Get Out There Podcast

Hunting camps on public land in the John Day river canyon. Working with a GPS to scout locations year round. Smoke in Oregon. Lightroom photo development with controller. Editing with an Xtouch compact. Over-processing a raw file. Amplified sound with a PA.

Hunting Camps

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

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Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/

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About   https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/

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.

Developing Film And Converting MiniDV

Developing a roll of film. Converting Mini DV tapes from 2006. Camping around Mt. Jefferson. Viewing the meteor shower.

154 Developing Film And Converting MiniDV Tapes

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

Link

Website Billy Newman Photo https://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   https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/

Developing Film Converting MiniDV

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.

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https://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/billynewmanphotopodcast

154 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Developing film and Converting old tapes

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast for the first week of September 2020. I hope everybody's doing well. Thanks a lot for checking out this episode. I wanted to talk a little about the start of September, some of the stuff I've been up to. It's cool, and I just finished a roll of film here pretty recently. Like I think during this last week when I was out traveling around, and I haven't finished a roll of film in a while, I've been shooting mostly on the digital camera that I've got kind of moved over to canon equipment back in 2018. And I've been shooting with that for, and I guess now almost two years is what it's coming up too. And so, during that time, I picked up a Canon film camera.And I've been using the Canon lenses that I have for my digital camera. On the Eos system over on an older canon film camera from I think the late 90s is what I was able to pick up. So I went over on like kth comm. I think this was this is probably like nine months ago or so at the beginning of the year. And I picked up a really inexpensive Canon camera body was like $35, something like that, to, to pick up this camera, mostly plastic in the body, but it has a bunch of the manual controls that you would expect from the sort of mid-range SLR sort of like the five D Mark, or you know, the five D Mark, the five D line, you know, whatever when you want to pick, but it's not the full professional build model. But it's definitely not the lower-end one. So yeah, it has like kind of the same layout of buttons and stuff on it as you can get with the more modern layout of cannon buttons and stuff. So most of it's really the same as it kind of translates back from one to the other. But it's a cool, pretty simple camera, and it's got, I think, like three focus points, three autofocus points on the inside. And that works fine for the kind of simple stuff that I was trying to do. But it's cool I was a cargo by I'm out here at a wildlife refuge spot. And I was checking out sort of has changed now that it's September 1, they've cut all the grass that they grow in these fields out here, that's all been cut, bailed, driven off. And then now it's like been tilled up, and there's like dirt and rocks and like all of these big multi-acre fields that kind of a stretch on out here. So we're working with this canon film camera, this, I can't remember what the name of it is. But it's got pretty simple controls, and it's been easy to use. It has a weird battery. Maybe I have talked about that before. The kind of tricky thing about some of these late 90s SLR cameras is that they take this sort of proprietary about these almost proprietary disposable batteries. I think this one is something sort of like to sort of fat double A's that are bonded together. And then kind of wrapped in this, you know, this little casing unit and that's supposed to like fit in your camera, and then the power of the camera for a couple of rolls or something like that it works fine. But I always kind of prefer the double-A or something that's a little more standard. They understood that they needed certain batteries to deliver more power for certain mechanisms. But I think now they've got that pretty well figured out with different series or different sets of series of double A and triple A batteries that they can use. Like that, the lithium-ion double-A batteries seem to work fine. And a lot of the stuff that I've used before, even just you know, the basic Duracell stuff has always worked fine. These are, these are weird batteries. So there, you know, like really thick, kind of, like if you took a double-A battery, and it was made playdough you took a double-A just kind of squished it a centimeter smaller than it was and kind of got it fatter on the sides. That's sort of what it looks like. And like I was saying, Yeah, bound together as I set it to and then put into the camera, and I haven't had to replace it in a year, but really, I've only shot through one roll. So I think like when I shoot with the Nikon f4, I think that takes a proprietary battery, but if you have the double-A battery pack system that attaches to it, and that's what I had so that one took like, took like six double-A batteries that went into the base and into the handle of the camera. And you could get about ten rolls of film shot with just that one set of batteries. And for me that would last a really long time. But if you'd imagine, you know, 10 rolls of film is you know, Max 36 frames. So if you multiply that out, it's you know, it's not more than a day's worth of shooting if you're if you're kind of shooting an event or like a wedding Or a sporting event, or something like that, where you're going to be expected to come back with a lot of frames that you, you know, develop and produce and then pick from. But for most of this kind of like, landscape work that I'm up to, or you like, this sort of stuff, it's a lot slower, it's a lot easier in a lot of ways to put together and a little more steady way. And so yeah, 10 roles, or, you know, like, I'm not going to shoot through 10 roles in the next two years, probably. Because it's, you know, sort of novelty thing for me to shoot now, but it's cool. I got that film role finished, I think, yeah, like I was saying it was probably from January till near the end of August now. So it's really not like a fast pace, it's probably like two or three frames a month that I've been shooting, but it's at a number of the different camps and stuff that I've gone to over the last year are different like trips and stuff that I've gone through different little spots that I was at. So I hope that there's some cool stuff on there. It's kind of fun when you go back and check. And you see, like what you got. And if you haven't, like, duplicate it over, or at least if I noticed, I haven't really duplicated over the the photo sets with, you know, a bunch of digital images of the same location, and then a bunch of film photos that same location have I really like crossed over too much. It's really almost a surprise to me what I when I developed the role, and I see some frames over there, I think, oh, man, I've heard you know, I've never seen this photo before, I never got to look at the back of the screen, just have to see how this photo would come out. I didn't I didn't get to pull it up on my computer yet. So you kind of look back to this thing that happened, you know, six or seven months ago, and you go, oh, man, I remember taking a picture of it, but I had never seen it. And so it's kind of fun getting to capture some of that stuff. And get to go through and check it out. And yeah, sometimes there's a there's a cool quality to the film photos that come out. But this is the first role that I put through this camera. So we'll see if it if it comes out at all, I don't really know how to develop it now that we're in sort of the, the COVID staff that we've been going through during 2020. I know like a lot of businesses and now opened up again or you know, like back into operations. But there's also sort of some strange protocols of how different things work. So I was trying to kind of figure that out and see if there was delays or something to it. But I think that, that I'm able to take it down to a spot. And they can probably develop it in house over a couple days. But well, no, I think it's still send out. Yeah. So I think it kind of depends on like, what what the, you know, what the location in Portland is doing or something right? I'm not really sure. It's kind of interesting, I think they can do a lot of C 41 processing in house. So maybe it's easier for him than what I'm thinking. But I was looking at a couple different services. So there's always kind of the idea where, if you're in a bigger market, you probably got a couple more options than I do. But out here in a more rural smaller market getting filmed about this become quite a bit more difficult. I probably talked about this before. Well, you know, like we've everybody's seen, the film departments in the photo departments of a lot of stores, just kind of go out of business, or flip to be in just a few digital kiosks that you get prints made up. And that's definitely going to serve 99% of the business. But in department store negatives were never the best things by any means. But but a lot of a lot of the access that you would have had to send your photos somewhere that you would see at least you know, like through your commercial markets you go to have kind of disappeared. And so so now like, yeah, you really just have to send an envelope out yourself to some developing house to have them, process the photos, send you back your negatives and send you back like a digital CD or thumb drive with your photos on I think now you can select for thumb drives for most everything. But it's kind of a little strange. It's and it's a reason I was looking at this one service called I think the darkroom. I think they're out of like an area in Northern California, like Santa Cruz or Monterey or something like that. And it's, I think, probably south, probably Bay Area. Maybe I could say that more like the South Bay sort of what it seemed like they're, they're saying from some of their information, but with them, I kind of like fill out a contact form on that website. And then it sent off that information. And they email me back like a prepaid mailer that I can put my, my film role in, and then they'll take it, put it through a scanning process during my negatives back and then give me the scans through some digital means. And the prices were pretty reasonable, but it seemed like it was somewhere around 20 bucks a roll to get the sort of good stuff, you can go up from there and spend more you can go down a little bit and spend a little less, but I wouldn't really recommend that that'd be that'd be like a lower quality scan of the materials. I haven't really that's sort of what I'm faced with the local stuff too. Like I was saying I can go to this local camera shop that's still a town away. And I could drop my film out there, then there's sort of the old-timey, they haven't really renovated anything since the late 90s, sort of camera store model that you would have seen before. But you go in there, you can drop your film off, they'll have it ready in a day, which is great. Otherwise, with this meal and service, we'll probably have to wait a week or two weeks to get my film back. But you can wait like a day, two days, three days or something, go down and pick up the film. But the problem is the CD that they provide you is bad. Or it's just got like, I haven't done that in years to I used to have like a CD reader, I haven't had like a CD drive in a long tiling a couple of years now at least that I've like done the CD stuff, shoot. But the seat Yeah, the CD-quality or like, whatever, whatever system they're using to scan those images is pretty bad. So you get like a, it's like a two megapixel scan, it's really highly usable for anything. But you know, like, something fun to see on a computer screen. But it's not really good enough to print anything more than like a four by five or so in photo. And even still, that's kind of, it's not as rich as it could be, if it was scanned properly. So that's one of the benefits that you get with doing the send out is that you get to kind of work with whatever, whatever scan shop is actually looking at and dealing with and caring for your photos and a lot of these local shops, they probably do a good job also. And if you're in again, like a larger market or more developed market, there's going to be well, I don't know, probably like, I don't know, there's probably going to be one or two places. And most of the West Coast market cities like say, you know, like Seattle, now the car going by. But like Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, I mean, Portland's got two or one, maybe they've got like a little art-house style one. But I think a lot of these also, I think they kind of cheat a little and send their stuff out to a bigger print house when it gets a little more complicated. So I'm not really sure how that goes, you kind of have to look at it. And like sort of read what that little spot is up to and how they kind of work with us that's filled with photos and stuff. But But yeah, I think getting the scans is a pretty good way of going about getting your film stuff created. And it's not too bad sending your scan in getting it developed put on CD getting sent back to you, that's all pretty easy to see 41 processing for a lot of the color film stuff that you can just get is pretty easy to use, like any other more complicated stuff, like medium format, or large format, if you get to shoot it, what's the other one to 40 even like some black and white stuff, it's like it's just not standard enough, it's not the C 41 processing system they've got. So it has to be sent out to like a different place. And it has to be, I guess, more beautifully processed to get handled. But I think that's because kind of like what what we recognize is that the those those formats of pretty much all of it disappeared now. So you just really can't get ahold of a lot of medium format film to shoot through. I mean, you can, of course, but it's just not going to be something that's done enough. So just about all that stuff is sent out to a few hubs that are large enough, so they can get enough of that so that it's profitable enough for them to keep developing it. So it's kind of cool. It's interesting, but But yeah, I want to try and shoot that film off. Get my my film sent back to me. Hopefully that'll work out pretty good. The other thing I've been trying to do, I've been going through like an old box that I have, and it's got these mini DV tapes in from probably started in I don't know 2005 2006 2007 and then probably no more by around 2008 or 2009 those interesting facets things kind of come and go when you look back at him . I think when I was getting into video editing and video processing stuff back in like high school and into college when I started a lot of the video footage that I'd record would be put onto these mini DV tapes that were little kind of like small palm-sized VHS tapes that were kind of a split between a few different video mediums that are out there like hiei or VHS See I think was like the other camera types that they had out there for a couple of years sort of were sort of floating around there in the market at the same time. They have these mini DV tapes, and it's got footage on them still, and I think I have clips of the footage that is that have been captured off of it like way back in 2005. Whenever I use a capture card to capture mini DV footage over from the camcorder that took it and then bring it into Final Cut Studio three or whatever it was that might have been around back then probably studio two Adobe version one premiere one, you know way back. But when you'd capture the this AVI file that was huge as a humongous file was like two gigabytes every minute or something. It was terrible. It kind of a uncompressed and this is just like a standard definition grainy video it sucks to deal with, but you just barely kind of process it with the computers of the day running it FireWire over from the computer, or over like across the camcorder through like a little capture card FireWire mechanism that I had in it, I think it was I got to use like a Canon XL one back in the day. And that was pretty cool. That was like a pretty fancy camera for the 2004 2005 2006 range. And so yeah, it was fun to get to shoot on a nice big lens. And I got to do a bunch of sports stuff and a bunch of normal video stuff. But But yeah, sure, with that captured onto a mini DV tape, sent over FireWire to like Mac, g five computer I think is what it was for a long time. And then I got one of those later myself to use to do some editing stuff. And I had that until I don't know, 2012 or so 2013 when I finally sold it. But yeah, using those computers and stuff to capture these mini DV tapes a way back, I'd captured the footage, done some edits to it or worked on whatever project that was associated with it. And then I'd rented that out. And I probably still have some of those captured files that are edited rendered out that are somewhere on my computer video archive that I've got around, I've seen a few of them float around, but it's not really like the raw footage. So it's cool. I've got these mini DV tapes still, to whatever still on, and I think they've been recorded over a few times. So I didn't do the the archivist job of putting everything together as I probably should have project by project, mini DV tape, but mini DV tape to pull out all the raw stuff now and be able to have it in full. I think I've recorded over a few of those like short class project files that I would have recorded for a bunch of the stuff that I would have worked on through late High School in college. So for whatever, I got a box of tapes, so whatever I do have I have, but I definitely think that I've lost some stuff in there too. So taking these sets of tapes, and I'm trying to take them in and send it to like a conversion shop, sort of like I was saying, you know, with the film stuff, trying to get my film developed, I'm trying to send these these mini DV tapes out to a spot where they'll take it, put it in the scanning system, and then capture that video off of it again and give me a digital file with that captured video. And it's kind of cool getting to see some of the stuff again, I've done it with two tapes already as like a test, and then I need to drop in probably another eight or 10 tapes to see if I can get some video off of them. But it's kind of cool. Yeah, some stuff that goes back to I think like 2006. And then another thing from probably summer of 2007. Maybe somewhere in there. Yeah, probably like the 2007 year I think it's like this wedding that I recorded. And so yeah, I just, I just got this guy, this tape bag, it was blank. It didn't have a label on it. And it's just, yeah, somebody's wedding from 2007 that I recorded. So it's like, yeah, there you go. Yeah, another event that I accorded recorded some some stage event that I recorded, and got got tape of it, there you go camera set up on a tripod looking at video from I think that was 2000, early 2007 as well, you know, so it's kind of kind of interesting to csfb, I just dropped off another two tapes, I'm going to I think drop off. Maybe you know that four or so. And I think they process it, they put it on a thumb drive for you. And then they send you the tape back and they give you a thumb drive. And it has a sort of process mark on it. But yeah, he through the through the same drive in your computer to transfer those files over. And they're like a more reasonably compressed mp4 or something, I think this time, or QuickTime file, something like that. And yeah, drag it over your computer, you got to an hour of videotape. now converted over to a digital file. So I'm going to try and go through that box that I have and see if I can pull out some cool videos from some stuff from 2005 to 2008. Whatever range of stuff I was recording at that time, that'd be kind of fun to see. Really what I'm noticing though is that it's just a lot of junk. I really am frustrated that you kind of think like early on, you're like recording some stuff, you're recording something cool. And then it kind of turns out later to be not not super useful. It's just not like a really like a full contained thing. And you think man, there's a lot of waste in here. If I could have eight hours of the good stuff. That would have been great. You know, if you really think about life and like, oh, what, eight hours what I'd want to still see now. Right? You know, like, what kind of stuff What do I wish I had recorded a little bit more of moment to moment. And I'm looking at that a little bit through the videos that I recorded that are like, what is this project and also into the photos I record to have like, you know, like that. There's an there's the process of photos that is cool, but there's some nostalgic stuff about photography that that really is what grows Over the years, you know, like, if you just take in personal photos, it's like the moments that the things in the the way that you sort of interacted with the thing that ends up being a lot more fun to see and look back on then just sort of the, the most plain, sort of flatly composed VISTA that you can kind of put together on a on a viewpoint, which is sort of what I ended having a lot of just like, Oh, yeah, it's like, it's like a horizon and then a sky. And I don't really know where it is, and it's sort of flat. And okay, but, but then there's a lot of stuff. That's, that's pretty cool. And sort of personal to get to see. And that's what the, I think the fun stuff is year over year, over years, you get kind of further down the road. