Night Sky Meteor Shower
Look up and watch the meteor shower tonight and tomorrow night.
Also lots of talk about developing new graphics for web projects…
Billy Newman Photo Podcast 8/11/2017
Night Sky Meteor Shower
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
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105
Hey, what’s going on? This is Billy Newman and you’re listening to the Billy Newman photo podcast. It’s August 11. Today remember the proceed meteor showers tonight and tomorrow night, I’m pretty sure cut out, look up toward the north, east after midnight and before dawn, and you’ll look up toward the constellation Perseus where there’s gonna be a bunch of meteors coming through or a bunch of, you know, shooting stars, it’s gonna be awesome. It’s a, it’s gonna be pretty cool. There’s a bit of a moon up tonight, though. So I guess you’re gonna see a bit of that, but it’s fine, you’ll still see some shooting stars with some moonlight. Right now I am sitting in my truck; I’m enjoying an afternoon of August, writing in my journal a bit. I’m trying to sketch out a few of the work projects that I’m trying to get done today. Man, I’ve been feeling like, like I sketch out a lot of stuff. I sorta, you know, a bit of the tasks that I’m trying to get done with my day. And I try and keep up with it. But it’s interesting. Like, there’s a level of indecision that I seem to go through. I was talking to a couple of people about this yesterday, too. But it seems like when you’re working on something for yourself, even though you’re tasked and you kind of understand the big scope of the work that you’re trying to get done, it just seems so big. And so sort of enigmatic, you’re not really sure if you’re in when you’re working on it, you’re actually getting anything done with it, you know, like, like, like this big website project I’ve been working on. It doesn’t really feel like so much that any given hour that I put into trying to focus on figuring it out and getting those new pieces put together, it doesn’t really seem like there’s a ton that gets done. There’s some sort of indecision do I work on this part of it? Do I work on this part of it? Do I have to start here or start here or start here, it just kind of seems a little scattered, or it’s kind of a frustration when you’re working. Or maybe it’s an attitude or mood that you get in when you’re kind of working for yourself. And you’re not really sure which thing to get to what’s the most important priority tasks to get to, and the website’s interesting. But the problem that I always have with the website, the thing I’m always frustrated about, when it comes to rebuilding that website is, you know, I built it in, I think I was talking yesterday in like 2008, the first time I built it again, when I was in college in 2009 2010. I did more in 2012. You know, I read it a bunch of graphics and stuff and 13. I did a ton of stuff in 2015 at the beginning of that year when I switched over to WordPress. And I’ve kind of redeveloped a few times since then, and a few kind of lightwaves. And, you know, there really isn’t an insane amount of work. It’s a it’s a good bit of writing, it’s a good bit of graphics and content. But you can kind of put those pieces together. All right. It’s just the frustrating side of it is that I’m not google.com, not Apple, or you know, I’m not some site that gets a lot of traffic, I’m not even some unpopular blog out there. It’s just, it’s just like a almost zero as it goes for traffic and, you know, search traffic or any kind of traction that I get for the stuff that I’m putting up on the website. And so in a big way, it’s like, oh, yeah, that’s a lot of energy. That’s a lot of time, a lot of hours to go and cut together a bunch of photos and the graphics and then build that into resized thing of links to put together on your website that’s responsive, that doesn’t have these glitches in it that links off to the right stuff. So it’s good to do, it’s cool, I’m happy I’m developing and then learning a bit about how that kind of world works. And I know that’s a big part of it. Like I know, kind of going forward, I need to know how to do this. I need to know how to really proficiently get through InDesign and do digital publishing and get like ebooks put together and get photo books put together. or some kind of publication piece that’s kind of designed, I need to have those skills around that kind of go along with photography going along with putting together, you know, artistic, visual brand stuff. So it’s no, it’s been weird kind of trying to figure it out. But there’s a level of indecision that just comes along with man, is this website? Or is this what I’m working on really effective, it’s a really going to, like pay a lot of dividends when I’m finished with it. And in a general way, I mean, I’m trying to kind of revamp some stuff to do a few different things as far. And so I think it’s gonna work out really well for me, really, most of it is just trying to strip down the website, trying to get rid of things, trying to get rid of extraneous elements from it, and trying to make it just do a couple things in sort of a clean and sort of clearly explained way. And I’m happy with what I’m doing. I think it’s cool. And I like doing revisions of work. So all of it’s okay, I like doing web development stuff. But man, is it tedious sometimes, like yesterday, I was just going through trying to build this new set of of sight graphics. And everything on the web asked to be kind of resized and refit to sort of work appropriately on the web or like to, I’m trying to build this auto responsive grid that that has a set of eight links for an A for two rows of four stacked on each other. And it’s eight links out to places on the website. And so I’m building all these custom graphics and then I’m trying to load those into this grid plugin so that it runs, animation and a hyperlink to And that out to another
