Designing A Website Working With A 28mm Lens
Designing A Website Working With A 28mm Lens, watching the meteor shower.
Billy Newman Photo 8/10
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104
Hey, what’s going on? This
is Billy Newman. Thanks
a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Putting up an episode today talking about a couple of things that have been going on that are related to the photography that I’m putting together. And a couple of the other media stuff, or media news that I have to talk about. So first thing today last week, I was talking about how I just got the a seminar, it’s the the new camera that I’ve been trying to push for. new to me, right, like, like I’ve talked about a couple times, I kind of try and push for older bodies a lot of the time. And I’d like doing that I think it’s been fun, and it saves me a lot of money for for the needs that I have, at least at this time, the photos that I’m making, I like kind of thinking about the work that I need to do, or the the equipment that I need to do the work that I have, and that trying to be really romantic about how cool it would be to have the very, very, very best thing or the very most expensive thing or the very newest thing. So I’ve always had like a lot of ideas about that. But in most ways, it’s kind of ordinary, or sort of general, I’m really happy that I got the a seven I’ve been shooting with it a good bit this last week, trying to kind of figure it out. Like I talked about, though I don’t have any glass for I don’t have any lenses. And so when I say shoot with it, that’s kind of a weird thing. But like I was saying, there’s like another lens that I have, there’s a crop sensor lens that I have that came with like an A 6000. So in this interim week, while I have class on its way being shipped to me, I’m using this other kit lens that was on the a 6000 that I’ve been getting used to over the last month that that work prediction camera that I’ve been using some kind of all as in a bigger part of the transition from Nikon over to Sony for most of my photography workflow kind of an interesting.
It’s an interesting change that I wasn’t really expecting to make entirely, I had sort of foreseen a couple years ago, months ago that Nikon wasn’t really coming out with the same type of feature sets that I was most interested in, you know, the market was sort of most interested in the newer technology and feature sets that are going into the Sony cameras just seems to outperform. for some purposes, a lot of the things that that I was looking for, in, in photos, part of it being just the lightness and scent like ability, they’re really capable, and they’re really light. And they’re cheaper than some of the other professional options that were out there. So I thought it was interesting, you know, I was learning about it, too, as I was getting more into the manual that I was reading, instead of SLR cameras that we’d kind of come to know in the past, since that’s a single lens reflex camera. And it was sort of noted that that was the the mirror and prism system in that traditional kind of 35 millimeter camera engineering. This is a bit different than that, since it’s a mirror less camera. And since you’re looking through an electronic viewfinder, I guess that sensors is picking up or it’s recording some level of visual information all the time. And it doesn’t have that mirror prism system anymore, reflecting that back up into an eyepiece. And so now they’re called, instead of SLR cameras, they’re called IL see cameras, there are no interchangeable lens cameras, Scott have changed, I wasn’t really expecting to see him, you know, of course, you can’t really go with mirror less for the whole lifecycle of this technology. Because mirrorless kind of implies the status quo of everything being mirrored. And so I ran into this a couple times, anytime there’s like new or or there’s some, there’s some kind of modifier on what the previous generation was, that name convention doesn’t really seem to get to be the one that sticks around for the longest time. So when we talk about mirrorless cameras, that name is going to kind of fade out and this evolution of camera technology is probably going to be known by some other better more accurate name, like interchangeable Chen, interchangeable lens camera, instead of mirrorless. Because mirrorless it just talks about the old decades talks about DSLRs and talking about what it’s not, instead of what it is, it’s not Affirmative. And I remember that kind of similar to like my college education when I when I got my degree when I went for New Media Communications with the difficulty with that is that things don’t remain new for very long. They’re only novel for the first moment. And then they’re antiquated, or then they’re they’re generation behind whatever it is. So it was kind of a confusing nomenclature that was just sort of trying to identify the changes that were emergent that they were seeing collected at that time in the early 2000s is new media, web 2.0. And the internet and social media are all kind of emerging onto the scene at the same time. They’ll just call that new media, but now we’re a decade away from that. And so that’s going to just be the current state of media. Is that going to be new or some kind of divergent section of media for a long time, then it just kind of made me think about that a little bit. They had ended up going through and renaming the program, I think to like digital Communication Arts Because it’s an affirmative, no, it’s not. It’s not something derivative from some other past technology that’s no longer considered. So that’s kind of an interesting thing about that. But the a seminar, it’s been a great camera, it’s, it’s working out well,