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the proceed meteor shower that had come up a while back now, in early August, it was cool again, to see that hopefully, you guys got to get out and make some observations of some meteors that were going by I got to do a couple of camping trips. During that time. I think like at the end of July, when comet nowise was cruising over, some of you guys probably got to see that that was cool. But during like the end of July is when the Perseus start kind of ramping up. And then it's pretty late. It's like it's a chance that you'll see a meteorite, or you know, a meteor streak across the sky during the evening sky during those weeks, but it really starts to kick up and peak. I think it's August 10 11th, and 12th sort of in that range ninth 10th 11th 12th. But really, I think like the 10th 11th is when it's it's the night to see it. And it's cool, and knives are on yours that the that the meteor shower is really peaking. I think it can be like up to 50 or almost 60 an hour, but you'd be projected to see. But I've seen a lot of really cool ones before that. It's been pretty fun, or you just go like, well man. I'm just seeing a lot of shooting stars throughout the sky. So it was cool. This year, I went out for a couple different sightings of it. I think like that during that last podcast that I was talking about was probably one of the better observation nights that I had when I was up on top of that mountain peak out in Eastern Oregon. It was really beautiful. It was the really dark night you can you can see really crisply into the Milky Way and into kind of the little filament light structures that sort of make up the edges and boundaries of the Milky Way. And then how dark it gets as it kind of falls off that into the deep space part of the night sky. It's really cool to kind of check out and look at that and and that was a lot of fun. Getting to go out there. Look at the sky, look at the Milky Way watch the Perseids as it kind of started to kick in a little bit more after midnight. So I said it took about about 2am that night and they're probably saw it's probably 15 or nearly 20 pretty good ones. there's a there's a bunch of spinners that were kind of coming through there but there was really like a lot of good ones that I was able to see kind of later or over that night and the night before. And it's cool when you get to see a few of them they really kind of stretch off across like a lot of different parts of the sky. I think they're the idea of the Percy is is that they're sort of originating out of the constellation of Perseus up in the north east part of the sky. But really, you can see him shoot now down into like Sagittarius and Scorpio in the south are way out past like Arcturus as you get like a little bit further over into the western sky. But yeah, it was cool getting to check out the meteor shower getting to see some of those bright tubes that are left band is like plasma tubes that are left behind is one of the bigger meteorites kind of cruises through burns up and leaves this kind of tube of I guess hot air hot ionized there. And it kind of glows for about a second or so. And the sky You can kind of see it as then sort of zips and whisps away as it sort of evaporates and cools back down. But it's fine. Yeah, being out there watching a few media or media shoot by that was fun. And then yeah, really a great part of August and some of the observations that you get to do is get a check out the meteor shower, I guess there are meteor showers through other parts of the year to like, think there's supposed to be? Well, it's probably a couple more weeks, and usually another really good one that comes up in October that we normally Miss. There's another good one, I think it's like the Leonid. Maybe it's a Leonid shower, that's in November. But for a lot of us in the Northern Hemisphere, by that time, it's just like clouded over enough. Or the the way that the weather is working just makes it so that you're not really able to make the kind of observations of the meteor showers you'd like to I suppose even when, like I was in Hawaii A while back and I was trying to make observations and some of those things I hadn't been able to do during the winter months here in Oregon. And a lot of that stuff I really wasn't able to see in the way that I would have hoped to. or Yeah, I just like the observations of it like we're just I don't know kind of kind of difficult to make. So really like get the proceed meteor shower was always one of the coolest ones because it's it's kind of it's, it's right there kind of writing a good season where you get to check it out. And in a good location for a lot of us here in the Northern Hemisphere and stuff. So it was cool, had a good time. Getting to do some of that earlier this year, it's ready to I'm out here. I like this section of the of this wildlife refuge, I was noticing the leaves and stuff like I was talking about the the acres of the of the grass fields have been tilled now. And that's dirt and rocks that are sort of turned up all over these multi acre fields and stuff. But out here past that there's groves of oak trees that kind of stretch out along the creeks as the ground and then up onto the hillsides is it kind of extends up into the forest over here more. But I've noticed in the oak trees, now that it's September 1, there's like this browning that's starting to occur. And so it's just sort of the the last two weeks of August is when you really start to first see it, but it's the first twinge that the the leaves are starting to change their color and that the seasons are starting to flip. And it's starting to move into into more of the fall. autumn season, which is kind of cool. It's interesting to see like how it sort of takes place when I was driving on the freeway last week. And as sort of moving around a little bit more, I could see a few rows of trees that had been put in I think they were ash or maybe their poplar trees that had already started to turn really quite yellow, and on some of the branches. And it's interesting to see how they sort of start to pop and turn a different time. But it'll be interesting to see how this year sort of plays out. I'm not sure if we're going to get the Indian summer the extended summer into like late September or October, like we've maybe gotten a few of the last last few years, but it'd be kind of need to check out, I'm excited for it to be September. So to be maybe a little bit of change of the vibe of what's been going on for the last few months, I'm kind of tired of the pandemic and the lockdown stuff and some of the changes that have sort of come with that. So I'm hopeful to kind of maybe see the Far be a shift in some of the way that some of that's working or kind of see like how it's going to evolve, we're going to maybe see now if like colleges are going back into place, or if schools are going back into place, or I think that'll be kind of maybe it'll set the temperature, the vibe of the type of change we're going to see through the rest of the year and how it's gonna go. I'm already seeing news articles saying you know, expect expected a distance Thanksgiving over zoom. So it doesn't look like they're putting it on the agenda to be back out of it or celebrating anything soon, which I understand, I guess makes some sense. And it sounds like a lot of states are going to be bringing their schools back into place, which I think is really going to affect a lot of parents and their ability to have a work schedule as a managing their kid in a home environment stuff. So that's all going to be kind of strange. Now that kind of cascades a problem. But yeah, it looks like it's gonna take a little longer to pull out of all the consequences from the pandemic. And it's too bad I wasn't a little faster. I was hoping that it would be kind of in July or August that would be able to kick most of it and get back to pretty regular business. But yeah, with a lot of states just not selected to have their their K through 12 classrooms reopened. But for reopening through a distance learning mechanism where you're, you're required to be occupied at home. I think that's gonna put a lot of parents in positions, that it's just gonna make it it's gonna make it an auditioning, or it's well, it's just gonna be a weird couple months, and I think everybody's got a pretty good handle on that. Shoot. I wanted to talk about this trip I did out to the lake Billy Chinook area. That's a cool area. I like that I think like Billy Chinook is, well maybe it's the lake I've seen a couple different names for that lake. It's sort of on the border. one edge of it toward the north is the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. To the south. I think it's when is that area. Now I don't know what it is. I was trying to think of the the National Forest system as part of that. Now I can't remember. But there's some national forest out there. And I think it's where like the crooked river and maybe the White River Salmon River, same river. I can remember it's where like a couple rivers sort of have their convergence point before they think they enter up and head down toward the Deschutes river and They put a dam in there and then backed it up. And it's an amazing location. It's really wild to think of what the landscape must have been like they're way, way back, but they put a dam in. But these canyon walls, he's like really, really steep walls go down, you know, like hundreds of feet or something more than like where it's even dammed up to today. So it's a really kind of strange spot but but yeah, I was camping out over there. Really interesting area, it was cool. I didn't camp down by the lake that was really actually very full kind of, like I talked about a few times in this podcast. The the outdoor kind of camping here is sort of the more developed pull your pull your truck and trailer in and set up a campsite. 15 feet from another camper next to a lake so you can fish kind of spots. Those are all really full this summer. I think, you know, maybe like Tuesday, Wednesday, you can find some more open spots, but they're still campers through the week. But then by Thursday, Friday, Saturday, most of those spots are real full in the small town junctions to get to those spots are even more full, like going out to lupine before you get out toward the Newberry crater Paulina Lake area or out toward like Crescent lake or some of those cascade lakes you can cut up to that the LA pine area some of those little travels and a gas stations out there that I've intersected with a couple times on this trip southeast Oregon are slammed by Friday with out of state license plates and within state license plates from people from Portland or bend or from wherever you're going out to do their summer recreation stuff and it's been way more busy this year than I've seen it for a number of the past years but but yeah, when I was at toward the Lake Village Nick area that the State Park area where there's like tent camping and RV camping that was sold out it said no vacancy, and it was loaded like no no distancing and seemed really you know, but it's just tense on 10 on 10 on 10 on truck camper, and so on. And it's a cool spot that I would say it's great if you get a boat or if you're renting like a houseboat or family boat or something like that to go out on a school you can drive your trailer down, drop it in the lake and take off for you know, a whole day and just kind of cruise around acres and acres of of Lake out there. So really beautiful spot really cool. It seems like it'd be a good spot to go fishing or I think people do some kind of light watersports, sort of, not jet ski, but, you know, like wakeboard, innertube, ski sort of stuff. I think it's like some parts of it. And then I think some other parts are still set up to be a little more slow for the fishing stuff. Now the car driving by what's up cars. But it was cool that there's a nice spot to go camping I, what I ended up doing though, is a was looking on that map. That off road on x map that I've talked about a few times shows a lot of the roads, the Forest Service roads to kind of stretch out and but Forest Service roads that are open too. So a lot of them have like gates on them. So if you're going down a road and you see it on the map, you're not really sure if it's open open to the public or if it if it drives through or not. It's cool because you can look on this map and see what is there where you can go and you can see what roads are open. But I was able to take this forest service or the cuts on the south side of the lake area, and then I think goes up into the mountains. And then it would if you took it all the way you would go over the mountain and then head down to sisters Oregon, which is a ways south of there, but you could take that just with with backroads the Forest Service backroads. But it was cool. But as you kind of climbed the ridge out of the Lake area out of the draw that was created by the river and the creek that flow into the bigger lake. You climb away it's like 500 feet or something that seems and you get up kind of toward the top of it. And it's interesting, the landscape is out there. It's really it seems like a flat landscape. And then the elevation changes created by the erosion from the water that that kind of creates these big Canyon draws that then drop down into the lake. So you can drop in elevation a lot, but really as you climb in elevation and get to the top of that, it really looks like a plateau that flattens out and goes flat across the high desert area out up into like Mount Hood or Mount Jefferson that you can kind of see from that area as you kind of climb up out of the I guess out of that Canyon grassland area. So it was cool. Yeah, the camping spot I got to was a dispersed campsite. That was up on top of that ridge outside of all the commotion at the State Park area by Billy Chinook. And it was cool Yeah, pulled up out of there. Found I think like these four campsites had like firing setup and they were all about probably like spread out by like a quarter mile or so. It wasn't too long of a space be I was this old rocky road that kind of curled out onto the precipice of this, this little point. And then the main road sort of stretched up the spine to the ridge, and went up a little further, until it crested over, and then came back down the other side, but went out toward this point, you had a cool view of Mount Jefferson, that wasn't really too far where mount Jefferson looked pretty prominent in the view. And then, as you looked at kind of toward the north, North West, you could see the point of Mount Hood, kind of sticking up over the flat plateau, the land that I talked about, you can see all the Mount Hood, but you can see kind of the top third of it or so just kind of sticking up over this flat plateau landscape. And then below that below Mount Hood, it dropped into this big Canyon, and then dropped into the lake Billy Chinook that you can kind of see down to the north and northwest or north and northeast, below me. And so it was cool is nice. Getting up to that spot. I tried to take some pictures up there, try to get some sunset photos of Mount Jefferson and try to do a couple of sunrise photos too. That was cool. It was better to lighten the sunrise sort of given the the side of the mountain that I was on. But yeah, it was nice getting out there and checking out mount Jefferson at night it was cool. was pretty smart. Like I'm kind of against like starting fires and stuff right now. So I've been using I think I talked about a couple of times that propane heater that saved me a lot through the through the season. But this is a good spot to use it it says everywhere up there. I think after a couple, a couple fires that had gotten out into the grassland and then gotten out of control. Early this decade, I think it was about 10 years ago or so they had that Warm Springs fire that burned. A lot of it, if you pull up a satellite image of the area, you'll see acres and acres and acres, this this whole big region that's been blackened by, by this flat fire that have gone through the big section of the Warm Springs Reservation. And some of the land that kind of stretches out from there. real shame as that goes, but there's a lot of stuff that says you know, hey, like we are locking down a lot of the fire you stuff that you have. So any any kind of just anything that seems hot, you just you don't get to use is pretty much what it seems to say I think in use gas stoves. And then you can use some propane systems, but really it's like, it's it's pretty against it in most ways. So like, I think you can't use charcoal, you can't use a fire pan, which is you know, sort of you get around these restrictions a lot of the time. You can't use any of that stuff. And I think it really kind of noticing what i what i saw out there is the wind is just really kicking up fast. And if anything leaves the fire and as a hot Ember, it'll just blow across and catch into a bunch of grass really way faster than you can get to it and way faster you can deal with it. So I understand like a lot of that, and I'm pretty happy to not have to deal with making a big fire or anything out there right now, especially through the summertime. So now that now that it is dropping into September and the fall, and moving into like some of the like hunting camp stuff that people are going to be doing. fires are gonna be great. That's always a fun part of the October camping stuff. When you get to light up a big fire burn through some Woods there plate. still stay warm. That stuff's really fun, but but man for like mid summer, really dry grassland camping. I'm happy to skip the fire this time. It was cool, though. That night when I was out there, I was camping out at the truck. And as you looked north, you could see up in Washington somewhere, you know, must have been way north of the Columbia River. You can see this Thunderhead system that had moved over. And you can see these these really bright and very distant strikes of lightning, they would shoot down somewhere east of Mount Adams so you can kind of make out up there you can see I can see Mount Hood from where I was and then a little over from that. Really more of like a due north location. You can see the hump of Mount Adams out there. And then so somewhere out east of Mount Adams from that landmark, you could see these big purple bolts of lightning that would strike down somewhere up in Washington, but that was really cool to see. Glad I got to be up there, and you can hear it, though. No Thunder anything you just see these distant flashes and stuff every 1015 minutes. You see these strikes from the storm and nowhere near me But yeah, as a trip, you can still see it from those mountaintops up there. So that was cool. Got a good time hanging out there out by mount Jefferson seeing some stuff. Check it out like Billy Shinnok that was really fun. Got to drop down to a couple fishing spots that are in that area. That was cool. nice spot, good summer spot spot to go really nice to get away from the State Park campsite area that they had that was super packed out and go to summaries that were a little bit more dispersed on the sides. How to get time doing that. So if It's cool that I probably wrap up the podcast here for this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast for the first week of September 2020. You guys should check out my website Billy Newman photo calm; I'm gonna try and put up some more written and photo content up there on the blog posts section of the site through September and October. So that'll be kind of cool. Have some new photos and stuff that I haven't put up before. I'm gonna try and try and put out, and I got a few other things kind of planned for the fall, but I'm excited to get into but yeah, so a few few more podcasts or September. Couple more things like this talking about some camping, I have a few plans to go out and do some traveling and stuff. So I hope I get to do some posts and makes new photos about that. It's pretty excited about what I got coming out for at least the next 30 days, and it probably slows down a lot into late October, November. Man the winning time. How fun. It's gonna be exciting. But yeah, go to Billy Newman photo calm for slash support. You check out some more stuff about this podcast helped me out on there. It's always appreciated. Yeah. Until next time, thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcasts.

Camping At An 8500 ft Mountain Peak

Camping on a mountain top, Finding cabins in the woods, Lookout towers on national forest land, 50 million years of geology.

Camping At An 8500 ft Mountain Peak

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

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153 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Camping at an 8500 ft mountain peak

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded for the second or almost coming up to the third week of August 2020. Made a cup of coffee this morning, and I'm out at that peak of the mountain out in Eastern Oregon.

Pretty cool spot up here that I was able to get to. I was looking around on the map. And I was able to find some spots that were old lookout towers like I guess they were like old like fire lookout towers for when there would be lightning strikes or other starts of fires for forest fires in the area. I have driven to a couple of them before, seven in Northern California. I'll talk about those in a few. But yeah, it's cool that you can find where these cabins are here if you look around. And I guess many of them now I use this as lookout towers for the fire department or federal forest department or whatever it would be.

But now, many of them have been kind of retrofitted to be overnight cabins that you can or other people in public can rent out and get for like a night or two nights or, or a part of a week or something is pretty cool. I guess they book pretty far out in advance. But it's pretty cool. So, yeah, I was looking around at some of those. And I've been on a trip for a couple of days now, driving around in some BLM and national forest land. It's out here in Eastern Oregon. And there's a lot of it, it's cool, a lot of space, a lot of open space in this part of the country.

It's a bit of a difference between them between west of the Cascades and east of the Cascades. A lot of the national forest land is on the west coast. Well, yeah, I'm trying to think of it a little. But as good as I can tell, a lot of the national forest land on the west coast is mountainous with many ridges, and a lot of thick timber too, a lot of thick evergreen forests wonderful area. But it's hard to traverse that kind of terrain; many of them have had roads that are pretty well maintained, they go through some of those areas.

But still, even with that, there's not a lot of open expanses and the kind of tight quarters sometimes. So it's kind of cool getting out over here in Eastern Oregon, where it sort of flattens out a bit opens up a bit. And even though there are still quite a few trees in the area that I'm looking out at, like I'm looking at, South of me here, miles and miles and miles of forest land, and mountains that go out 20 miles, 30 miles or so. But it's cool. It goes out for a while. But there are changes in the land to the lookout. Like I was saying, I made it at the top of the peak of a mountain here. So I can see out to the east over here, I look over, and I see like a few ridges, a few bluffs, and it seems like it goes on forever. But it's pretty cool.

And this area here, looking out west to me here, I can see the lights of one of the cities last night that's out here, or you know, one of the small towns it's in the area, he can kind of see the little dots of those. Those farms and ranches and some concentration in downtown are out over in the valley to the west of me. But it's pretty cool. So, yeah, you can kind of see the changes and ripples in the landscape up here. But yeah, there's a lookout tower up here in this area. And you can rat them out. There are a few others in a couple of other spots I was at yesterday, too. So I was traveling down these Forest Service roads, and then you can pull off and then go up. It's pretty high.

It's like you're driving up on the rim. You kind of like already made most of your way up the elevation. But then you can take these little side roads off that the main road, and then it'll cut up to a cabin that's put up with, you know, a forest service money, and it's been there for a long time. And yeah, hang out at their picnic tables in a bathroom and stuff. It's one of the more well serviced high altitude areas that you know, you can kind of pop into, but it's cool. They maintain the roads pretty well.

So you can drive right up to the summit of it. And then check it out and then drive right back down, which is a nice feature of it. But I'm not at the lookout tower right now. I'm actually a half-mile away over on another peak that's just a bit higher in elevation. There's no Lookout Tower. Over here, but there's like a couple Geological Survey markers up here that they've got pinned down to the top of the summit, which is cool.

I should check them a little they read a bit more accurately what my altitude is. I think that it's around 8500 feet right now, which is cool. It's pretty high up here. It seems like it's one of the highest things Around can lookout. I can see one of the mountains in the Cascades. I can see Mount Shasta from here yesterday. I was in a spot where I could see Mount Thiessen and Mount McLoughlin, which was cool. Kind of getting to spot that in the evening time. You can see the cracked kind of crackled rock of the Horn of mouthfeel sent over, and what is it like South?

The southern section of the Cascades in Oregon. I can look out into California waves, and I can see Mount Shasta from here. I can't see anything like a blast. And that's probably way too far. I can't really see anything that goes North either. But, yeah, probably they got something if it was a little clear. There seems like some smoke in the air. Probably smoke. Not really quite sure which fire it's coming from. But yeah, there's like some good bands of smoke in the air. And it's a little hazy.

You can kind of Yeah, pretty good visibility for miles, but right on the brim of the horizon is sort of a murky, kind of smoke toned cloud that sort of stretches all the surrounding way. It's cool. That was about a quarter-mile away from this Lookout Tower up at the top of this little rise. And it's cool, there's this little two-track road that just kind of meanders right up the side of this hill, and then you just sort of pop up onto the summit. And then you've got something that's about now would that be maybe 10 yards 15 yards across by, say 50 yards long, the sort of the flat enough spot of the summit that you can kind of walk around on before it starts to dip off. So really, only an area of about probably 100 by 100 feet is really flat enough to park a vehicle.

But yeah, the area kind of stretches on a bit out from there. And there are many kinds of outcrops of rock, I think like I'm looking down over to my two o'clock. There's an outcrop of rock that sticks up as I look out over to my was it probably 10 o'clock over to the other side and drops off pretty quickly as it kind of pulls into a ravine before it pops up to the peak of another hill over to the east of me. But, there's like a little another little two-track row that kind of carries on quite steeply. I might add that it just kind of drops down that hill. Lord knows where it goes. I don't think I'm going to take that one.

I think I was looking at a camper that I passed yesterday at a spot in like a more setup campground. They have their fifth wheel set up, but they have like that for ATVs out there, and I see it. Man having a quad out here would be pretty cool. They're just, you know, the kind of train and stuff you can travel over. And just kind of the ability to take some of these roads take some of these steep little tracks and stuff would be kind of fun.

But yeah, I think it probably isn't good for my mid-sized highway-ready truck to be jumping on. But beautiful spot up here. Really cool. I was spending the night up here last night. It's just right at the peak of the summit; I was thinking I was going to get a ton of wind, like that's what I ran into yesterday when I went up to the edge of a bluff where I was at, at the high elevation point where they had their lookout towers down from it a bit at a set of picnic tables in an area that set up really beautiful.

You can see that the land kind of slopes off to the west gradually in the forest land. But to the east, there's just a real steep, probably 800-foot drop off that goes down to a lake bed valley floor out to the east of me. So it was really cool kind of getting up there and seeing it, but when I got up to that spot where it had been in the trees in the more moderate elevations of it to the west side, there hadn't really been any wind or any inclement weather or anything like that. But when I got up near the peak, there are two fronts of weather as the sun was going down.

We're just kind of mixing weirdly, and you got a ton of wind blowing each and every different way. So I was just getting blown around a lot up in that area, and there were some people up there that seemed like they wanted me to go, so I took off and found another campsite, but beautiful spot up in that area is really kind of just to be out when you get up to this. This peaks you kind of figure you'd be running into a lot of wind or as It was just going to be blowing me out for a while. So is that really the best place to camp, and can I go seen as sort of small area and claustrophobic enough that it sort of feels weird just being up here by yourself barking on the tippy top of a mountain hanging out all night?

It was kind of weird when it got dark. You know, like after, after the sun went down, and it's nighttime, and you can just sort of see darkness really all around you but for the city lights out to the distance from where I'm at. And yeah, it's just kind of a small area. It's kind of freaky walking around and sort of uneven ground and stuff. You're like, man, where am I right now? But it's cool. It's a beautiful spot; get kind of used to it after a bit. It seems like other people are kind of used to it too.

I see other trucks kind of driving around in different areas, or yesterday I did. I saw a couple trucks moving around and stuff. Yeah, I was up here last night, trying to make some photographs of a guy here a couple of hours before sunset. And I try to start to take some photos of the sunset and photos of the surrounding landscape, which is pretty cool. Stunning spots up here. So yeah, like when I was looking south, I think I'm looking at over into the over into Nevada from how far south I am right now. So I think I'm in the Fremont, and I was shot filing this out the Fremont Winema National Forest.

And I think last time I said a Winona, kind of American Oregonian pronunciation of something that was probably I have a sense Well, I don't know. I should look up who when emo was. I'm not really sure. But yeah, over in this Fremont NEMA national forest area. It's pretty cool. And I think it stretches out into a section of the border. Well, I'm not sure really where the border is. But I think we're right about at the border of Northern California, Southern Oregon.

And a bat-like over deeper east to me is a lot of Nevada too, which is cool. So yeah, I was looking out south to me, and I could see a lightning strike. Oh, yeah, I can see lightning, probably six or seven. Good flashes of it seem like hundreds of miles to the South. And he never heard anything, you know, but you could just see like a little or a big bright pop of light, way deep into the South, where they're having some kind of lightning storm. You know, it's probably by Reno or something. But, but it's a school up here. Yeah, it's a nice kind of clear night, hot too. Everybody in the southwest is talking about this heatwave coming through, like Arizona will hit 115. And probably everywhere around everywhere in Nevada and Vegas, and Los Angeles will be or east of Los Angeles into the Palm Desert over by Joshua Tree is just going to be begun during this period of August right now.

Probably fortunate that they're not running Burning Man. I mean, I guess everybody's used to 115 120 degree days with if you had not into Burning Man, Black Rock desert area every summer. But yeah, I feel like the COVID-19 pandemic stuff, all live events in Nevada, are shut down. I think everybody in California is kind of spooked about some of those mass gatherings of people as well. So doesn't look like there's going to be a burn this year. Fine with me, I suppose. But I'm sure there's a bunch of people missing out, which is too bad.

But as you're taking photos, in the evening time of sunset, and trying to photograph some contours and changes in the land, you can kind of see some landmarks. And just sort of the way that these bluffs rise up from, or you have a rise up over the land. And then I have the steep drop-offs. So it's kind of trying to get some images of that. And the perspective that I have from up here on top of this mountain. Pretty cool. It's kind of interesting looking out, and you're like looking down at a ridge that I've only really seen from the valley floor of it before.

The valley floor of it looks huge. Like when you're down there, you lookout, and then you look up at this massive table, you know, Mesa of Iraq, it's just kind of built-up in front of Yeah, but then outside that all around it is, you know, just kind of flat and low in those areas. But yeah, appears just seems like the tippy top of it. So you can kind of look down into the forest. And then you can look at where the forest ends and where the ridge begins. And it just kind of has a steep drop off into a lower Valley. But pretty cool up here. So I was taking photos of that.

Taking photos of some kind of Well, I guess it's where, like creeks and water have run off the mountains over the millennia and have created these deep ours, that cut through this desert landscape out here, and how they kind of pull through this sort of tidy Canyon area and then open up into a wider area that was, I don't know, eroded by some Lakes or something like that back in the Pleistocene era, and probably, probably a few ice ages, a few Ice Age cycles before that, too. So I'm not really sure how old this landscape is. I mean, looking at some other stuff, I kind of have, like, some perspective on 15,000 years. But man, if you talk about 100,000 years, I don't really know, I can't really tell you, or I'm not really very good at that. I know a lot of people do, where they have like a pretty good kind of mental picture in their head of what the changes in the landscape over the last 15 million years were, but it's kind of cool like to see like the geological research that they have out there for some different stuff.

I was up in northern Oregon a few weeks ago, I think when I was talking about being near the john de area, and I was reading some information about the geology in that region and how it was formed. Like way back, I guess they find a lot of fossils up in that area. I think there's a town called a fossil. I remember being a kid up there, go into the high school in the back, pass the football field, and you can just dig away at some shale. And if you kind of crack that shale open, you're going to see these Fern leaves or these, you know, just this full pattern leaf in the rock. And I guess they've also found, like, a lot of like animal fossils out there. Part of the laws that you can't pick up vertebrate fossils is, I think, what I understand thinking to get seashells. I'm not totally sure I think you can get a fossilized seashell.

