yeah. I mean,
I know we talked about it, all the area would be I want to drones. So yeah. Bad idea. Yeah, there’s a time we could do that with that first stock stuff, but also really just for like, personal projects and documentary style stuff that I want to do. Yeah, I think that that’d be so cool to have. Yeah,
I was thinking about that too, with a lot of the the documentary video that we want to try and get into. I think there’s a lot of opportunities with a drone. And we got to figure out some other stuff for like, vlogging. I mean, I know we have a ton of gear already as it is for doing videos now. Especially like we have like the new camera and stuff you know, that shoots video. So there’s so many better opportunities than we would have had in the past. But I want to try and get into like some video production stuff a little bit more. We got to figure it out. I want to get the drone. I want to shoot like a bunch of video with that. I’m trying to figure out some way where we can like, we can still shoot a lot of photos. But we’ll still have some video rolling.
Oh, yeah, I know. You mean, we just need a few more cameras. We just need a few more few more. I can’t, I think yeah, I think Case Closed. I think that’s a good idea. A couple more cameras will solve all our problems,
do some video production. So but I want It’s actually more about that in like, 2018. I want to try and figure out some documentary video project so we can track it together. Absolutely. Yeah, really just stuff. Yeah, just working on photos and some of the stuff that it is to try and put that together. So, yeah, we’re trying to figure some stuff out on that we find. It’s cool that we got all the audio stuff coming out to all these podcasts, like this one that we’re working on, we just put together an Alexa skill. Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, we launched it like progress this weekend really is December 1. Whoo. It’s great. Yeah, it’s cool. We, we put up the night sky, it’s night sky 365. You can search for that on the Amazon Alexa skill store. And it’s a flash briefing that we’re going to put up every day, as much as we can. And it’s going to be like an update for that dates, Sky watching news for locations with some of the interesting features and celestial events that are going on in the sky above us. But it’s really cool night sky 365. And it’s the Alexa flash briefing system on Amazon for the Amazon Alexa system of the Amazon Echo, you get like an Amazon Echo for Christmas, you gotta check it out. But it’s cool. It’s just a couple of minutes. But it’s been fun working on.
Yeah, it’s awesome. Checking out the flash briefings and Alexa skills,
I’ve had a really good time checking that stuff out. And trying to figure it out a little bit trying to kind of crack some of the some of the audio publishing stuff around it. But it’s interesting figuring out and I’m trying to listen to a few of the other flash briefing shows that are going up there right now it seems like short format seems produced or you know, there’s like a little bit more of a throwback to radio with some of it, which has been kind of fun to play around with. And I don’t know, there’s a few dynamics to it that are a little bit different than podcasting. So it’s been kind of interesting, trying to try to figure that out a little bit. But I want to try and take the one that we did. And duplicate I want to try and figure out like other ways to make other interesting things for for this platform. Yeah, I bet that there are a bunch of different subjects to get into with that. Yeah, yeah, be really cool. There’s probably there’s so many things, I mean, it’s probably like anything that you’re interested in, you can you can get into some capacity. So we got to figure it out, I got to spend some time thinking about it, I got like write about it, I got my journal in front of me, I gotta like put down write about Alexa ideas like that. But I got like, I got to spend more time in my journal to that’s a good thing to do in December, and January, is get into your book a little bit more, you know, that kind of thing and sort of write out like some of your plans and your goals a little bit before like January 1 comes around. Yeah, kind of go through a little bit. And like figure out like, well, are these like some of the personal projects, I want to work on some of the photo things like I’m trying to figure out or, you know, like, whatever it is the business even just like closing out your books for your business. That’s what I was talking about earlier. Like, you’re kind of like, coming into Thanksgiving, you’re still gonna be busy through a lot of the stuff in December, no doubt, but really, a lot of that’s like more on the clerical side, or like trying to generate and develop like your business and books for the year like 2018. But a lot of people have kinda like close their books for business on 2017 for like, private practice stuff that they do, you know, it’s like already stuff that’s planned and booked for the next four weeks, right? And then it’s all stuff that’s going to be booked for the next year. So a lot of the work that they’re doing is all like clerical and the books like looking at, like, how did this go, like reviewing some stuff analytically? I think that’s kind of an interesting part of the process of the year. So I’m trying to do that a little bit this year, like, what did I do? What kind of creative work that I do? Or get into how much was like production and process work? And like, you know, like, what did we get out? That’s all that sort of stuff. How much did it cost? What kind of change overs? Did we make? How successful was it like, switching over gear from like, old gear to new gear, all that sort of stuff? I want to try and ride out and break down a little bit?
Yeah, it’s a great time to review projects and plans and kind of figure out what direction you’re going with with your next year of business. Yeah,
I’m gonna be 30 next year, I’ve already been trying to do that a bit of trying to I’m trying to reverse engineer, you know, like, from 30 back, what do I have to do to get to 30 the way that I want, and probably probably way too much shoot. But it’s been interesting in that in that aspect alone, just kind of thinking about like, okay, like, this is this and this and this, and this is how I gotta like do stuff of it. So it’s interesting to write about sort of see, write out for yourself, like what kind of change you need to make, like, okay to be doing this, it means I am doing this, which is not other stuff I’m doing right now. I should look at that. Okay. So it’s kind of interesting to do, but at least we do some podcasts. Read it. Thanks so much for your podcast with me today. Yeah, it’s awesome.
I love being in the audio stuff. I think it’s great.
Yeah, I’m really diggin being in the audio stuff. Amazon Alexa flash briefing stuff. I really want to dig in on these podcasts. I really want to dig it on. I think it’s really fun. And like the podcast, everything is only gonna get better and better for us. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, this whole this whole side of the content stuff. The audio stuff is I think, I think nothing to sleep on. Like, I think this is like their photo stuff as primary, you know, but like a lot of the content that we make, I think it’s really going to come together on the audio side. So I really appreciate you doing these parts. Cast with me.
Thanks so much for showing me how to do podcasting. It’s been great. It’s been pretty cool. We got to put a couple cool podcast studio Christmases. Oh, yeah, definitely. I’ve got a few studio pieces on my list.
We need fresh equipment.
We gotta get it so fresh. You guys make a way better. But thanks so much. So, on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Neiman. And thank you guys very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast.