Streamlight Flashlights and Cutting Christmas Trees In The Forest
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I keep my camera in a Lowepro camera bag
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When I am photographing landscape images I use a Manfrotto tripod
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A lot of my film portfolio was created with the Nikon N80 and Nikon F4
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Two lenses I am using all the time are the 50mm f1.8 and the 17-40mm f4
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Some astrophotography and documentary video work was created with the Sony A7r
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I am Billy Newman, a photographer and creative director that has served clients in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii for 10 years. I am an author, digital publisher, and Oregon travel guide. I have worked with businesses and individuals to create a portfolio of commercial photography. The images have been placed within billboard, print, and digital campaigns including Travel Oregon, Airbnb, Chevrolet, and Guaranty RV.
My photographs often incorporate outdoor landscape environments with strong elements of light, weather, and sky. Through my work, I have published several books of photographs that further explore my connection to natural places.
Link Streamlight Flashlights and Cutting Christmas Trees In The Forest
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166 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Streamlight Flashlights and Cutting Christmas Trees In The Forest
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Appreciate you tuning in to this episode; I wanted to talk today about picking up a Christmas tree. I think it’s coming into that kind of season and stuff. It’s kind of cool. A lot of Christmas tree farms and stuff around Oregon, you know, as people kind of normally find a lot of Christmas tree stands that are run by what seemed like sort of sketchy operations sometimes, but they got the trees, I need the trees, that’s sort of how it goes most of the time, right? If you’re looking for the noble for the Douglas fir, or whatever it is, you’re after noble furs that were the top you know, but if you are what I found, and what you might know too, and what makes a good bit of effort to see follow through with, but you can get a permit from the Forest Service and go out to national forest land and cut down your noble fairy tree and set it up as your Christmas tree for the year. Pretty cool. Pretty neat thing if you’re able for it and not for it’s a kind of fun family activity is that assume, and it’s cool if you had the time to put into it a bit of outdoor activity to go about and do, but I was looking at up in Oregon, you have to get a permit to do such a thing first. So like trees like this are sort of, I guess it’s a finite resource. So there are regulations on its use and its access, and I guess your access to it. So they issue these permits through the National Forest Service, and it’s for, for national forest areas, you have to select the forest region you’d be cutting from, and then they kind of manage this. So if there’s not if the forest area that you’re trying to go to doesn’t have that resource, then you don’t get to do it there. But over here in the Cascade Range along the west coast through Oregon, and then over into the coastal range of mountains, there are many opportunities for people to pick up what I think are pretty cool Christmas trees. Now it’s interesting, you know, like when you see trees that have grown wild, but they don’t grow the same as five trees do. So the density of the branches, as they come up there six, seven, or eight-foot height. Or I guess kind of what under 12; I think the perimeter rec says it must be a tree under 12 feet. And I don’t know like somewhere around like less than six inches around or something like that. There’s probably some more specifics of it; you’ll see that when you find it, I found a sort of contradicting information as I looked around for the piece, you know, there are different parameters, I guess you can get, I guess like you know, the White House, they’ll send someone over, or you know, like the state the Capitol building had a noble fare cut down from Lane County two years ago or last year, something like that. But you know, it’s kind of interesting. They come out here they got the noble first they’re going in the right elevation, no buffers, I guess growing high elevation areas, you have to go up pretty high in the mountain to get those, that more bluish-colored, kind of tighter bristled no tighter, tighter needle patterned trees that they have out there. But there are no buffers; I think they are pretty cool. And I like their kind of bluish tone. The bluish-green tinge that they have is the ashy blue. It kind of tinge that they have on the fruit tree. There’s