But maybe they even ask you not to that I'm not really sure. But I guess the vertebrate for fossilized vertebrates there are requested to be remaining in place. But the researchers have gone through and found a lot of that stuff and tried to collect evidence of the geological formations and changes over the years. And I think with that, they're able to kind of make a pretty clear map of the way that the Oregon landscape was constituted back then. I was reading some information before the Quaternary period, where we're in right now.

This is the last couple of 100,000 years that we've had these cycles of ice ages that come on and off. But before that, there was a period where the Earth's climate was, I guess, a lot wetter and a lot warmer. So even in an area like northern Oregon, which is now sort of a dry, kind of high plains' grassland area as you get up into the Columbia River area over in Eastern Oregon, like as you go from, I don't know, somewhere, somewhere around Pendleton that Kennewick, you know, something like that landscape. There's just a bunch of kind of dry flat grassland now, but apparently, 15 million years ago, it was something like palm trees and a more like a way wetter. Rainfall or not rain forest but the way more wet, forested area that was more tropical in its nature. And I guess that kind of reflected with a lot of the animals that were there. Like they talk about camels being there.

They talk about a predecessor to the modern horse, like a kind of small horse. It was probably more like a deer-sized animal sort of this kind of fat nose like predecessors to what would be something more like a bear have been found out there. A lot of different animals were found out there. Which is really cool. I think rhinoceroses john big beaver Sloths few things like that that might have been later collections of animals. But yeah, at some of those early collections, it's interesting to hear about the kind of landscape that it must have been. Still, apparently through some kind of geologic activity, a bit like a really quick or fast-acting mudslide came through and just buried everything in that region all at once. So I think hard in there and then fossilized many of those animals trapped in that mud slider. I don't know, that mud event that came through pretty swiftly. And yeah, I just kind of encapsulated all those things, including the trees to I guess there are some areas where you can see some spires that they kind of are now part of what's been eroded away from the creeks and the rivers that are flowing through that area Ever since then, you know, over the last few, many million years.

They've washed away, and now we have some river canyons and Creek canyons that we see through the area now, and that's where we see some exposed rim rock and stuff that kind of falls along with that with the canyon as it flows out toward the bigger Columbia River Lake river area over there in Eastern Oregon. So it's really cool to get a bit of a perspective on the kinds of things that have changed out here over the years. But yeah, I guess you can. They've made out that those spires are old, old tree trunks that had been encapsulated in mud and then had fossilized over the years. And then now as they're being exposed, again, through erosion, there's really just sort of spiral shape on the edge of a cliff face, but I guess they've been identified as fossilized tree trunks. It's pretty cool. So out here in this area, as I'm thinking about the types of changes that have happened over the past, I don't know 100,000 years or so, which is what I have just a tiny bit better handle on, at least in this region, you can kind of see some different erosion patterns that have happened to the landscape out here. Like when I look out to the west, northwest to me, I see, I see like another huge bluff that runs across from miles. And then below that, there's a big depression in the land that runs really flat and smoothly for miles and miles and miles, it goes up to the North.

And apparently, as you find out more information about it, what now is really just dry desert sagebrush used to be back in the Pleistocene era, a pretty significant lake that stretched on that was probably I think, they marked it on the rimrock of the bluff to be like, 500 feet deep. You know, now that lake will dry out in the summer, if it's, if it's a dry year, there won't be any water in, in, in two of the five lakes that are sort of just little puddles that seem to be left of what once was a huge, massive body of water that was out here probably changed the way this landscape felt 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, this sort of things would oscillate on and off between the ice ages, I think, what is it a 30,000-year period? Mix or to some sense? Well, so what it was about 15,000 years ago from now that we were coming into a period where the Ice Age was starting to end. And as we were kind of coming into what we are, we now have as the Holocene. But before that? Well, I think they kind of marked that out like 11 or 12,000 years or something like that. But some of the earliest human artifacts are, I think they're coprolites. They've been found in Mesa Vera de Chile, way down in South US, recorded proven out to be human remains. But yeah, 15,000 years ago is what they are carbon data too. So really interested to kind of think about human exploration in some of these areas. If you follow the land bridge hypothesis, they came over Beringia, from Asia to Alaska, and then it traveled down into the Americas. That must have been something like 15,000 years ago that that had, I guess, started well. I don't know how that goes. It would have been there or maybe before that to some ideas or that it might have been before them. But it seems like some of the earliest things that we've ever found are from about that 15,000-year mark.

They had some ideas, like, kind of rudimentary can new technology, where they could sort of skirt along what would have been the much lower coastline of the Pacific. I think they say it was somewhere around 400 feet lower in elevation to where it is now. But they were able to kind of skirt around the coast and traveled a little more quickly. To get down towards South US. We do expeditions as you can to do some little jumps out in the ocean travel on the coast pullover. Have a camp. It probably took a long time to figure all that stuff out. Or, you know, for them to maneuver through all the landscape and survive and build and gain resources and stuff. I don't think it was just one guy. Or maybe it was just sort of an interesting thing, how there are outliers, where I think when they track different animals to that, that normally have kind of a home range of 50 miles or something like that. I think they've been tracking. I think it was wolves. I think coupe sometimes too, but yeah, I think the wolf was one that I had heard or reported that like traveled like 1500 miles, you know, it was just like on the run, or you know, just took off but, but really like a lot of them have sort of a more localized home range. And then, for whatever reason, one of them has the Explorer gene as a dog would, whatever that would be. But, still, for whatever kind of urge your drive it has or whatever type of pressures are put on it by its environment, it ends up making a really significant amount of distance all in one go.

So there's sort of a gradualism perspective where things happen pretty gradually and families, we got families, we got families that would kind of slowly traverse a bit of distance South at a time to make its way down to South US. And then there's the other idea of what it would be like punctuated equilibrium, where just about everything is almost the same all the time. But one person does a lot more, or a small group of people does a lot more all at once, which is another idea out there for some ways things spread. I think it's sort of a universal idea of what is it? I think it was the idea of uniformitarianism. And, and punctuated equilibrium where I think there's still kind of a concept and evolution that is talked about, I think for a while, it was considered that like uniformitarianism was what was taking place where everything was about the same and just sort of gradually evolving over time with slow incremental changes that had happened since the beginning of time. Well, uniformitarianism, I think, is more of like a religious perspective that came from the Catholic Church where everything has to be the same because God made it that way a bit. But if you kind of relax that a bit into some of the things that we're trying to tie it to later in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. And then I guess on to the 19th century, where there are you know, the 18 hundreds from when scientific method naturalist researchers, geological surveys were going on in the last year, they're able to kind of put some of those ideas together. But I guess there's always been a debate between those sides of things, you know, even trained scientists sort of disagree about which side of the line to come down on. So assuming the idea is also called the well, this is a different idea, but it's attached.

But there's the idea of lumpers and splitters where, as you're categorizing things, certain people train people to sort of select to lump very similar things together and identify in the same category while others split those small differences. And when identify something that might be similar into two different categories. Which is kind of an interesting idea. I think that happens in biology a lot when they're trying to classify an animal. You know, you have many catfish or something, but you have a catfish with these features. And that's like maybe a different species. Is it a different species or a different subspecies? But it's kind of interesting how they come into those delineations between those decisions. Yes, it's got to be a person that decides what it is. And so those who would want it to be the same, those are lumpers, those who'd want it to be identified selectively different. Those are splitters. And I guess that's sort of a conversation that's ongoing in the scientific community even still. It makes sense, you know, because it's about human categorization, categorization, which I think goes medicine, right. But I think that's sort of the intent of it, you know, it's like, it's a human endeavor that we're involved in, by trying to survey and categorize these different things that we're experiencing in the world. And it's to better have a context of what those are to ourselves. So we can explain them to ourselves. But we don't have to, you know, it's not actually definitive, if it's, if it's lumped, or if it's split, it's just sort of a natural occurrence. And it is different. Each individual, you know, unit of that species is probably a little different. You know if you can imagine, if anyone specific individual the species, or any two, I suppose, were Noah's Ark style, were the only remaining members of that species to procreate and then have offspring. You'd have kind of a genetic bottleneck of those inheritable traits of that animal, and it might not be representative of every trait that was expressed in that animal for a long time.

So I guess that's kind of to say that it's just, there are some things we see and some things we don't and there's a lot of genetic expressions that we could have if there's different pressures, environmental pressures, or different I guess, different circumstances that those creatures were involved in during the evolution of their lifespan, or you know, the species span but yeah, it's got cool thinking about some of that stuff and thinking about some of the past environments that must have been out here. You know, I think about what it was like when the great bass in your area here. It was more full of water. I guess like I was saying, sort of during the ice age or during the Pleistocene era where you were kind of coming in and out of ice ages over 200,000 years, 2 million years. 5 million years. I don't know, they say something like that. But so yeah, like the ice age that we just got out of, I think is part of a cyclical period that the Earth has been in for, for a long time now, where you kind of have an ice age and then rolls off, and there's not as much ice, but there's still ice caps, and then it rolls on, again, where there's ice, and then rolls off where there's not as much ice. And then I guess, for a significant time, but you know, way back in the dinosaurs, and for a significant time for the millions of years that followed that was it like that 68 million years ago, Mark, where we, we lost we had that big extinction event, there was a significant period after that to where there were no ice caps, you know, there's no ice on the South Pole, no ice on the North Pole.

It was like low Earth or something. And I have heard the well. I've heard some reasons for it. I probably won't speculate too much on it now. But you guys should look it up. It's kind of interesting. There are some interesting ideas about how the environment used to be. But, still, yeah, it's kind of a trip to think that there had only been really a couple periods in Earth's history and development over the last 4 billion years when there's been a snowball Earth, I think, is what they call it. The period where there's like a significant amount of ice and snow across the land and held up in glaciers over high elevation areas, either at the poles or even on the mountaintop areas of the North, like the high Northern and low southern regions of the Earth.

But yeah, and I guess when there is ice on the Earth, that's what an ice age is, is a bit of what I've been learning. So kind of a trip to learn some of that stuff. But thinking about some Pleistocene stuff here in the Great Basin, where these giant lakes like a kind of like almost inland seas, had existed for a while, it really must have been quite different. What was it like, Lake Lahontan out in? Nevada? I guess there's like the Great Salt Lake that we see now. It's just a big giant salt flat, and apparently, that used to be, you know, an inland body of water developed. And then yeah, out here, I think they talked about I think they talk about areas of like, what would it be? I guess it's the northern great bass and region of probably like Silver Lake summer-like. And then as you travel south to Abraham Lake, and then whatever, whatever is out there, I'm not really sure what this area would have been called before that. But apparently, all those were just connected as one enormous lake that sort of stretched on for a long time, or there are some breakups in mountains and stuff. But there were just really massive bodies of water that carried on out here, and then it just started to dry up over the years.

I guessed even like 500 years ago, there were are more significant lakes out here like that would probably like more or less resemble something closer to Klamath Lake like we have in Oregon now than what we see out like in the Alvord, like I've talked about the Alvord Desert before earlier in the podcast, I was talking about the Black Rock desert, Black Rock desert, that playa is made, you know from the silt that settled flatly across a lake bed that had been out in that region. And it's now dried and no longer there. And so it's just interesting to kind of perceive some of this Nevada landscape deep southeastern Oregon landscape is something that had really been occupied by a lot of water at once and now is a significant desert region that really doesn't receive any water. So it's just kind of perplexing to sort of pondering like, Oh, I wonder why to like that those kinds of changes have happened in the landscape. But yeah, kind of cool stuff. So over this trip, I've been checking out some of these, these Forest Service towers, which has been pretty cool. I've been having a good time kind of figuring it out a bit. I was driving around some Forest Service roads up in the Fremont minima National Forest. I was trying to find some campsites that I've never been to before and try to find some spots to check out, but yeah, along with a couple lookout towers and cabins that are sort of nestled away up in the mountains there. So yeah, pretty. Pretty cool. Being up here.

But yeah, I just look like a little wobbly critter that kind of scooted down the road a bit with stop, turn post up, look back at me. That's why I was able to pull up binoculars and try and get it on it. And it looks really quite a bit like a little badger that was wobbling around out there. So we're just kind of fine. And then, as I made it a little way out further closer to it. And I finally got the good sense to Duke to the left and cut off into the forest. So didn't see it after that. But this coyote cut across the land over there. I think I've seen a couple coyotes, one of them was quite a bit further away. I heard a bunch of them suddenly kind of winning and call them, you know, making those little coyote hoots that they do. But yeah, I was camped out, I think, two nights ago. And there was a little pack of coyotes that were all calling out to each other.

Somewhere to the North of me seemed like, like a half-mile or a mile away or so. But it seemed like they were still, you know, pretty close. They're probably checking me out. But a lot of cows out there. So a lot of cows like cattle that's been, I think you put up on some of that public land through a permanent to sort of range round and graze and see a bunch of little cows out there kind of run around with their mom cow. And they're blocking the road. I mean pretty good a couple of times, like 3030, big old black cows and a bunch of little baby calves, or you know, little guys. We're all sort of posted up in the middle of a road and have to get close to them. They just look at, yet they start to moo, moo, moo. And then they sort of start to scatter, and then they get scared, and then they all run, and then they definitely scatter, and then I kind of put my truck through and then take up take off on that Forest Service road just a little further. A few deer really only, as I think, dos most of the time-out here. So a couple cottontails that's kind of fun. I don't know. Gobble of critters. But not anything too crazy or too big out here. I haven't seen any antelope. I haven't. I don't think I've really gone East enough to get into the antelope country. I think if I cut just a bit more to the east, I would get closer to some areas where I've seen antelope before.

Like, I've been over to like heart mountain before and over to the Steens. And in those areas, that scene impacts antelope or the little herd's antelope running around and gathering out there. And they're exciting watching this, this pronghorn antelope kind of cruising across the landscape over there. I was learning that those are one of like what is it? Are they like? They're actually a separate animal from the African antelope. And they're like one of the oldest evolved species in North US. Yeah, the antelope. I guess the pronghorn is sort of more accurate with what it's called by some folks now. Well, yeah, when you see a pronghorn antelope out here in Eastern Oregon, you apparently like their speed and their ability to kind of book it across this. This landscape was sort of evolved at a time when they had to. They had outrun what they consider to be like a North American Cheetah Lake animal. I think it was slightly different from the mountain lions we have now or the Jaguars that you find in, like, what was it like northern? Well, I guess I think New Mexico is maybe the furthest North that you'll find or that they've spotted or seen something like that as part of like, their natural range now. And then like south into Mexico, and then and then Central US. And then up here, we have mountain lions, but yeah, apparently, there used to be some now-extinct form of a cat. That was really fast like they talked about cheetahs being fast. Still, I guess the eyesight and the speed of the antelope sort of signals that for some period of its evolutionary history, it had had a spot thing really far away and then move really fast when I found him.