it’s it’s definitely great for my needs, you know, I’m really happy with it, I’m really not that demanding on a camera, that’s kind of what I noticed in some capacities, is that there’s a lot of things that I’m able to get away with a little bit more simply, especially now, now that I’ve learned a little bit of how to put more of the weight of the photographs that I’m making on to myself and not my camera. But a lot of the creative exercise on myself. And the the options I’m selecting are getting out of the technical side of kind of pushing toward the artistic side, it’s been kind of interesting, but there’s, there’s there’s layers, and layers and layers and stuff. So over the first week, the 87 hours of thumbs up, I’ve been having a good time working with that, and having a great time being able to shoot video on the fly, some cameras don’t do that, you know. So that’s been really fun having something that I can get video clips of at any time. It’s interesting work with formats working with bigger file sizes, working with all that, working with like a new RAW file type that I always end up converting to dng anyway, but I don’t know if you guys have any information out there. I’ve heard before that, that the cameras RAW file holds more information than the Adobe converted dng. RAW file well, like for Canon like the CRT file to hold more or the Nef file hold more, or this Sony, a W two file or something will hold more. I don’t know if it’s true, though. But I’ve always kind of pushed for using the DNG as a raw file or some kind of lossless file that I can edit later. That seems to work pretty well. For me, I’m not really feeling like I’m missing out on too much. I think what I’d like to do more than that is just have the D and G’s and then have those backed up effectively over different places, especially for things that are considered important projects or important pieces of work. I have the great luxury that a lot of the photographs I make are fun photos, and kind of experiential photos that I love having and I’m really glad that I have but they’re they’re sort of a separate category in my mind in the sense of some of the more work related photographs or fine art stuff or kind of put effort into and then reissue a single thing a lot of times so that you have the best outcome of that photograph or that version of something. So I don’t know, you know, I kind of live in a little bit of both worlds for that kind of photo stuff.
But this camera is gonna go great for me, I went online and I ordered a 28 millimeter f two a or F two lens that should be here maybe tomorrow. That’s sort of the word that I hear man, I really hope that it is it’d be great. If, if we get something to show up here pretty soon. I think that yeah, I think it should be here to my God. Yeah, that the 28 millimeter, it’s going to be a great lens to set it to be full frame on this, the one that I’m looking for after that, I guess is the 85 I’m sort of going back and forth on which one I would go for first. A couple different reasons sort of gave me gave me the idea, but I was hoping that I can at least use the 28 to start off with some high ISO low light photography that I thought would be interesting. I think 28 just at the at the wide enough angle side that I could do some Astro photography that I think would be pretty interesting and also do a lot of landscape photography that that I’m into. And you know, a lot of personal experiential photos I can get with that prime lens too, without, without feeling like I’m losing too much. So I thought the versatility of it for a few of the things that I’m going to be putting my time into it for about the versatility was sort of what pushed it up over the edge, and the price to I got a good price on it. That’s what I’m looking for all the time. So try and recover a couple of those $100 bills that seem to evaporate when I when I did this gear exchange. That’s the tough thing about as you kind of list out all you itemize everything you kind of see the values established, but then hundreds of dollars at a time could just sort of evaporate poof where they go. It’s kind of interesting how that can be, especially with the way that modern life sort of seems to seep value away from you over time. Just just a matter of days. It seems like he can it can consume $100 just like that. But But yeah, it was great. pulling into new glass for the lens and trying to put away a little bit of extra bucks for an 85 millimeter or would it be an X like an 80 518 is what I was looking at. I’m looking at a couple prime lenses to start off with I know they’re not as versatile in a sense, but it’s really what I prefer to shoot with. I think it’s the best sharpest way to go about getting landscape photos or getting Fine Art photos and and I’m really looking forward to trying to use the the high frame rate the high resolution like a 36 megapixel sensor of size that I’ve not had before to try and get some really crisp, really clean photographs that I can blow up to larger sizes without feeling like there’s a lot of resolution loss. That’ll be the first time I kind of run into that. That barrier there