its kind of fun. But yeah, a bunch of different fruit tree varieties that you can pick up there. And the premise is straightforward. I think it’s five bucks. You go online, go to Oregon.gov, or whatever you go over to. I think it’s at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. And then you can go on to that site. You can look at permits; you can look at Christmas trees. If you search it on Google, you’ll pull up the Christmas tree permit page right away. But it was five bucks for me to pick up a permit to try and cut down a Christmas tree up in the mountains. So that was kind of cool. I picked up a spot, and I think over like the, I guess what it would be? I think it’s the Willamette National Forest, as it’s listed there. Fortunately, there are several spots where you can find different varieties of trees in the Willamette national forest, but you have to be careful. After all, for a lot of those trees, you have to climb up near the snow line because it’s Christmas-time stuff unless it’s a year when you haven’t had much snowfall, or you know. After all, not much rain falls in the valley, and not much snow falls in the hills. So it depends on what time of year you get it, but if you’re going to get into the second or so a week of December, it’s pretty likely that here in Oregon, you’re going to have hit the freezing point you’re going to hit a couple of winter storms that have dropped. A good bit of snow and ice elevations above 3000 feet. So you kind of have to look at it a little. But if you do get out there and the roads plowed, and you do get to a location where you can see those trees, it’s kind of a tricky and sort of, it’s kind of interesting to bushwhacking back in there to get to a spot where you can find a tree, and then find the right kind of story and the right kind of location with the right kind of tree populations around it so that it’s okay for you to cut it. You can harvest that tree, yank it back to your truck, take it down, clean it up outside, and then dress it up, like your holiday Christmas tree inside your house. So kind of fun that you can do that sort of stuff out there. And it’s kind of a fun little alternative to the 50 plus bucks; you pay for some kind of Douglas fir noble for the version of a tree that you can get at one of the tree farms and stands that you get down in the valley floor through the wintertime. But sometimes, you can find a cool deal. But man, I don’t know if you can be a $5 permit going cut out your tree. So if you’re familiar with the backwoods, you are familiar with how to cut stuff down. Man, it’s a cool way to get out. And take care of it. I think you have to have a saw like a handsaw. You got to cut it down kind of near the base; then you got to do a bit of rewilding to sort of make it look like that stump is sort of disappeared. Some other stuff around it was that I think it had to be from an area where several other seedlings of about that age grouping were growing together. If there was a tree, you might find it out there where there are 15, 20, or 30 of them growing together in a tight Grove. And really, it’s too close for those trees to have their best survival rate of the grass the best growth opportunity they could have. So what they recommend is sort of a thinning process. So what you’re supposed to do is not cut down. You know, if you have trees, one through four, you’re not supposed to cut them all down in a row like that. You’re supposed to like a mix between them. So you are spreading it out a bit, fitting it out. So that the trees that are left there have a better opportunity to grow larger, grow bigger, get more sunlight, and have better access to the environment that they’re in there. So you can extend them out a little. And then it’s supposed to help the tree production into the years in the future. So fun and pretty cool. And if I find a good spot, man, it’d be, it’d be great. But it’s tricky. When you get out there at higher low elevations were those where there are no buffers to hang out. You got to be a little careful; it seems like many of those terrain areas are really steep and pretty tricky to get out into. If you’re able to find a nicely broad and sort of open area. And you’re able to kind of move through there. More simply as a lager would, I mean, yeah, you can get you can probably cover much ground, you can probably find much cool stuff out in the backwoods and stuff. But yeah, some of those areas out there, they get real claustrophobic real tight in, and it’s hard. Those in taller sort of grown forest areas, you don’t find a lot of brushy ceilings that are kind of thick, just inches above the ground, like you’d want a Christmas tree, you know, you don’t want the Christmas tree branches starting 10 feet up in the air, whatever it is, or to have gaps in between the branches of feet apart, you know, it’s a one-foot a two-foot gap in between the low branch and the next