I think that kind of leads to the idea that there was some predator competition for that the for you know, for those antelope that would have put that kind of pressure on him to evolve that kind of binocular eyesight and that kind of speed when they're moving around. So it's kind of interesting kind of coloring about and seeing some of these different animals and stuff out here. But that's pretty cool. Camped out here up in my truck, had the little Mr. heater going yesterday keeping me warm in the evening, and got my sleeping mat and a sleeping bag laid out here in the back of my truck, as I was doing a couple nights out away from home. But it's cool. Yeah, I got my little podcast rig. And the rest of my stuff up here got my layers, you know, really, like I was saying, it's just like super hot like with that heat wave coming through like they were talking about so even here. And I think that's about 8500 feet above sea level.

It was still warm almost all night. I think I had to take a layer off yesterday up in the forest mountains are in the forested area mountains I was at to the west of me, I got real cold at night, I think I've got like a 15-degree sleeping bag. And I think it's like 15 degrees is where you'll survive, but I don't think it's where you're going to be comfortable. You know. So I think a lot of people have talked about that before. So a lot of times, when I'm going to bed with that 15-degree bag, I have to wear a couple extra layers. Like just like clothes you know, like I'll wear like I got this, I've got like a wall layer that I keep on, and I've got like some like a wool pair of leggings I'll keep on that. They kind of keep me a bit warmer at night, and then sometimes, you know what's colder, I've had to throw on a couple sweaters to try and stay warm. The nice trick, though, is that I've learned it is I'm so cold that I wake up from being cold I can kick on that propane heater even here in the back of the cab of my truck. There's enough ventilation of it, but even in the back of the cab of my truck, I can kick that propane heater on for 10 minutes and heat the cab of the truck up to some reasonably comfortable 70 degrees, and then shut it off. So have enough time to be warm to fall back asleep in somewhat of a position to comfort, so they worked out pretty good but yeah.

This morning at about 630, I saw the sun popping up over what is it this Mesa Ridge over to the west to me and then really only after just a couple of minutes it kind of turned from that soft, warm orange light to what would be sort of that more rugged flat daylight look like the shadows there's you know there's really not like a lot of forest or mountains or anything else. You know I'm at the top of the mountain, so right as soon as it came over the horizon, it was just up. And then I was watching the shadows from this mountain cast to the west fade away and turn into what would be regular old daylight pretty quickly; it seemed like 15 minutes or something like that interesting works out here. And in areas where you got a lot of horizon line around, yeah, but yeah, beautiful morning, really cool to be up here in this area. I was kind of freaked out by this area like As mentioned earlier, but it worked out pretty good. I was thinking about maybe I should take some pictures up there and then flip the truck around I back down before it gets dark, but it worked out pretty well hanging out a pier because I wouldn't put a tent up here, that's for sure. But yeah, being in a little spot spending the night out, setting up the tripod taking some star photos. That was cool. You got Jupiter and Saturn out to the do south through a good bit of the night right now. Up in the constellation of Sagittarius. And then somewhere around 11 o'clock. 1130 probably midnight most areas where you don't have a great view of the eastern horizon. I was able to see Mars coming up this morning. It was beautiful. I saw the Moon and Mars or spice pardon me, the moon and like a crescent moon and Venus rising.

Probably around 3:30am 3am 4am somewhere in there. And yeah, looks just awesome. It's incredible to see. See, Venus looks really bright in the morning sky. Looks like it's pretty far away from the horizon line right now. And yeah, nice crescent moon or kind of near crescent shape of a moon right up next to it along the ecliptic line there, so that was pretty cool to see this morning. And then yeah, somewhere around 630, the sun popped up, and now we're back into daylight. So beautiful to see some stuff up here. Oh, and also the purse. He is probably talked about the proceeds a few other times on this podcast in the past, but yeah, the purse he had meteor showers. That thing comes around once a year during this time in late July and August, and I guess he has a peak right around the 10th, 11th 12th of August. So every year, I figure, and I think some years that kind of predicted to be stronger and some Time's like, a bit less strong. But it was cool during this last couple of days when the moon has been sort of more at that crescent shape, rise and really late into the night, you get these really dark skies. I'm sure you can. You can still see quite a bit of the sky. But then, for the last couple of days, it's just been a really dark and intense sky, especially up here in these higher elevations.

Like once, you get to 4040 500 feet now I'm at 8500 feet, it's like, it's just a really crisp air and really dark sky where you can see a lot of stuff as I mean, I could easily make out the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye last night as I was looking up toward the cast come to Perseus and yeah, just really cool to Well, I guess, man, the constellation of Andromeda. But that's always been, I guess, generally as a constellation, this one I've never really seen the shape of. But yeah, looking at you can just see like, Wow, look at that. That's the Andromeda Galaxy right there, naked-eye observation of it, and it looks good. You can see it a lot of times in a dark sky. But the man is apparent to see, like looking south into the constellation of Sagittarius, you see that some of those points in the Milky Way that are part of the Galactic Center really clearly just some of those, like clusters of stars that are out there. Real distant, real faint, or you know, in magnitude, but as they're so close to together as you kind of looked down to the center of the galaxy. As we get those really thick and bright plumes of the kind of dirty look at the Milky Way, it cuts across the sky. But yeah, really beautiful to see from an area like this up here, on one of these summer nights, that has that kind of crisp summer, warm air up here. Nice night to see some of those summer constellations and a nice night to observe some meteor showers even still, I think what is like a couple of days after the peak of to proceed meteor shower, I was able to count probably like 10 or 15, that were really pretty good ones, you know, there are some spitters that I probably didn't count, but there's a number of them that had like that bright, kind of lasting plasma trail that sort of runs behind it.

I guess that as the rock enters the atmosphere, it'll kind of, wow, I don't know if I can really explain to it that well, but it'll leave like a tube behind it. That is illuminated as it's kind of burned its way through that area and then dissipated, you know, to whatever fine point that it ended. But that tube that existed as a tail behind it will stay visible for a couple of seconds after that. After that, big shooting stars already passed. So really cool to kind of get to see some of that stuff from out here. Seeing a couple good ones like that before, but yeah, pretty fun stuff being out here, man. It was a good time.

What's the deal? I don't know. Nice way to live, I suppose. But it has got funny. I guess there's no Coronavirus out here. So I guess other stuff worried about, probably Me too, I suppose. But I hope to strike that repeat. I hope everybody's doing well out there. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I'm going to try and wrap it up here. And if you guys want, you can go to Billy Newman photo.com to see more information about the photos I've taken and check out some of the other work I've been up to. Oh, you can also check out Billy Newman's photo comm forward-slash support if you want to throw some support toward the podcast. It's always appreciated toward the photo chips towards aping and stuff. And yeah, the goal is to kind of try and continue some travel stuff over here in Eastern Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, if they don't lock all the states down, but at least as it is through these sections of public land in Oregon that I'm able to travel around and still through the end August into September and October while the weather is still in season for it. So looking forward to the next few weeks of it, getting to travel around, take some photos and stuff. It's been a nice time getting out and traveling and stuff. So hope everybody's doing good. Thanks for listening to this episode of the building human photo podcast. Always check out more stuff if you want to online, but until next time, I'll talk to you later.

Sandhill Cranes In A High Desert Meadow

Audio Fixed

Sighting big Sandhill Cranes in the mountains. Rockhounding on public land. Traveling forest service roads. Finding dispersed camp sites.

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

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152 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Sandhill Crane _2