where I have enough resolution that I can kind of get close exceeding the quality of my lenses. That’s what I’d heard at least before. But I don’t know how real that is anymore. Now that we’re this far into the future now that these are modern lenses and modern engineering, I think if it were the 70s, you know, anything like that, there would have been a lot of issues with the quality Are you running into the quality of those more inexpensive lenses during during the early SLR times. But I think now, if you’re shooting the right way, or you know, if you’re kind of going for it in the right direction, if you’re getting good quality prime lenses, and you’re working with it the correct way, you’re really going to get outstanding results with it. And and I’m sure that there’s kind of a market difference, but it’s sort of within that last five or 10%, sort of I remember talking about with a guy who did a lot of audio engineering Is that for real inexpensive prices, you can get 95% of the way there to professional quality to everything that you would want in that way of recording something. But to get that extra 5% to get you all the way up to what that professional standard is. It’s this exponential amount of expenditure into equipment and processing and gear and expertise of people to try and get those little bits of quality back out of the product you’re making. It’s interesting, I want to pursue that. But for right now, I’m so happy that I get to make at scale, a larger volume of material with older, more inexpensive equipment. So it’ll change over time. I’m sure as stuff in, in the Billy business evolves, like it has over the last couple years. But other big stuff is that I’ve been working on my website a bunch, I’ve been trying to rebuild some of the some of the foundational things that it’s made on. And I’ve been trying to clean up some stuff too, it’s essentially going to look the same. But most of all, what I’m trying to do is cut out all of the extraneous colors, all of the extra is sort of embellishments on the website, I’m really trying to strip it down to one of the most simple and more straightforward, faster loading
kinds of websites that I can make out of it. So that’s why I’m kind of getting rid of a lot of the the more complicated plugins, and I’m trying to drop back to just more simple auto responsive web tools that can show up the the few photos that I want and the few pieces of text that I want on clean white backgrounds with clean, formatted bordered pages and, and the like. So they’re working on that stuff, a bunch of just finished like an about page, trying to rewrite some of that stuff and get new photographs and make new graphics. That’s the other thing too is I’ve gone through and I’ve tried to make new, like graphic cover pieces for the main page of the site for like Twitter, for Facebook for YouTube. And probably Whoa, Instagram doesn’t take it. That’s right. Hmm. Did you stay? Well, yeah, but I’m trying to make new graphics for everywhere that can take graphics and new photos everywhere that can take those photos. So it’s been kind of good, I’ve like, like putting it together. It’s not bad, I think I’m gonna head over to a coffee house here in a little bit, I’m going to try and make Well, that’s what I’m working on today is I’m going to try and make eight graphics that are 400 by 275. I know this is the exciting part. But I’m gonna make eight graphics to go into this grid of buttons that I’m making for the website. And it’s silly how much effort it goes, or how many steps there are into making these, these eight cutout graphics, like each one is sort of a specific project in a computer in a program, rendering it out to a size and checking it rendering out to a size and checking it, it seems like it’s just like a bit of work to try and get any of these little things done. This sort of strange how that is we’re trying to scale things are seeing that something isn’t really as right as you thought it was originally. So all that is kind of a weird part of the website, stuff that you have to go through, it seems like a big waste of time and a lot of ways. You have to build things to a certain specification, and then you put it into the website, then it’s buggy, and it doesn’t work the right way. There’s just all sorts of headaches that sort of come into it. But it’s much, much, much better than it used to be years ago in the past, the results are much cleaner, you’re much closer to the final product of what you would have wanted to have originally it was just exciting that anything happened at all, when you typed in some kind of HTML code. Well, I made my page blue or something I made this text yellow, and it just be these hideous, garish, design changes of colors that are sort of try and make things more contrast or you know, to try and make it visually interesting because you could because you were learning how to be you didn’t know how to implement that stuff in a clean, comfortable way. So I’m trying to use a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned about kind of pulling out more minimal design features. And it’s sort of been a slow revision of the years. I think the first version of this website I put together was in 2015. There’s early versions of that, that were on other platforms that were still kind of the same design language in a way that go back to 2010 or 2009. Before that, I think it was just a blog on a WordPress page. So that’s like 