mid-branch up. And that’s sort of naturally how a lot of those trees end up starting to grow. But if you’re able to find the right types of specimens in the right age group, and they’re going to grow densely, and they’re going to grow kind of similar to the way that you see farmed Christmas trees, farm Christmas trees are pruned have, and that kind of help promote and direct and angles, the type of growth that they have. And it’s where you get that real kind of conical shape to it that’s consistent as a product over the years. But if you got and got your own wild Christmas tree, man, much fun. And you can get, so that’s quite a bit different from what you’d have from a store a lot larger to man, if you got a vaulted ceiling, no better value than heading out to the forest to get your own. I think you have a limit of 12 feet. I’ve seen 15 fees as a listing on other permit sites too. And then in addition to that, I think there are special permits, whereas instead of just kind of the wide-open and general Christmas tree permit for any given Christmas tree, you know, for the kind of your household one, I think you can get a special permit where you can go for like a 25-foot tree. That takes much effort, much utility to try and get that tree out of the woods and then into your house. So I think that’s kind of why it’s a limited option in some ways, but yeah, you can get tall stuff. I mean, yeah, like 14 feet, I think is that’s, you know, like two stories are 20 feet, right. So I don’t know, I don’t know how vaulted your ceilings, but, but yeah, it’d be up to the top. So it’s kind of cool that you can go out to the woods; you can find those pieces. If you identify correctly. You can harvest it out, carry it back to your house and set it up. I think it’s pretty fun. So maybe looking into that this year. I got a permit. It’s pretty fun. To grab a permit, I got a permit last year, and it’s enjoyable to go out looking for a tree and stuff. It’s kind of the fun part of the holidays and stuff here. So something that’s coming up pretty soon but kind of continue with some of the stuff that I’ve been talking about the last couple episodes talking about some everyday carry camping stuff that an outdoors, the stuff that I have around with me as I was going to talk a bit about flashlights too. I’ve been trying to pick up some kind of outdoor flashlights that I can have around with me had the headlight; I have a headlamp, I have a black diamond headlamp. I like that headlamp works pretty well for me; it’s a pretty rugged, kind of outdoorsy sort of Rei-ready tool that works pretty well. I think it’s around like 190 lumens or so for the spotlight piece, and then there’s a not as bright kind of wild angle LED light on there too. Also, as the switch over to the red LED, a lot of that stuff is nice; it works pretty well, hasn’t failed me yet runs on three triple A batteries. I think it’s a pretty cool piece. I think it’s been fine. I’ve also been looking around at other flashlight units and another kind of outdoor sort of work and utility flashlights that I can get ahold of for the longest time as a kid. I was really into the Maglite systems, you know, like the kind of like the cop lights you’d have the runs on the D cell size batteries, and I had like the to sell flashlight That was a good one to kind of put they have like a truck holster these little pins that you can put down kind of drill them straight down to the better your truck by your left-hand driver side is you dropped to the floor there before you get out your driver’s side door. And you could kind of pop in a two-cell mag light there as your truck; as I said, that was pretty cool. But I’d have them add the mag lights and stuff around a long time. I think that’s what you know what they have like the five sub mag light that for cell three cells, they have the two double A Maglites Yeah, you know, the mall across the lineup and stuff had those for years. Those ended up failing on me after a while, and now they’re not supposed to. But I think like the back end sort of rusted up. And then I had some trouble with corrosion with the batteries in there, and I couldn’t break it open with the PB blaster penetrating fluid that I was hoping to use on it. Anyway, that’s all to say that mag light has been put aside. For a couple of years, I think I haven’t used other stuff. LED is the way to go. Mag light hasn’t updated the technology so that you’re still using kind of a lame, like 50 or 80-lumen incandescent ball, but they pop in there, which I think is inferior, especially at this point. And their LED conversion options that they make, I think, are minimal and aren’t anywhere near the type of LED. It’s, you know, it’s just it’s, it’s like a reproduction of the same incandescent ball. But as like an LED as a real kind of harsh, I thought blue light to it. And it doesn’t have that kind of bright and crisp layout and focusing beam system that you