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded for the second week of August 2020. I'm out on a camping trip right now, and I'm in the back of my truck on the tailgate at a campsite in the Fremont winnaman National Forest in South Central Oregon. Pretty sure that's about where it would be. Maybe it's still Central Oregon. I think it's, it's still in the mountain area before you drop into the Great Basin, near the location that I was for the last podcast when I was talking about hanging out near that cabin, near a meadow. And since then, I've been driving kind of around through these Forest Service roads, checking out different campsites that are laid out in some areas. A lot of areas up here, I think. I think what I was looking at my watch, and it says we're about 4900 feet. I think it was about 5200 feet near maybe the higher parts that I was at. But yeah, this is pretty high up here. I think it's a little snow on the ground in a spot a while back when I was driving a little shady spot that and get it been warmed up, which is weird to see in August. Not much snow out here, though, you know, by any means. So I think I was up here in the springtime in a different area kind of further down and lower and elevation. And I think it was early April. And I could get away ways up the mountain, but I think I got snowed out really quickly before it before you really even break into, you know, the Forest Service roads that are up here. Even the more well-traveled ones just weren't maintained through the winter. These are gravel roads out here. It's like a cinder cone that's cashed up and then spread across the roads, or I think further to the west. They're still using gravel. I think I crossed over from Klamath County, now into Lake County. As I've been making my way, I think on the map app that I've got that onyx off-road app that I've been using a lot out here, it's really been a good benefit to have a road map of all these Forest Service roads and all the trails and the terrain and stuff that I'm looking around. But yeah, it really helps to kind of scan around and sees what's around you and how to get through some places. But I mean, you'll have just real tiny ATV trails. troublingly though, I think I mentioned, they're not really totally differentiated with notes on how bad each different road is. It's just a solid green line. It says you can drive on it. And it might be a well-graded gravel road. That's why like a highway, or it might be a really small and brushy like overgrown powerline road that kind of cuts along a property line. That's what I was on yesterday for about a half-hour, and I was thinking, man, I probably would have taken that main way around. If I had realized it would do this. That's the thing that gets you to because it'll be a good road for about three miles, you know, or long enough that you're like, I don't really want to turn around. And then it'll kind of gradually creep in and creeping more slowly is I suppose less and fewer people have gone out as far as that to keep the road well-traveled and maintained. But yeah, you get that, that the ruts of the tires. And then you get the center strip where you're getting like a bunch of seedlings of trees, these evergreen trees that are growing up about two feet, three feet or so and they haven't really been topped off or knocked over by other trucks go through maybe there's I don't know, higher clearance vehicles that go through most of the time. But even in this truck, it's still just kind of scraped across the bottom of these tiny little seedlings that are all over the place. So I don't know It's okay, it's okay kind of floating around. But I think I made it around like 70 miles or so from the last place that I was camping and I'm now up in the hills at an area out by a big lake. Well, I think it's a reservoir. And I think this area, there's like kind of a natural depression, it's only been 2025 feet lower. But I think what they've done is they've dammed up an area down from here and then I've created a reservoir up here, I think to supply water to the town and farmland that's down lower in elevation from here, which is kind of cool. It's interesting how it's sort of laid out like this up here but I've been walking around up here for a little and I think I'm the only person up here in this area. I think there's a like a forest service campground that's a little ways over it's pretty undeveloped too. There's a I think there's like I don't think there's running water there. But didn't there's a boat ramp or something that's about it. And there's signs that give me information really out here though. It's just it's just undeveloped camping. But there's a picnic table at the spot. I'm at pretty big Rockpile fireplace with the fire grate over it looks like it was a hunting camp up here. I see, I see a couple log poles that are stretched across a tree at probably 12 feet and eight feet or so. I think that's what they use when, like in the fall when they start doing their when hunting season comes into effect and I think this area gets a little more flooded out with people that are drawn tags to go mule deer hunting. And I think if they if they fill their tag, then they'll use these poles to I guess like prep the meat as it's as you get it back in a camp but it's a cool little camp it's a big area to it's it was a swaying to. There's like a rope swing with a wood board at the bottom that you sit on. You can swing around a pine tree up here a lot of pine trees wood as lodgepole pine. So that was called. I think that's what I saw on a sign that said this is an experimental for us and they're gonna test scenarios, you know, regrowth of lodgepole pine, I think I see what they're talking about. They're just real straight, real thin. Not a lot of curvatures and stuff. So I figure like what they do is alright, like a lot of the the White House or you know, polls that we see here are from trees like this. Pretty exciting. Wow. I've been walking around out here. It's still a good bit of trees in this area. But a bit further out for me like I was saying is that lake bed but it's it's really dry right now there's kind of like a creek flowing through part of the center of it. I'm sure. They probably fill it up in the winter time. I gotta remember it's August two. And if I remember, right, it wasn't a heavy rain year. Is that true? It seemed really rainy this winter. But if I remember them talking about the watershed, they're still talking about how it's sort of a drought year again. Take a sip of my cold coffee that I made up earlier. I got my aeropress hat with me and then I picked up another jet boy Have you had one years ago. Jet bows are like one of the best camping inventions that have been around for a while if you don't have a good portable stove and you're going out a lot. It really makes things a lot easier and a lot more comfortable. But yeah, I've gone without making a fire anytime this year than in the summer out here. I keep seeing signs. As I've kind of learned in the past to that during fire season there's there's really like no, no good way. Or at least no legal way to have an open fire pit. You know, like a rock pit with some logs in it, I think is frowned upon up here. I think we've had a lot of forest fires and stuff up here. From stuff like that, but yeah, I've really kind of tried to avoid making campfires but for circumstances where I feel like I'd really need it in the wintertime I have more fun with that sort of stuff. But what I've noticed the most with camping for multiple days and setting up campfires is that is that you really get city and you get dirty a lot faster. Your clothes are kind of impregnated with the smell of like a wet smoke and stuff and I'm not really appreciated the way I feel with that. So yeah, I've kind of found that by doing just a couple lighter things. And also by following the fire regulation rules, I can kind of stay a bit more comfortable while I'm out camping and stuff. So I'm not really in the backcountry and I don't like a big, big expedition hike backpack and deep into the wilderness and anything I've got my truck here, I've got a cooler, I've got a stove and all that stuff. But then even when I'm out camping or backpack and stuff, the Jetboil is just like it's a pound or last or so I don't it's great. It's just an easy thing to carry and, and, and travel around with. So yeah, lit it up this word made my coffee, I got my aeropress with me, which I think is probably my preferred camping coffee making method if you haven't had an aeropress it's probably one of the the easier. And I don't know it's been it's been fine to make a single cup of coffee. Now if you got like four people and you want a lot of coffee the same time, when that'd be a great solution. It's pretty tough. You can kind of do one cup of coffee at a time for me out here. It works great. You can throw in a scoop it's kind of like plastic. I think it's made by aerobie you know that you know when you were in elementary school and you play Frisbee. It was like an arrow B frisbee they make like frisbees, I think they're like a plastics company and they try and find different uses for these plastics that they're creating. So I guess at some high temperature plastic, and it's a coffeemaker Wow. So you get these little filters you throw them in you can probably look it up online to figure out what an aeropress is but I filled up my coffee and stuff and made my cup and my camping cup and threw some half-and-half in there that I had in the cooler and it's already it's already cold. So it's okay. But other camping tools that I found super useful was like I was saying I don't really have a heater or I don't have a fireplace that I'm using our you know like a fire ring or I'm not bringing wood with me through this time here but what I did pick up is an is just like a portable propane heater. I've seen these used by a couple Other people before, but it's sort of the size of a briefcase or so. And it's it takes one of those, this portable green propane pans, you can pick up for three or four bucks at a store. And you throw that in there. Yeah, light the pilot light. And then it's got this, like ceramic pad that throws off heat. So it's great to have and that's really like my fireplace replacement as exciting as that sounds, but it's pretty safe working really well been really stable and easy to use. But yeah, I got my tailgate down and I've got that like heater going in. At night. It's an it's about as good as a fire you know, you don't have any of the the exhaust or the smoke and stuff coming off of it. So it's a nice clean heat source and stuff. And it's fun to if you want to move you're like oh, you know, I like my cat. But let's walk out over here like what I did last night is a shut the heater off. While I was after I made dinner and I sit in my truck. And then I walked out probably about 100 yards into that open area as you get near the edge of the lake bed. And then I sat down over there and then kick the heater on again. Boom. I'm set up and hanging out and warm. And yeah, it gets cold up here at night. Really, I think the last couple of days have been kind of chilly. Well, least like yesterday was pretty cold for I don't know what day in August. You think it'd be? You think it'd be a hot one. But yeah, it was pretty, pretty cool. Yesterday, I think it was probably like 73 degrees as a high. It was really comfortable. Or I appreciated that as opposed to the heat like I was I was knocked out by the heat. I think it was like around 100 when I was out in the john de area a few weeks back. And man Yeah, it was just wiped out by that. But it was 100 degrees. I'm driving around my truck with the windows down and I have AC in this thing. And I just like I have this mask, right? It's a gator. Yeah, everybody's got a mask nowadays. So I've got one of these Gators. And I would just constantly be like dunking that and ice water. And then like using that to cool off. But man, yeah, throwing that around your neck when it's covered in ice water is a great way to cool off. I think that was like some, I don't know some like gimmicky product back in the early 2000s was something like that where you'd you'd fill up like some something wrapped around your neck and it had ice cubes and water in it. You go on a walk and stay cool in the summer. Now that's super cool coffee. But yeah, having this heater out here has been great going out to anywhere you want setting up a chair, set up a heater, it's a pretty comfortable way to do some stuff. And it works well for doing some photo stuff too, because you can just kind of take off from where you're at, take your camera bag, take this little heater, and then set up your tripod. Sit down said it became a staff get your shots ready for like that evening time. Because you can sit there pretty comfortably and just you know, stay warm and stay pretty comfortable. And I wouldn't really take it too far out, you know if I was if I was traveling pretty far. But if it's if it's just kind of like a short, short little jaunt down to a spot where I'm fishing are where I'm going to be taking some photos. It seems like it's been working pretty good for that sort of stuff. But yeah, kind of fun having a couple of things around, I brought to bear a few other things, but I don't know, I'll probably get into the other camp stuff later. It's been pretty smooth though, keep it out here and traveling around. I've been trying to do some more rock counting stuff. I was learning about some of the privileges that you have on public lands to do rock counting. It's cool you can look this up yourselves too but I think there's like rock counting. It's like the hobby of going around and collecting interesting rocks that you find you know out while you're traveling around and so legally you still get to pick those things up from public land areas, unless there's some specific restriction in that area. But yeah, you can go around and do rock counting all you want so I think it's its most common stones that you can you can just pick up with no, or you know, just you're right on public land to pick up the rocks he come past so it's been kind of cool going around and picking up appearances in a bunch of city and in raw form stuff, which is pretty cool. coming across some Jasper's some agate supports some petrified wood. That's been cool. I think last week I found a chunk of petrified wood when I was walking around and I thought hey, nice cool like this. And there's some areas in Oregon where there's more of that than others. I think it was part of part of the land development of how I guess how much wood would have been trapped quickly under mud. Is that what it is? I don't know. There's some there's some like specific process of how petrified wood gets created from really old trees and you know how that that mineral change happens. So I was learning about agate to agates from wood also I didn't really understand this, I think agates from when a piece of wood is buried in lava from a volcanic flow, someone that knows about rocks really would probably be able to tell me more quickly. But I think from something I was understanding recently, if you don't listen to it, check out the meat eater podcast, there's a bunch of really good stuff on there. I think it's hosted by Steve rinella. And they normally have like some really good guests on to talk about. Most of the time, it's through the focus, or through the lens of like hunting trips and stuff. But really, I've learned so much about like outdoors outdoor management. And then you know, including stuff like this, like rock counting, and geology and all sorts of like intersectional ideas that are about the outdoors and outdoorsmen ship. So really appreciate it kind of some of the things I've learned from that. But one of the things I learned from that from an episode, I think maybe back in early May was about some rock counting stuff that they were doing, where they were going out looking for agate. And I think they were out in the Yellowstone valley where they were looking for agate, one of the things that they explained is from one of the the old Yellowstone eruptions, there was a flow of magma that covered a forest or you know, a lot of trees. And then what would happen is that once that wood was encased in magma, the wood the carbon would burn away, and then it would leave a pocket where that wood had been. And then over a long amount of time, water groundwater would seep into that pocket, and then evaporate out. But as it would seep in, it would bring a certain set of minerals in it. And then as that mineral deposit would build, it would build an agate. And that's how you get these agate stones, I have this one at home. That's that's it looks like, it looks like an onion almost or like if you've ever seen the cross section of a really big piece of hail is sort of like that, where it's got all these different layers to it that have been created at different times at different stages as it developed. But it was pretty cool. Yeah, going around and try and find some agate. And really cool stuff are really, really cool colors really cool. Like, just the clarity of some of them is awesome. It's really cool. I think a little further out from here, you can start finding opal, which is cool, I don't think I've really found a lot of opal. I've heard a lot about that. In the i think i think it's more common and more popular like out in Nevada, I think like north-western Nevada is pretty common for finding opal, or deposits of opal rocks in that area. And that's sort of similar to an agate, at least in look of that kind of clear, Crystal Levy, look of Iraq, which is always fun to find that I've been traveling around up here, and it's kind of High Country up here. But I've been traveling around and yeah, trying to do some rock counting stuff, trying to pick up some different things. And you really can find a lot if you're keeping your eyes to the ground and picking up pieces and chips and chunks of different rocks. And Stephanie you kind of collect through them and see what you got and what you want to keep and stuff. But as I was understanding the rules are rock counting, you can get into I think it's 25 pounds of rock a day from BLM land across Oregon. And I believe it's 10 pounds of rock per day from national forest land, really, it's a lot of rock. Also, in addition to that you can pick up 125 pound or more specific specimen from I think each location. So like if you find like one big rock that's out 50 pounds or 30 pounds or something like that you can you can take that rock as well and not be in violation of your rockhounding picking limits. Pretty, pretty fun. But it's cool. Yeah, you can go around and pick up a lot of stuff. And I think it's with a maximum of 250 pounds collected from each property management location through a year. So you can pick up 250 pounds of rocks over the course of a year. And I think you can't do that in a day, I suppose. Some information sort of sort of states both things, so I'm not really sure which one it is but from what I understood from looking at the National Forest Service website, I think there's some information about rockhounding in Oregon, and some of the areas that I was going to be I was 25 pounds a day on BLM 10 pounds a day on national forest land and that and yeah, that's cool. That's a lot. You can also go around and pick up firewood which I didn't really know about. You need like a permit in some circumstances if you're trying to collect it