page. And it’s just sort of a thing I’m trying to put together. But it’s so many things, it’s so many like individual process projects, I mean, even just the first layer of the graphic, that’s, that’s eight images I have to find and then render at the right size, and I have to load those into a web app. And then I have to add a design feature to it, and then I have to export that again, then I have to resize the image, then I have to load it to WordPress, and I have to put it in the plugin, then I have to resort it and then put all the attributes to it, then add the link to it and save it. And then I have to do that again. And again. And again, I have to do that eight times, you know, until it’s finished. So it’s just like a lot of stuff. And that’s just that one piece that’s like okay, then now part one of this is done is Oh man, that’s like, that’s duplication of, of up task eight times. And it just goes on. And on. Saturday, I finished part of that yesterday, at least I got like a working version of it done today, I’m going to try and focus on a gallery here, like some kind of photo portfolio. And it’s a lot of the photos that I’ve had for a long time. But I’m going to try and get those in a quick collection of like the 25 or 30 or so that I want to show in a portfolio sort of quickly on a page. I think that’ll work out pretty well for me, but I’m gonna try and rebuild that photographs page, I’m going to get rid of the portfolio page and the work portfolio stuff. And I’ll try and kind of refocus when thinking about for, for my work description, but I think the site is going to focus most on on photography, and then it’s going to push out a bunch, like I was saying to Instagram and YouTube and Facebook staff, which is a whole other story of things I need to do to produce for that. See, like I’m editing and I’m developing this website. But more than that, like I need to be editing and developing content and things to publish new things, new graphics, new media items to publish for, like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, that’s where I’m trying to put up as much as I can. But then more than that, even more than just like making a bunch of stuff there. I think where I’m falling behind is I need to be networking more on. I don’t know if you guys do that much. It seems like in a lot of ways, like the personal Facebook page. So you know, whatever that was, I focused a lot of my social media efforts on sort of my personal network of people around. And I think I really need to push, like I’ve been talking about forever, and like I’ve been doing for a long time, but I need to push and I need to talk to an internet or interact with network with the, the further reach of people like the the further periphery of people on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, even that are putting up a lot of content that’s interesting, or a lot of, you know, people in the media field that are trying to do the same sort of thing. So I want to try and participate with those people more and be more connected with whatever, whatever kind of like minded people I’d have camaraderie within the in the media industry. So I’m gonna try and connect to those people a little bit more, probably through Facebook, but not in Junction City, it turns out like right now, again, I’m looking out into, I don’t know, 15 or 20 acres of empty dirt in this field after it’s now been been plowed. And they, they cut the hay, they bailed it, they hauled it off, they wrote it tilled it, they’re going to amend the soil, then it’s going to hang here for a few months until the fall, they’re going to put sheep on it. And it’s going to run like a whole other circuit. You know, it’s weird, now they have a little system out here of how they’re going to how they cultivate this. Just acreage of land is just grass that grows on it, they grow the grass, they cut the grass, they harvest and sell it, then they put sheep on it, they raise it, and then they sell it. But the point of it is I’m sitting out here again, just kind of looking at this dirt again. So there’s really nobody cool. That’s in the media industry out there for me to interact with and talk with and, you know, get some kind of interesting advice from or insight from or a future path or, you know, whatever it is, there’s nothing like that. So I want to try and push a lot to network with, with other people out there. And, yeah, I go through, I try and do like a certain amount of whatever every day, or you’re trying to like talk to people try to see people’s new photos, I’m trying to like look at my visual style too. And I want to work harder on that I’m really happy that I got some of the equipment like I was talking about I got a wide-angle lens to do landscape and low life photography, I got that a seminar, that’s really gonna help kick in modern image-making for me, I’m really excited about that. But bigger than that, I’ve tried to rework a little bit of how I edit or how I look at photos. And then I just try to try to work out a couple of visual style things that I want to try and sort out a little better. I was looking at other editing tools to