get even with really cheaply made Chinese LED lights now. So I was trying to find some kind of brought in some cool sorts of outdoorsy or utility stuff toughness that the Maglite had with its branding, or you know, kind of with its flashlight engineering. And then something that kind of brought in some cool LED, focusing being light technology stuff that we have with the more modern flashlights that we’ve had over the last ten years or so right like blue LEDs came out in 2008, something like that. So that’s the first time we had red, green, and blue LEDs, which allowed us to make white LED ease. And that allowed us to make you know all these cool color-changing light-emitting diode patents that we have now. And that’s where we can get these diodes that are bright and just kick out a ton of light versus their power output. So we can run these incredibly bright 1000 lumen flashlights out of just like a handheld couple battery, you know like I know, a few will afford DSL battery or an eight, double a cell battery. You can load up these flashlights or load them up with your rechargeable batteries, which is a cool new feature. You can juice them up with a USB like your iPhone and then punch that light on. You can run a sustained, like 1000 lumen torches for hours off of that. It’s cool. Yeah, that kind of option now. So that’s the sort of stuff that I was looking into. I was looking into a couple of different durable, reliable, and useful outdoor utility flashlights. I think that the Marines or special forces use one specific light. That’s like $1,000 insanely priced then was finding this other one stream light. I don’t know if you heard these flashlights. I’ve heard of them a bit before I’ve seen them in some other stuff. And it seems like they’re kind of, I don’t know, sort of like an industry standard. So I think if you’re doing a lot of like first responder work, or like your work with your work in an ambulance, I think you have a Streamlight has a contract with many emergency response people, and so they have like these stream light flashlights Cool stuff it seems like nicely made. Utilities many metal flashlights, many polycarbonate flashlights on a safety flashlight, a lot of what? No lanterns, I don’t like these big new kind of like big carry lights that have like three, sort of like three LEDs laid out in this triangle shape on the front. And then a red flash on the side manages big old honking lights, but they’re expensive, man, if you get I think like their top, whatever they’re, they’re 22 it’s like iPhones or something. They’re serious about their 2020 model flashlight is like $170. You get like 1000 lumens handheld flashlights. It’s rechargeable. It’s got a bunch of buttons on it supposed to be drop-proof, shatterproof, tactical proof, or you know all sorts of stuff, that they’re kind of making claims on them, and its usefulness and reliability. And it’s pretty cool, man, these lights are just incredible on like some of the stuff that they can do, it seems you know, I mean, or at least like to whatever degree they’re trusted in emergency response or police use, I think like the police use these Streamlight lights a lot, many people in kind of professional settings seem to use them a lot. So I was looking around at him. Minimum, even just for penlights, those are starting at like 30 bucks, it seems like, and then as you’re getting into like some nicer mid-range stuff, you’re talking about 50 bucks light, or you’re talking up from there, into something even higher into like the $100 averaging $80 to $100 to $200 or $250 for some of these, these lantern lights that they have listed out there. So cool, cool lights, cool flashlights, man, if I was going to get a premium flashlight, I probably get one of these seems like they’re going to last a long time. It seems like they have good warranties with them. And they’ve got like a bunch of different stuff around it that this seems like man, what a cool like Marina, like, that’s going to be a reliable, constructed piece that you can carry around with you. But at that price point, I just can’t see that it matches what I need. And where I need to go very well, I can’t spend $75 on a flashlight; it just sort of doesn’t quite fit with what I’m trying to be up to right now. And for the way that I’ve kind of been talking, you know, it’s like flashlights sort of go bad, you know, use them for a while, but you don’t use them all the time. Or at least like in my circumstance, like, you know, it’s like I use it, I like to use it, I need to have a flashlight, I got them. I got them around where I need them. But I needed to be good. But I also needed to fit a certain price point where you get the best sort of trade-off between these two different things. And I think he can make a quality flashlight for less than $100. Right. So I was looking around, I found this other brand out of Portland called coast, and you see him they’re