commercially. But if you're collecting it for private personal use, even just like home use, there's a lot of wood that you can pick up from managed public lands. Some I think there's like some specific areas where they want you to be doing that and some specific areas where they don't want you to be doing that. I think if it's Well, I'm not sure not all downed would but I think if if, if it's down and it's collectible, I think you can collect that in a lot of areas. So yeah, I went through like in the springtime I went through an area of BLM land and I filled up my truck with with a bunch of logs that had been taken down and I think stacked up in an area and yeah, I just loaded up my truck and I have firewood for a while you can get like a I think you can get it's it's a limit similar to the Rock County so you can get like a couple cords of wood a year and collect that for personal home use I think if you're trying to sell firewood then you have to go through the BLM or the Forest Service to get a permit for the area where you're going to be doing wood cutting I've only just picked up down wood that you pick up kind of like for campfire so it's like you know if you're going around trying to pick up firewood for camp it's kind of a similar process to that I'm not really like cutting down on fresh trees and aging them but but there's there's a qualification for that too. You can go around and if it's a specifically designated area for that kind of thing. You can go around and actually you know, use a tool and cut down a tree and process it and take it home and cover up your stump or something like that. And you know naturalize the stump that you cut but but yeah, there's there's a lot of stuff you can do out on public land I wasn't really quite quite aware of in every way. But yeah, it's been cool being out here. Doing some rock counting stuff, trying to find some, some cool pieces. Really a lot of obsidian is what I've been finding, which has been fun. A lot of a lot of like volcanic rock stuff out here. And some of them are cool, you know, but they're not that. Like they're not like a gem or anything. It's just like, you know, a basalt stone from a volcano. But it's cool. Yeah, these rock counting stuff has been pretty good. Oh, what was the other stuff I wanted to talk about. So I think I saw what we've been seeing. I saw a helicopter. There's a thunderstorm. That was like when I was last doing a podcast right so there was like a big time thunderstorm that was rolling through that last camp that I was at when I was podcasting and then rained a bunch after that vows nice. Stayed nice and dry and pretty warm and tracking the truck canopy and stuff waited out the rain then it cleared off just like a couple hours later is that that thunderstorm system moved past us and then got cleared off got cold got pretty cold. I layered up and I walked out into that field now with a ton of wet grass and stuff. walked out there brought the heater like I was talking about and posted it up out in that Meadow to check out the stars and stuff from that you can see Scorpio almost all a Scorpio it's really cool when you got a strong Southern view of the sky. And for Miss area in Oregon you can't quite see the dip in the tail of Scorpio is a kind of scoops down and it comes back up with the stinger at the end. You just barely or I get out you can you can definitely imagine how it kind of scoops around but yeah, at where it is now. This time in August. I think it's it's kind of tipping over and gone. not visible. And that spot but I think I see. Was it Jupiter? You see just past Sagittarius as you're looking to the south. Then near that just a little bit further over to the east on that same ecliptic line you see Saturn. I think they both near the position where they'd be at opposition. They're not as bright as they were a few years ago, you notice, but they're still really bright. Really cool to see. And then if you stay up late enough, maybe around midnight or so. You'll see Mars rise over on the eastern horizon. And it looks real real coppery red and really noticeable really cool. But I think it came up right about the same or about an hour or so after the moon rose last night. So tonight or probably rise along the same location as Mars. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Would those cool, check it out that stuff. And I was checking it out the other night after that thunderstorm out in that field. So it's kind of fun, kind of staying up and check it out some stuff. But then I went to bed. And then I got up the next morning and this was what was really cool. As I looked out the field. I hadn't really seen any animals out there. I heard a few a few birds like a raven, and a couple other things. I think I heard a turkey gobble. Not sure though but I looked out looked across the field and I saw that two of the biggest birds I have ever seen. There. They are the biggest birds I've ever seen. I'm really not sure what it is it looks like similar to Blue herring, so I figured some kind of herring, maybe it's a crane. But I would, I would guess if it was standing up, it would be almost four feet tall. It really looked like a small deer or a dog, like in mass and size, as you know, kind of like the feathery body if it wasn't popped up in a big way, but there are two of them. And yeah, it looked like dinosaurs out there. In this middle of this field. I've never seen a bird like that it looked like like a blue herring. That was about twice a day I see a buck. It's at my two o'clock walk into my three o'clock. 1.2 point 3.4 point. It's a two or three point buck. It doesn't see me. That's cool. Little buck cruising through. I think it's a mule deer out here. I sound like a group of mule deer down in the lake bed this morning. And when I started wrestling around, they they all kind of started run or one of them kind of got excited and then ran off there. They're probably like two or 300 yards from me. And I pulled up the binoculars as scouten Yeah, they're just booking it across this open lake bed. And then they got tired and stopped and started eating grass like almost right away. So it's kind of funny how they they kind of move around but yet this guy's like no. What? 200 feet walking around can't cool, dude. Thanks for camping with me. What is this in two giant birds. I saw these two giant birds Thunderbirds. They're awesome. They're Brown, kind of Sandy tan colored. And they had like a beaked face like a real pointy beaked face really similar to a blue herring. It looked like it looked like an emu or an ostrich or something out in this field. It was diet. But it looked I'd say like I've seen a lot of blue herrings, they're way more slender than this. This really had that kind of big kind of round full body thing and then had that crane neck that kind of the s curved crane neck and it was just kind of on the ground walking with its buddy. And they were cruising around poking at the ground trying to get grubs or whatever. But But yeah, really cool to see him and then so I was watching them for a bit I had him in the binoculars I think I got a couple pictures. But like I was explaining that last podcast smartly. I have a wide angle lens with me, which is you 17 to 40 millimeter so as way out super wide. So you just so you know, no telephoto my back. So didn't get the wildlife shot. That would have been cool, which is fine. And I accept but I did get a couple pictures of it that probably poorly show two big things out in the distance. And I mean, it looks like it could be dogs could be deer. Or it could be birds. So it was pretty awesome to see. But as I walked out a little bit, I exposed myself into the sunlight. They got they got side of me and then they they both let out these for like maybe 30 seconds to a minute or so. They both just kind of stood around and made these sort of warning or territorial croaks. These like these like three beat croaks that would just echo across this whole this whole valley that are this whole Meadow area that I was in it just carried on four acres. They're probably like an acre or two away from me at that time. And yeah, they just let out these loud croaks kind of morning that these up, standing dude predator out in the distance. But yeah, then they kind of sorted it into flight, but they just kind of started back off up into the hill, up into the tree line. And then I tucked back myself back up into the tree line by my truck, made another cup of coffee that morning, and then I saw him kind of pop out again and poking around that. That Meadow again, but it was really cool giant birds, I really would say they're like four feet tall. Body Mass section, it seemed like about two feet or so. And you know, like kind of on their leg, maybe 24 inches off the ground. Yeah, it just seemed like a really big bird. If I was standing right next to it. I'd be like, Whoa, man, this is this is a real critter. So it was fun. I've never seen a bird like that out there before I've heard about. Some of those are some birds like that before I remember hearing like, it's like a ground colloquial family story that I think like a great uncle of mine had had probably similar to this area too, which is interesting. I like that. But he said that he had woken up one morning and looked out and saw these prehistoric looking Thunderbirds he called him and I think I had an experience like a two. I think it was fun. I'm sure it's totally a normal animal. It's probably used to be around a lake or something. You know, that's sort of what it seemed like is just like a giant Pelican or crane or something that you would see out by the ocean, but to see how You're just walking around sagebrush in a field in a meadow at 730 in the morning, it's just like, Wow, look at that. I thought I'd see a deer out there, but no giant birds. So that was really cool. Never seen any, any birds like that before that was fun later in the day saw a few Hawks. Those are cool to see they were watching me. I came out here to this reservoir area, and there is an area where there's water that's backed up, but I saw an osprey fly out over real high, probably 100 feet up above the water, then it kind of kind of did these tight circles. And then it did this big kind of quick drop with its wings still out back but kind of kind of braced drops down about 30 feet did another circle and that tuck those wings in and Dove straight boom down in the water spash grab the fish look like a three inch or four inch Sunfish. And that aspect grabbed it, crushed it and bolted off to its its tree branch perch to have lunch. It was really cool. I love watching this Ospreys fish, it's really interesting to see their their behaviors and stuff. You've got an osprey and are like, you know, like a bird of prey like that. And now it operates in juxtaposition to other birds that we see their behaviors that more commonly. And it's just really interesting to see, like how they operate, how they work and sort of their I don't know, their attitude of their behavior is just kind of interesting. Or just seemed like really present. You know, like, I think they say that, like eagles are carrying eaters. Is that what it is? So there's sort of like a vulture where they'll eat dead things. I think hawks do that a bit too. But hawks, hawks will pass. I think hawks like to pounce on mice stuff, but you never see a hawk fish, like I see ospreay fishing all the time, it's just really cool to see that kind of connection, or that kind of that kind of development between their ecosystem of an osprey knowing instinctually knowing from its parents that, you know, it's because they nest the nest really like for a long time. So you need to have those big nasty return to those nests instead of the giant, wide nest and the snags. And they're just like really impressive lifecycles they've gotten but it was cool. Check it out. smartspace always something I like that additional to that. I saw a helicopter cruise by like I've seen there's a lightning storm just the other day. So I guess it must have started fire somewhere out here. But I saw this helicopter cruise over right near the reservoir that I'm at. I was a couple miles away from at the time, but I saw a reservoir come or I saw a helicopter fly over the reservoir with a big bucket hanging from it. And I watched it to a cycle of like two drops or it wouldn't drop here but it would scoop up water from this reservoir and then fly out to wherever beyond my distance wherever it needed to go to dump on this fire. putting out fires with the helicopter. It was cool to see but yeah, it was really wow. No way the helicopters cruising right here, picking up a scoop of water and then bolting it over to wherever that fire needs to go out. But it was a trip to see that it was cool. I wonder what that be like to be you know that, Hey, you got your firefighter but with the helicopter, it'd be a trip to be like, well, let's ramp up the helicopter. And it'd be a weird to be a pilot to do that. You know, like I hear about being a helicopter pilot, but I just think it'd be really strange to be hovering. Drop a big sack into the water. And then boom, scoop up hundreds of pounds gallons and gallons and gallons of water. I mean water is heavy, right? You know, so you have to like think about that. But then scoop up all that change how you're flying to adjust to all the new weight that you've added to the to the vehicle that you're flying in while you're flying it. That's what I think it'd be strange if you load a vehicle or something and then you've got that weight in it and then you fly that around. But as you're riding a light vehicle like a light helicopter, cruising down picking up big, like 1000 pounds of water actually can't pick that up but picking up all the water that it can and then lifting off and taken off again that just be so strange to fly around the mountains picking up picking up big buckets of water and then dropping it on fires. It just seems like a weird way to spend your days out here in the high desert. But I'm sure it'll be probably some cool stories. I don't know. Yeah, cool stuff to see that helicopter. cool to see. This Thunderbirds cool. Do some rockhounding cool. See some mule deer cruising around out here saw that bug Oh, endless chipmunks. I see chipmunk perched up getting some sign right now. Nice. But yeah, endless. Endless chipmunks. Many squirrels no mosquitoes at all. That's been great man. I got beat up by mosquitoes up in the Cascades. I think last week I'm still kind of nursing my way back to health from that. That really hurt. It's x those mountain mosquitoes, when they're held by those bogs and marshes and lakes leftover from the snow melt. And it seems like now in July and August is when they're really just getting going. But man, they're brutal, hungry mosquitoes. And I hit myself a deep a couple times. it slowed him down. But man, I could have used 50 or so last mosquito bites that day, that's for sure. So, yeah, good times, but have fun, get beat up by mosquitoes, but but not on this trip. So I'm having a good time. I think it's a little colder this time too. So that's probably part of what's dampened down the number of mosquitoes and really out here in this higher desert area, I think you get a little lucky with mosquitoes if you're not around like a pretty heavy body of water. So in a lot of areas I've been it's been pretty dry. So are you it's like pretty far away from a lake and pretty far away from like, a bigger river or Creek source, that'd be a mosquito swamp. So thank goodness, I've stayed away from that for a little bit. But having a good time out here, I'm going to be driving around for a good part of the day, checking out some more Forest Service routes. And looking at this map, there's just so many areas you can go from you can spend, you could probably go I could probably go down into Nevada, I you know, I'd cross a couple highways or something. But you could probably drive all the way down in Nevada, mostly just taking these Forest Service roads. I think Dan is like the Fremont than the winner. And then you can drop down into the I think Humboldt I think it would be the Humboldt National Forest. Yeah, you can stay out on these back country roads and stay off the I mean, you know, there's no towns or houses or anything on here. So I think just about everything is a bad country road. But you can stay on those and get down into I don't know Nevada, or Northeastern California and spend a bunch of time just kind of tooling around out in this high desert country. So it's pretty cool. I've enjoyed checking it out out here. And I want to try and get back out here and do some more stuff. I think it's a it's a good good kind of location before it gets too deep into the fall. And I think this is probably one of the the faster places to get snowed out in in October or October, November, depending on the snow levels that year. I remember being out with my dad, October 17 I think we were camping at an area in Eastern Oregon, really still just kind of the lowland area of Eastern Oregon, where you know you're not you're not climbing up real high to a mountaintop or anything like that kind of like where I am now. But it started snowing snowed through the valley snowed all across the highway when for years, we were trying to trying to drive back the blei and a couple inches or something like that. But still, you know for like early October there's still hunters out there and campers and stuff. And yeah, I just get hit with the the first couple couple inches of snow. It's good times, but I'm not sure it makes it cool for people that are more used to this now and stuff I'm sure it's kind of an easy transition when you're doing some hunting stuff to get out and deal with but man I do not like early season wet snow if it stick in and kind of deal with that. But man that you know, just like after it half hour, it's just standing water is what it feels like. It's just that slushy stuff, you can't even walk in through it all splash now. It's rough. So I'm glad to kind of avoid that most of the time. But up here in the mountains is cool. Hey, the helicopters back I think you might be able to hear that. I'll probably noise gate that sound out. But yeah, I hear that chopper flying over and it looks like it's probably gonna head over to that reservoir again. So again, I've had those fires, shoot. But I'm gonna wrap it up here, I suppose. And probably come back with another podcast in the next couple days to talk about more of the summer camping trips I've been out on and I think I'm going to try and get home process and photos, process some stuff together and then do a little retrospective about some of the last couple camping trips that that had not yet talked about on the podcast. So thanks for tuning in and listen to me. jabber from my tailgate, high atop the Fremont winnaman National Forest in the mountains by Lakeside camping out. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. You can find more information about me at Billy Newman photo comm shoot me a message or feel free to support the podcast to go to Billy Newman photo comm forward slash support, or I think patreon.com forward slash Billy Newman photo if you'd like to help out and send me some bucks to support the travel and photo stuff that I'm up to and what I'm able to put together so it always helps. always appreciate it. But thank you guys very much for bothering to listen. And to check out this episode of The Billy Newman a photo podcast Talk to you next time.