10 years I’ve been going through and I think it go back all the way to the beginning of 2008. Maybe something like that, that I put that website together. So it’s interesting, man, that’s been a long time, like, almost 10 years of that stuff. So I don’t know, it’s good cutting it up and cleaning it up putting it together, putting more of the workflow focus stuff on them, I’m getting rid of some of the resume based work stuff or some of the web project stuff, I’m really try and funnel in on on the photography work that I do, and how I can do that for other people. And you know, and be paid to do it or, or network with other photographers or agencies or something that I can do that with. So that’s kind of what I’m trying to go for is a bit of a professional page that really focuses on the social media accounts are the YouTube page, Facebook page, Instagram page, where there’s gonna be a lot of content paying, that’s what the whole backbone of it is, is, how does the website feed out to places where I’m going to try and put a lot of content? And then how does that content, sort of without me doing any work, push all back to my website. Without me doing any work? That seems to be the hiccup that I have in this plan, it seems like everything that I need to get done is just me doing a lot of physical development on each page, which is okay. But it’s time consuming. And it doesn’t really go anywhere. I don’t know if even like, why even like two, three years ago, when I first put this page together. I can’t really say specifically or certainly that any person has really gone to that website to do something with it that I needed. I think it’s more of a novelty that like, oh, Billy has a website. Yeah, a lot of stuff on the internet. Hmm. You know, it’s seems to be more at stake. And I see a little, a little graph of how many people have visited it. And I think it’s like one two to five spam accounts, this need to visit it every day. But my distribution for a website, it’s super thin people don’t go to it. And it’s okay, but that’s why I’m gonna try and put more of my distribution efforts into YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. And
I don’t know if I can build some stuff up there. But thanks a lot for listening to Oh, wait. Before I leave, I wanted to talk about the meteor shower, the proceed meteor shower. I am not doing the night sky podcast as much anymore. So I wanted to talk about this part of it. I think I might have mentioned it. Or maybe there’s a podcast about it I can throw up from last year. I try and do that today too. But the person had meteor showers coming up, like tonight, tomorrow The next night. So be sure to get out and try and watch it. I know we’ve been having a tough time if you’re on the west coast. In Oregon, we’ve been hit by a ton of smoke in the valleys like a lot of like fire smoke. And so at night, it’s still a little bit murky and a little bit hazy and we’re going to be drawn back a little bit because there’s a pretty full moon. I think it’s like a third quarter moon or, or you know, a waning gibbous moon was maybe what we’re close to right now we’re coming into the eclipse though too. As soon as that moon hits a new moon that’s the day the eclipse happens. So as we see kind of progress toward New Moon each day. That’s that’s the cycle into the eclipse right there. But tonight, but like 10th 11th and 12th those are the good nights to check out the Perseids meteor shower look up to the constellation Perseus that would be in sort of your North East view after 11 o’clock. 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock, one o’clock mean guy then go from like midnight to 4am is sort of that big zone that, that you seem to get a lot of stuff visible. So check it out, check it out, see if you can spot some mediators shooting through. I think Marina and I are gonna head up toward the mountains and see if we can find some darker clear skies tonight to see if we can spot a couple meteor showers. Could be kind of fun. I remember doing it last year. Last couple years, we’ve all tried to go out and spot some meteor showers. I think my favorite one was maybe like 2012 2010. Back in 2010 years working on the river I had almost nothing real serious to do. It’s just a fun time hanging on the river. Taking photos are finished that we went to a concert, we drove out to this big park afterward. It’s about 1am to 4am watching out in this big field watching the proceed meteor showers out in the dark section of the valley. And it was awesome. We just saw a ton of stuff out in the sky. It’s really fun. You know, it’s it’s a little bit frustrating sometimes because it’s a lot of minutes. At times between a good show of meteors. Sometimes you kind of want it to pick up a little bit. But if you’re patient and you wait out there a long time, you can really spot a lot of stuff. That’s pretty cool. So my recommendation is to go out tonight, tomorrow or the next day and see if you can spot some meteors. It’d be pretty cool. So that’s what I wanted to mention. And I think that’s gonna wrap it up for this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Thanks a lot for listening, checking out the feed, you can go to iTunes and search for Billy Newman photo podcast and maybe you can find it Subscribe. Whatever. It’s all good. I think there’s links about it everywhere. So thanks a lot for listening. This has been Billy Newman for the Billy Newman photo podcast. Bye