distributed everywhere. You can find them in many places you can. I think you can find them at Walmart. You can find them on Amazon. They’re all over on Amazon in stock. You can find them on their site, you can find them. I would say Home Depot; they’ve got a big selection just laid out at Home Depot. You can get many pieces of lanterns, magnetic work lights, utility lights, and then a bunch of ranges of flashlights, and they have steel, or how do I say like a mag light style series that’s a steel metal casing. And then they also have this other one that’s a polycarbonate casing. That’s sort of like almost like plastic, but it’s like a steel case with a polycarbonate coating is supposed to be good for some outdoor or, you know, some kind of, I guess, higher work stress threshold flashlights. So I think that’s kind of what I went with the coast, and I thought it was kind of cool that they were a Portland company. They’ve got a whole led line. They’ve got like a line of knives too, that are inexpensive and kind of cool to get ahold of. And if you can find them. I throw one of those in the toolbox. It seems kind of fun. But these lives, these lights, these flashlights are pretty easy to get ahold of. I picked up a poly steel 400; I think that’s a 400-lumen handheld poly steel Latta ticks for double-As. And that’s got like a real solid beam on, and the poly steel is cool. It’s that polycarbonate case, so it’s kind of like plastic, but it’s like that it’s polycarbonate, so it’s like the plastic, or you know, it’s like that kind of the plastic that’s on a Glock handle, or it’s on your know, like a knife handle or something like that. But real sturdy, you can kind of slam that thing under the ground, and it seems like it stays intact still works. I think that’s one of the things that this model prides itself on. You can go online to coast Portland, calm their website, and you can watch these tests, these stress tests, their flashlights, where for whatever use this is I don’t know if you’re going to This a bunch, I guess, get this flashlight but they, they have a guy up on like a ten-story building, and he checks this lit flashlight off the building down into an empty parking lot below. You watch the flashlight fall to the ground, drop, boom, bounce, kick over, slide off, and the light stays on. Why would a miracle so work? Its tough is what they’re telling me, which is pretty wild. If you try and do that with a lot of other led flashlights, you’re going to have that led, and you’re going to have the power to the LED interrupted from the battery source that’s going to get knocked out and probably cracked or messed up. And the LED circuitry itself is going to crack and shatter. And you’re not going to be able to use that chip anymore to emit light in the same way that you had been before. So that’s what’s cool about these are that they can take what seems like you know, like, what are you doing this for kind of thing, but they’re crushproof to think they’re waterproof IP x eight rated flashlights, they’ve got the CO to be the chip on board, light panel LED light panel, kind of on the side of one of the flashlights that I picked up, you know, it’s got the straight beam ahead. But then it’s got that kind of newer led lantern effect that some of these flashlights have now where it’s got instead of just like a single spotlight led lens through the front of the light, they’ve got this like strip of LEDs. Now on the side of it, you kick a kick, another switch that turns on. It’s sort of more of a broad and open lantern light that you’d have if you’re walking the dog or something like that, or you want to kind of fill ambient the light in a room with a flashlight, you can kick that light on in sort of softer illumination across the ground without any kind of spotlight and a sort of warmer white color to you also click that button one more time boom, it turns into red. So you got a safety light, you click it one more time, and you got flashing reds, which is pretty cool that you have a few of those different options, but yeah, I got that one. That’s an, I think, almost 1000; otherwise, it should get that right. I think it’s 800 lumens out the front spotlight and then another 500 lumen light out the side chip on board CLB, but that that sidelight so yeah, really bright lights I got that 400-lumen spotlight there’s also like I was talking about headlamps add that Black Diamond one I think that was like maybe like 150 lumens, it’s sort of averaged out to be there for the spotlight and the wide light that I had there for this coast stuff. They have a headlamp; it looks more like a miner’s headlamp. You know, like the cool thing about the LED stuff, the backpacker stuff that’s all sleek in design, it’s small, it’s a compact methodology that they’re laying it out and if you look back in time. You look at like the miner’s lights, add these minor headlamps is Oh, man, how silly would that