like, I use Lightroom all the time. But then there’s this other one out there called affinity. I think that’s what it’s called. affinity is is this other Photoshop like photo editing app and I think it’s got a really powerful version that’s out for for the iPad or the iPad Pro right now. I think people are really interested and are surprised at how well some of the photo editing options work or how closely they mirror all the good stuff you can do with Photoshop in the morning. Complicated layering systems and tone control or curve adjustments that you can do in Photoshop. So I think it’s kind of cool, a lot of that is is probably extra on top of the photo editing level that I normally operate with, I want to take just the photograph as it is, and then I want to adjust it. But I don’t really want to do a lot of sharpening or a lot of additional layering and editing to bring out other elements in the photo, I’m kind of trying to keep it sort of as it was, and then and then engineer that to be as good as it can be. So I don’t know, a couple different takes on it does fat people work with with different image editing and raw processing equipment. But I think it’d be cool to try out; I was also looking at phase one, I think that’s kind of worth a trial to us, as noticed in that phase one has. And you know, there’s some I don’t understand completely, but I guess phase one, it builds the software or builds it to work with each specific camera, it’s not really a generic editor. So I’m not really sure what benefits it has. Or if it’s, if it’s some kind of better raw processing system, I’ve heard a few photographers interested in it, or that they like it or you know that they’ve processed their black and why it’s worth it or whatever. And I’m sure it’s really interesting, but it seems a probably just in the same sense that I’m talking about right now, just the idea of being novel, and not working with Lightroom as kind of what has become sort of a ubiquitous standard of photo editing. I think it’s kind of interesting to do that because it sort of gives you a different set of creative tools. And maybe with that, you’re going to run down a different creative hierarchy of the choices you’re going to make. So maybe you’ll do things a little differently, or it’ll change that for you know, kind of throw it a little bit of a wrench into your normal process. So you have to kind of work around some stuff and maybe find some new, some new avenues to make something interesting. I’ve noticed that before I want to try and work with, with new software, new equipment, new filters, just sort of the the opportunity to work with some a little bit different or a little new, it sort of excites whatever kind of creative stuff you’re working on. So I think that’s probably most of the stuff I’m going to talk about for this episode of the podcast. didn’t write down too many crazy things. But I think the rest of the day, I’m going to try and work on a little bit of video stuff. I’m going to shoot with this new lens; it finally came that 28 f two lenses here for the a seven I’m going to shoot a bunch of that. I want to try a bunch of low light stuff. I say in that a bunch of landscape stuff, man. Yeah, like I mentioned into a lot of video stuff. I think that’s gonna be cool. I’ve been really frustrated with AVC HD, though, it’s that that Sony HD format?
I don’t know, maybe
it’s fine. But as I work with it on a computer, it’s just a few too many extra things that have to do to render, I really wanted to just render out as an mp4, though, I know there’s some kind of some drawbacks to that. So I’m gonna look into that a little bit and see what, what real drawbacks I would have for me and the video that I shoot and sort of what I’m looking for quality, high end moviemaking stuff for convenience web video, what am I trying to do? What’s the long term, the long term goal here, in 2020 5am, I gonna be upset that I had a 10 ed 1920 camera, but I didn’t record in it. Maybe it would be, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be happy just having the videos in a format, I can still, I can still read and then render. But I’m sure I can do that with everything. So just some thoughts about some of the stuff I’m working on. I’m back to trying to cut together some graphics for this website and trying to figure out some hyperlinking problems on it. So I’m going to try and figure that stuff out the rest of the afternoon. I’m going to post a couple of photographs, print a couple photographs. Now I’ll try and figure out another one of these podcasts for some time soon. So thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. My name is Billy Newman. If you have any questions or comments, let me know you should throw them up on Instagram or
YouTube or wherever you end up seeing this. This podcast would be cool. But yeah, thanks for listening. Have a good one. Bye.