have been, but I think it was just kind of a shiny piece of metal that cupped around a pretty regular incandescent bulb and that was supposed to sort of lens forward your light for you. So you can kind of grab it and focus it all the toward the front of you. And that was a pretty bad way of doing it at the time. But that was how they produce their headlamp spotlights at the time; they kind of improved that technology over the last 100 years, of course. And even during the, you know, the battery-operated days, you’d have like a big miner like the high-end headlamps or like just these big old beastly lights, and then it runs a wire down to your hip. We’re on your belt, you have a battery pack hooked up, and then you kind of switch it on from there, it juices up your light up your back on a cable and then boom, out the front of the light comes. I don’t know 500 lumens or 400 lumens or whatever it is you get your real sustained light there. Now with some advancements of the LED stuff, you still have those lights. And those are high-end, cool tactical lights. But even just looking at some of this more simple headlamp from the coast that they had, they had the kind of the big kind of miners headlamp style spotlight section thing there. And that put out 400 lumens of light, which was, you know, maybe do a double at least what my little headlamp was doing. So it’s cool that you can just kind of pop in and pick up some of these other tools and stuff. And they’re waterproof, crushproof IP x eight rated kind of outdoor utility tools. And so it’s cool that you can get a hold of those things. And it’s nice that they’re as inexpensive as they are; they’re a lot less than the stream light lights. But man, I like those stream lights also. So I’m going to try and keep an eye on them. And if it seems like it comes up with a good deal or a good value on trying to pick up one of those, that kind of Streamlight higher-end lights. I might go for it too, but really for the value for money and utility that it provides. It seems like these coasts; lights are we score. The last one I picked up was a penlight. So this is sort of the everyday carry light that I’ve got with me in my bag. We’re actually in the hammock. Can I put that kind of that smaller polysteel 400 coasts light that’s in the ammo can box been in the pocket every day I’ve got this, this little pocket penlight still kind of the same thing? I think it’s a 110 lumen light. It’s got two AAA batteries in it. And it’s about the size of a pan just a little bigger, kind of like a bit of a like a thick Sharpie is sort of about as big as it is. But that size in the packet. It’s got the same waterproof rating. Crushproof rating is like the other pieces that I talked about. But yeah, it’s just a smaller handheld penlight that I like quite a bit. I think it’s pretty cool to have kind of like a full-size land. I know my phone has its LED on it. That’s nowhere near as bright as what I’m able to get out of this penlight. So it’s cool having that peace around me, and even already in the last couple of days of nurse pulled this thing out a lot more than I thought I would to try and try and use it as a utility, especially in spots where the phone light would come in is no good. So kind of fun stuff going around. Work in the flashlights, trying to check out some different brands and stuff. Maybe I’ll still try out a mag light in the future. Those are kind of fun for nostalgia’s sake, but I think some of these coastlines might be the direction I go, and it’s fun. That was the other thing I was talking about. Probably all that I need to talk about. The only other thing I’ve been up to, and this is probably fascinating for you guys. This is the Easter egg I have re-waterproofed my GoreTex shell. So I’ve got, and I’ve got a GoreTex shell. It’s worked great. Probably one of my best pieces of gear. Marmot made this one. It’s a Marmot orange pack light GoreTex shell. I like this one. It’s been with me for like five years now; probably before that, I had another GoreTex shell that I got in blue; I picked it up from goodwill man What an amazing find. That’s probably one of the best goodwill pickups I’ve picked. I’ve found it before Marina found it for me, it was fantastic. Happy that I got that one. I use that one for years. It was too small for me though it wasn’t quite the right size. So, yeah, I swapped that up with a new one that I got. And I’ve been using that for years. The waterproofing the hydrophobic waterproofing material that was on the coating of the jacket has kind of worn off now. So when I was out in the rain a couple of weeks ago, I was noticing that it was penetrating not through the GoreTex like through the shell to my skin, but it was penetrating the top nylon layer that was there, so the nylon layer is getting wet and then the thing that impedes the use of the breathability of the GoreTex you stay dry. And I was fine in that way, but it adds much weight to the jacket, and it isn’t operating at its full performance, I guess in that way. So I was looking online. I was trying to find out what Marmot recommends for the care of your garments and stuff. So it provides like a bunch of different information there about how to deal with your down like do you need to waterproof your down or do you need to wash your down jacket, your insulated puffy jacket, do you need to wash out your puffy jacket or like a synthetic fleece jacket or whatever it might be or in this case like a nylon jacket like a softshell or GoreTex shell-like what I’m working with, so there’s like different kinds of types of detergent that they can offer to deal with that I don’t get into much of that stuff. I know there are many products out there that do plenty of things that I don’t think these kinds of high-end materials are as delicate as they say down I kind of put in different category wool I put it in a different category. But this sort of synthetic softshell materials or nylon shell materials, they’re pretty durable in many ways, so with much time like what I did with the shell this last time is I took the shell I put it in a five-gallon bucket filled it with water like hot water, and then I put just a bit of like just like a bead of dawn soap in there and diluted that in the water. What I was trying to do was kind of soak that that pack light jacket or that gore-tex Marmot jacket for 24 hours is what I was going for. And then I kind of give it a good shake every once in a while and sort of seeing like how soaked I could get that how penetrated I could get that and if I could get that detergent, or you know to get the soap in there with the water and the heat of it enough to kind of break up some of that dark sort of city materials that have kind of landed into the sleeves and landed under the hammer the jacket there, so it’s just gotten dirty through use of me kind of rubbing up on stuff with my stomach, or like up by my hips where my belt is And then and then up down by my sleeves like where I put my arms down on a table, or where I’d be like working on tools or working with something out in the dirt or in the woods or whatever it is. So there are little bits I’m trying to kind of wash-up out of it. So I soak that jacket for like 24 hours and a little soap. Started with hot water, of course, like cooled off after that, but, but then I yanked that jacket up out of their kind of wrung it out a bit, rinse it off pretty thoroughly, and then I did sort of a ring out, it’s kind of like squished out whatever water I could remember it’s a gore-tex jacket. So why there are they going to get trapped in there? If you had your zippers open, and you had pockets, pockets will fill with water, and then it’s not going to soak through it, you know the way you think it would or something, so don’t crush it out of there. I noticed my pockets filled with water with my puffy jacket if you, little puffy Nano Puff pocket cells, you know the little boxes of cells and inside that is down or puffballs, if you get that wet, and you wring that out, it’s going to put pressure on the cells and then sometimes pop burst that cell and then whatever kind of puffy material is going to it’s going to go out whatever weekend is there, especially if like me, you’ve put years of wear on your jacket, and some of those parts are getting thinner and thinner over time. So as I tried to do sort of a soothing soak of it, that worked well, then I gave too much of a crush on it to try and squeeze and wring out that water. Like as if I were working with some other kind of fabric that I was more accustomed to. I squeezed, put pressure on that. So I’m pop that like, well like a piece of bubble wrap, that sort of thing. So that was frustrating. And then you got to kind of like re-stitch that together, put the phone back in there, but the down back in there, whatever it is, and then seal it back up again so that it doesn’t rupture again. And then once it’s wrapped shared that stitching around it, you put like little, it’s this, the nylon in the way that the fabric is laid stab is sort of rips out into like a little square or like tag shape, and you get a right angle on that tear as it’s ripping up the x and y-axis so that threading and if it runs then it’ll run-up, and you’ll get like kind of a big tag out of it. But if you kind of stitch that L shaped back together, it’s good, and that’s great, but the weak part is just on the inside of that stitched owl. So wherever your stitching is, then it rips away, right behind that stitching, and then you stitch that, and then it rips away right behind that stitching. So it’s kind of tricky to get the strength of material to kind of stay there again once it’s kind of gone. But you can do patches. You can do little nylon patches or little fabric patches and stuff. And I think most of the companies that make these outdoor jackets and stuff so little patch kits to kind of add-in, so you can keep your jacket going after you, ‘ve turned it up a bit on the outside, or you can like re-stuff it. Patagonia has many services northface has a bunch of services to renew your jacket and keep it in use, keep it on keeping it live continued or use it to pass down or something like that. They got a big thing about it. Whatever. For this trying to waterproof, that GoreTex jacket. If there’s water in the pockets, and they’re open, I tried to drain those out of there like holding like two or three cups of water inside. So I dumped all those out. I hung up the jacket, and I set it up outside on a hanger how to air dry for a while cold day, man, the breeze helped a little, but it’s cool that gore-tex is what it is because it does dry out quickly even in the cold. You know, even like it was as out and a bit of a breeze. And it was able to dry out the nylon dry out the gore-tex, and then a couple of hours later, I went over with this. This Nick wash is what it was called. Kind of like a tech wash sort of solution. But this one was kind of specific for gore-tex shells. And so what you do is after I think it dried out, or even if it doesn’t dry out, what you’re supposed to do is put a spray on the outside of this jacket all the way around. And so you kind of get it that it sort of soaks up all over. And it’s interesting material. It’s not water, whatever chemical I mean, of course, it’s like a hydrophobic material that sort of waterproofs your jacket. But as you spray it onto it, it sort of looks like it’s getting your jacket wet. You know, it almost looks like oil or, you know, like if you’re kind of like spraying some vegetable on your jacket, but just kind of the way it kind of dampens it and sort of makes it looks greasy almost at first. Then because it’s a high hydrophobic chemical, it’s trying to like push water away. It does this kind of weird thing where you spray it on, and then it sort of starts to absorb it into the jacket, but then it sort of pushes it back. It’s hydrophobic, and it beads up the water on the outside of the jacket all of a sudden as it works; you know you see it working is its the beat up the fluid that you just sprayed onto a kind of on the outside of the jacket. Then it starts to run off the area that it’s now treated and hydrophobic from, so I think you’re supposed to grab that with a washcloth and kind of rub that down the rest of it, but as you kind of spray, spray, spray a little spritz across the jacket front and back over the hood, and up and down the seams of the zippers and stuff around the hem around the sleeves and stuff. Try and hit those as best you can. You notice how well it’s soaked over. And then once it’s soaked, you kind of wipe it down with a cloth to get rid of the excess fluid on the outside and then let that air dry again. And that’s supposed to kind of cure up to be a new hydrophobic shell that you have on the exterior of your gore-tex jacket. So now, and I tried it out a couple of times, but now like it took like a little handful I had a cup of water, I took a little handful of it and I kind of tossed it over like afoot at the jacket after it had cured. And that was so that the water would come out the hand it would beat up as a spray and then hit the jacket similar to rainfall is the hope. And it did a great job; the jacket, the water, hit the jacket, beat it up outside it instantly, didn’t look like it penetrated the nylon at all. And then, with just kind of quick flick, it sort of all shook off like, like a fresh waterproof piece of material. So kind of a kind of cool. And it’s nice to sort of care for some of those outdoor layers and stuff really like this moment piece. Probably one of the best pieces of gear I’ve had in a long time. And then yeah, Karen, for a bit, will keep it on me and keep it with me for a long time. It’s pretty fun. So thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Thanks for listening to me talk about expensive flashlights and gore-tex waterproof hydrophobic material. What are hydrophobic solutions? I don’t know what it is, but it’s. Yeah, it’s been cool. It’s been cool to take care of a couple of these projects and stuff, and I hope you guys enjoyed listening to this episode of the podcast. So if you want to check out more information about me or some of the stuff that I’m up to, you can go to Billy Newman photo comm. If you’d like to support the work, I’m up to you, and you can go to Billy Newman photo comm forward-slash support. You can find links to my Patreon account from there as well. Go to the Amazon page check out some of the books that I’m trying to put together for some photographs and probably all the pieces of information up around the website. So check that out anytime you want billing in Minnesota calm thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy new and photo podcast. I will talk to you again next time.