Summer Thunderstorm Over Fremont Winema National Forest

Thunder in the high desert mountains, photographing a meadow in the evening, camping in the rain.

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

Link Summer Thunderstorm Over Fremont Winema National Forest

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151 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown summer thunderstorm_1

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Be sure you guys are tuning in for the first week of August 2020. I'm out on a camping trip right now; I'm deep in the middle of the Fremont National Forest, where I've been driving around for a good part of the day. And it's not; it's not really high desert out here. I think it's still mostly like smaller pine trees. And then I think just a little further east if I were to drive where you would start to drop into the area, that would be like the Great Basin, I think that area that was the Inland Sea back during the Pleistocene period before the end of the last ice age. And that's where you get like on eastern Oregon and then out into Nevada to I think it's like just a little east of Bend Oregon. And, and then south from there, into Nevada, and parts of Utah. I think it's like a really big, like high desert area that I think was mostly created from like an inland sea or, you know, that's, I think what they talked about the Great Basin area when you look on those, those maps, and it kinda has this, this far northern region that are up into the Chico mountains and pretty sure somewhere around there. But I think it's a pretty cool being out here. I was able to find a, like an old or at least it's on the map is like a forest service cabin, I don't think it was really in use by the Forest Service's it's not like a base, or it's not like a place where they have resources or tracks. It's just like, an old, an old built homestead almost is what it looks like out here. And it's got to, but I think it's kind of semi-managed and sort of protected by the National Forest Service out here. The roads are pretty good to get into it. And then it opens up into a big meadow. It's probably. I don't know, six or seven acres or so. And then there's like big fencing around it made out of the small, like log pines that they dropped. And then they'd put together these like a-frames and then stack together logs on that to make these big fences that kind of stretch around the property of the house, I guess to not have it, I don't know, trampled or whatever by but whatever out here. I think when I was walking around, I saw that there's there seems to be like some open range cattle that share the land out here. As I was walking around, I can see some signs of it. And then I could also see, and this is where I'm not really too good at. Following what I'm seeing, I'm not sure if it's like, like mule deer that are out there. Or if it's elk that are out there. I know the mule deer out here, but I'm not sure if what I was seeing was from an elk or knives seemed like it would be elk. But I'm not really sure. It's kind of cool, though. It's cool being out here in this area. I spent a good part of the day getting down here. I've been trying to make a camping trip of some sort each week here through the summer. And that's really kind of been really only one of the few things that have been. I don't know, stress-relieving anybody else stressed this year 2020. Man, what a good time. It's an It's been a long couple months, it seems like, and it seems like a lot of changes and a lot of shifts and stuff for a lot of people, myself included, and just kind of the way that things go and the way that you're able to kind of plan for the future and the way you're able to sort of deal and figure stuff out. And yeah, it's been kind of depressing to just sort of change up, and really I think psychologically, the more draining thing is the the lack of assurance that it's sorting out or that any of these milestones that are out there for what we're dealing with are our stable milestones, you know, it seems like the kind of keep moving out further and further away from us. I remember back in early, what was it like mid-March, March 15, when we had the guidelines for America come out said we were going to be locked down for two weeks a 15 day period, we're going to get a stimulus check. And then it could last it could last with an effect as long into July or August. I remember hearing in that port now we're here in August. It seems like it's still honestly seems like it's like one of the longest periods. I mean, of course, it's obvious what I'm saying now, but it's just the longest period in history that I think anything like this has ever occurred in this kind of pattern. I mean, we've had other pandemics and stuff, but I think more What I'm talking about is like the social pressure that's sort of coming along with them with this set of circumstances that we've seen over the last few months maybe it's part of an election year. A lot of countries go through periods of turmoil before their election cycle process, but as it is, I think it's just like a lot of lot of real factors that are uncomfortable. So part of what I've been trying to do since I have a pretty, a pretty small Well, how do I say yeah, it's like a pretty easy set of things that I'm up to right now. And I'd really like to expand it; I've been kind of frustrated that there's not really an opportunity to do a lot more stuff, you know, like any of the weddings I would have done this summer, they're pretty much out. any of the other work stuff I would have done to make some money is sort of up in the air. And so a lot of the stuff that I'm doing is, is sort of alternative to that, which has been really interesting, it's been fine. It's not been that interesting, I guess, given just the amount of pressure that's on everything, if it was just an open period, you know, everybody got to kind of relearn some things, and we knew what it was gonna end or we knew that it was a good thing that was happening, you know, I bet everybody would have been more creative. That's sort of what I'd heard from a lot of folks are, you know, like, I listen to a lot of radio, a lot of podcasts and stuff. I listen to a lot of podcasts from the different comics that are out there, along with a few others but, but at the beginning of all this, we were talking about, oh, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna write a ton we're gonna be we're gonna come out of this with a whole new our material of jokes to write and then a couple months into a couple of weeks into it, they're all saying I haven't, I haven't even flipped open a notebook, I haven't written anything down, I haven't done anything creative. And I think that's sort of a sign of and hearing from a lot of people that are out to try and do something semi creative, or even just creatively wake up and make coffee and eggs, it's like, it's just a drag a lot of the time and there's been a, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's kind of dragging people down, and in a number of ways. So I hope everybody that does end up listening to this is, is getting through it and understands that they're not alone in the in all the stuff that's going on. And it's it's just a It's a unique year and a lot of ways. So hello, man, I hope it's unique. It's unique so far into my life. So I guess I can count my blessings on that. So I'm out here and what I've been trying to do to kind of sort out that stress and stuff is to try and get out and get to do some more outdoor travel and some camping stuff while I have the wide opportunity to especially through the summer. I mean, that's one of the activities that's not restricted. Is traveling around and camping. I think I talked about that on one of those podcasts in May when we were still in the lockdown coming up to our phase one reopening. And we rock kind of trying to figure out what can we do what can we not do? What do we do with this time now that we have you know what, we can't go to work? You know, we kind of do some stuff in town, but it's like you can only like take walks around your block so many times or take hikes at the park so many times. So I guess it's I have the background in it. And since I've been doing it for a while, I've been trying to take advantage of getting out once a week for an overnight trip or a two night trip to go to new places in Oregon and really trying to do a lot of scouting stuff, which I've enjoyed to doing some scouting stuff through the summer has been pretty cool. Where I'm really trying to go through some of these backroads I'm trying to like Mark spots in the map where there's good campsites, which I hadn't really done before, you know, it was a lot of places I've driven a lot, a lot of roads I've been on. Especially, you know, I backcountry roads to Forest Service roads, BLM roads, and I know a lot of good dispersed camping areas. And really, I understand the context of how to find those areas so much better now that I'm older than when I was young. I mean, when I was young, and I go camping with my dad, you know, we'd go out to Eastern Oregon, we'd find some spots. And they had known about this spot, since you know, he was a kid and he was going over there and hunting camps and stuff with his grandpa. So it's cool for me to get to go over to those same spots and get to check out that area and stuff. But I think there's been or at least when I was a kid, I didn't really understand that the land, like the public land rights that you have, and really how those are organized, like how public lands are organized and what you can do on him and then sort of how it operates. I didn't really understand the difference between national forest land and BLM land or national Parkland and state Parkland or wilderness areas, National Wildlife Refuge areas, man, there's just so many distinctions of different things and then also just private property. So I didn't really have a clear recollection of those things. And really, a lot of time when it's public land, you can go on it, but there's some things you can't do on it like I they maybe hunt in some circumstances, like a, like a national park, or I think you can't discharge a firearm inside a national park. But for specifically permitted events, maybe probably national wildlife refuges. I think those hunting opportunities are limited. Also though, you can still do some things in those areas. I think you have to get permitted and you have to drop tag for that location, I think is what it is. But yeah, it's kind of interesting, sort of learning about that learning how these things go, and also finally getting some maps that you can use that you can kind of trust better. While you're in the backcountry. I think that's something that's really helped me kind of understand where I can go and what I can do and I don't know I mean, we've had those map books you know, like that, that 50 page or 100 page book of Oregon and you know, every page is a 25 mile map of that area is always super useful as a kind of grid out everything and show you that you know the mile by mile marking and the topography of the area. The different Little roads and stuff that even those roads, those mapmakers still got things wrong. I remember to you know, back in like, was it 2004, I think we were out in an area in Southern Oregon near the Nevada border was a Druze reservoir somewhere South a Gearhart mountain. And I remember we were on some, some little, some little road, I don't even know if it was if it was a national forest area, I think it was just in between private and public lands, as it kind of jumped back and forth. And those pretty remote areas, all of it is just remote, desert and forest and sagebrush and Juniper. But some of it goes into like ranch land, it's more managed, and some of it cuts back into BLM land. So as little roads sort of meander through it. But I remember being out there and noticing that the map on the page was just totally different than the map or than the other real world ground truth of where the road went. And I saw Oh, wow, yeah, you can't really trust the maps to show you the information that you want to see. When you need it. Other times to you know, you'll see like, Oh, hey, like it shows there's a road right here. Good deal, we'll take that road. Well, you know, it shows it's on the map. So you cut down there, you get on the road, and then it's washed out like crazy. Or it's super bumpy and like, and just terrible, right? And but it's the same green roads, the same label, the same marking is the road next to it that was graded and, and aren't was that paved, right? It's grated gravel, they put more gravel down, I think is what I'm trying to say they've, they've made it an easier going road to drive on. But then you get those washboard sections out there. I don't know if you guys have done that, where you're driving around in the Forest Service roads and those gravel roads. And I think it's a natural process of erosion that occurs that creates these waves in the material. You know, as I think as a rainwater comes down, it sort of naturally over time generates these, these little ripples. And that's the washboard effect that you get when you're driving. That's also the thing that kind of keeps your car sideways when you're, you're going a little too fast on a gravel road. So I started doing today, I think I kicked it pretty hard side or not, you know, like, it's pretty loose on the traction, and it was starting to tip sideways in my truck. And so I slowed down and threw it into four wheel drive after that, and was able to cruise around out here pretty freely. But yeah, I wanted to talk on this podcast about hanging out in the Fremont National Forest and I just got finished with a huge thunderstorm that came through. It just really finished raining a little ago. We kind of thing when I arrived to today at this Meadows still a few hours before sunset, so I walked around and kind of went along the perimeter of the meadow and then and then I noticed that you know, I mean it's cloudy. It's been kind of cloudy today. And there's been thunderheads that have been building up over the location that I've been ever since I kind of came over the past the Cascades had been in like a pretty solid string of a thunderheads that have sort of coalesced into big mass over the Cascades. Some of it here over the Fremont National Forest river mountains these are that I'm in, and yeah, it seems like this section in Eastern Oregon was getting hit with a good Thunder a good summer August thunderstorm today, which was kind of fun to sit through and go through. It was cool. If I got rained on pretty hard early when I was driving over. I thought I'd get out here and be a little more free of it. But it seemed like that storm kind of drifted over this way. And it was sort of drifting north from here. And yeah, there's a new system, but man, there's just a bunch of lightning that was coming through and huge cracks of thunder. Just big, deep rumbles. I haven't heard Thunder like that. And in years and years, probably, you know, where it just kind of stays and like, hangs and rolls for 10 seconds. 15 seconds, it seems like you know, you just really kind of like whoa, is Can it really still be just cracking and rumbling and rolling. And, and there was enough activity and if lightning activity that was going on where you'd hear thunder. I mean, it was almost like 45 minutes there where there was just a crack and a roll of thunder almost continuously like it was an it was pretty intense. It's It's It's really, I think one of the more strong lightning storms I've been in a while. But that's sort of how it goes out here. When you have these higher elevations. I think I'm floating around up in the 5100 feet or so above sea level. And so it just means I'm up in the mountains where these, these thunderstorms get started, you know, they get there. They get there. I think that's where they'll kind of coalesce over these big mountain tops and then float over in the hot weather. I don't really understand the weather enough to say I know how a thunderstorm starts. It doesn't start now. I've just gotten cold enough. I'm trying to throw a jacket on. And now you got to live through it. I'm really camping. It's been good but I'm gonna be out here for two nights, I think is what I'm going to do. And then tomorrow, I'll cruise out. And I'll try and hit some of these Forest Service roads for a bit. drive around, do some exploring mark a couple spots on the map as a, as I'm cruising around. I think that'll be, that'll be a good time. But then I haven't been out here before. I think I've heard of a couple of friends that have been out in this area that have done some. I think they did a couple scouting trips for a hunting trip that they're going on in the fall. I think this is an area where we're one of my friends goes, I think they try and draw a tag for not this area. I think it's a drainage over from here. But I think I've heard about this area a couple times from people talking about it. So yeah, it's cool, it's cool spot it was out taking pictures earlier, taking some photographs, I've been working mostly, probably for almost a year and a half now. I've been working a lot with this 17 to 40 millimeter wide angle Canon lens. And it's a pretty inexpensive lens, and you can get it for like 400 bucks, maybe a little less, if you're lucky. And you get it on a sale time sometimes in the fall as we're kind of ramping down toward for Thanksgiving, I think you can get some good deals on it. But that's it's sort of in the the $400 range. I think sometimes maybe it's more around five or something, but I picked it up a couple years ago when I was starting to do some real estate photography or was working for Airbnb for a while where they had hired me as a photographer to go into these Airbnb plus listings, and get a new set of photographs, I was interested in kind of learning about how specific they wanted all this, this photographs and this this really specific art style and, and you know, format of it. And that was fine. It was interesting to do for a while. But, but what was cool is that I picked up that lens to get in and do that work. But really, after that, I've been appreciating how much I can do with that wide-angle lens. And then you know, 40 millimeters isn't way different than 50 millimeters. It's certainly different for the effects of portraits and stuff but when I'm out here doing landscape stuff, and I'm trying to take pictures of a lot of this stuff is kind of sketch photos to where I'm sort of going around and midday I'm taking some photos of some different things I want some cat photos and my track and my little cooler set up in the back here. And so all that's been good. In addition to that the the Astrophotography stuff that I can do with it, it's pretty cool because it drops to 17 millimeters. It's an autofocus lens, it's a sealed lens, it's, it's pretty, it's it's pretty good and most ways and I've really noticed over time that I'm not as absolute of a mandate for me to be shooting at a really wide open f stop you know, if I'm shooting at a wide-open aperture, almost all my photos early on were 1.8 or, or 2.0 or two eight or something. And I would do that really because I was trying to I was really trying to get because I didn't have very many lenses I was really trying to get as much effect out of that bouquet out of that soft background as I could. So I was really trying to lean into that and get some photos with it, and I noticed with my camera and equipment at the time that it just it just looked better. They just did look better when it was at, you know f1 eight; I think I just had that nifty 50 Nikon 50 millimeter for the longest time that's what I did. I did my early trips on and did a lot of my portfolio building stuff on that but I've got a different 50 millimeter lens with me now I've got it on my film camera in my bag right now which I need to take out too and I'm trying to finish a roll of acti film it's been on there for a while and I've enjoyed shooting it it's cool it's and it's a new Canon camera to me at least I got it used on kth and spent 35 bucks on it 10 bucks to ship it and it takes a weird battery to it's one of those 90s film cameras it has this weird it almost looks like a battery pack. This it's like two so I was almost like to double A's if they were a little fatter but are bonded together in this little plastic pack and then you pop that in there and shoot for a little while I guess and it runs a meter okay so I'm I'm getting by with it but I've noticed the film cameras stuff it's it's fun to have an awesome film camera it'd be cool to have a Leica and all the lenses I wanted but a lot of the time with that you know the good lenses I have this this new or like canon l glass that I get to shoot through and for film photos and for the variety of images or the variety of lenses i have i can i can do telephoto I can do prime I can do really wide-angle all with the modern digital Canon lenses that have you know chips in them that read well that meter well that make contact with or send information back and forth or at least from the lens to the camera I think that works. That works in the autofocus stuff for the digital camera. This is this is autofocus. Yeah, it's an autofocus digital camera. It's sending information back. It's working. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So it's it's cool. Like That's something I didn't really have available to me for a long time. You know, I think when I've probably on this podcast, if you go way back in the archives, I'm talking a lot about film with a Nikon f4. You know, I mean, that just had autofocus, I was the first camera like 88 to get autofocus period. So it's cool to have that in a more flexible way now. But what I remember talking about the past that was that I had, like, limited options with glass all the time, I didn't really always have the lenses that I would have preferred. And so I've kind of made a collection of that now with this canon stuff, I got a Canon camera. And so I can throw all those lenses on and have that same flexibility that I have with my digital set. But just with this, this film body that I get to shoot a roll through, so I kind of say the film stuff for when it's a thing that I want. But what I've noticed, though, for a little while, is that I miss a lot of those moments, and I ended up just having the the norm, you know, the regular digital camera with me with a bunch of my other gear. When I've been going out, I've been trying to kind of just take the camera with me, and then I'll leave the bigger bag back at the truck. So that I'm not really carrying as much stuff with me, I've also started carrying, like when I'm out here in the woods and stuff I'm carrying that binocular harness with me, which is kind of cool, you can get them in different sizes, but it's sort of like if you imagine like a backpack, but what they do is they strap on to the front, so it's right on your chest. And what you can do is fill is put like a pair of binoculars in there. So you can pull them out and then scatter around with your binoculars, do some glasses, and then pop them back into your into your harness and then kind of carry on with whatever you want to do. But if you leave that empty without the without the binoculars, if you have a smaller camera rig, probably like a mirrorless or a Sony camera, you know, like one of those Sony, a 6000s. Man, if you were a backpacker, and you had a Sony A 6000. And this, this front carry, like binocular pack, you'd be really sad that would be like all the camera bag that you'd need. In fact, really, if I'm thinking about ever doing some, like, over, you know, some longer backpacking travel, where I just have to pack everything in a way it's gonna be something I'm more conscious of, than I think that's really like the way to go is I've kind of been thinking about it a little bit, it's like get to get a lighter camera, or I mean, it'd be great to like carry like a 360 camera, you know, if you're going up somewhere, those are almost nothing as it is anyway but but if you carry like an SLR or something that you want to try and do some some more controlled photography was you had something like a, an A 6000 from Sony or an a seven, seven or three or whatever it is something that size with a lens attached to it, you know, that could fit in one of these binocular hearts is harnesses and carry kind of route on your front and then you see something you would take it, pop that open right on your chest, pull it right up to your eyes, got straps on it in the harness, pull it right up to your eyes ready to shoot, and you can take photos, or take photos, you know as quick as you want to. So it's kind of a cool process. If you're out hiking a lot for what I'm doing. I have my binocular harness, but it's got binoculars in it. And I've been kind of going around trying to do some bird watching stuff while I'm out here in so cool Hawk was posted up who's looking at me, that's about all I've seen so far. So I coyote the other day. That was cool. I'll talk about that later that but because I had those binoculars in there, and I've been kind of going out on these, these shorter hikes and stuff that I've been trying to go around and like, just kind of watch some stuff or watch land and kind of keep an eye out. But I just had the camera on my longer strap on my side with that 17 to 40 millimeter lens. And that's where it's really good. And it's been a pretty flexible kit for me to go around and take a bunch of photographs with so it's pretty easy, pretty lightweight to work with. And I can kind of move back and forth between those things strapped around my neck, you know, it's not everything just hanging around my neck with a lanyard. It's all kind of put somewhere or packed in somewhere. So that's been kind of cool. But it was good going out and taking some photos tonight, I was trying to get some of the i didn't i didn't get anything lightning in the camera, the lightning stone kind of past as soon as it was getting really dark enough to do like a long exposure kind of thing where I could, I could sort of catch something, something spark and otherwise, you know, you got to you got to beat the lightning bolt with your shutter finger. And that's a pretty tricky task to do. I think that's how they do it. You know, when you get those, you get those like magazine photos back in the day of powerful lightning bolt striking. I don't know the center of a road or something like that. It's what they'd show, you know, some kind of power lightning bolt, but the way that they would do that stuff is I think, I think it was like it was dark out, you know, are pretty dark out. And so they'd set the camera up for just a cycle of long exposures. And then they would just kind of let it ride, you know, so they'd have a couple seconds to expose the image to whatever you know would work. And then they would just kind of have that rolling so that when when a bolt of lightning did strike, and it would be captured and you could go through that collection of captured or you know how I say that. When a lightning bolt would strike the ground, the cam I would have already been exposing for a photograph. Because it's just cycling the shutter on a four second exposure, let's say something like that. And so you know, it takes a four second exposure, stops, processes for a second, takes a four second exposure stops processes for a second. So I think that's how they did some of that stuff where they, they kind of anticipate. Alright, it's been a couple minutes, let's take a frame now and then it's just going to be an event in the future. So we don't know if it's going to happen or not, we're going to wait for this event in the future when we boom, see a lightning bolt. And then that light then exposes the sensor or the film and the camera. And then you're left with an image that has that lightning bolt represented in the frame when you're shooting on a tripod or something like that with with like a short cycle, long exposure. And I thought that was pretty cool. But I didn't really get a chance to get all that stuff set up before the storm kind of passed me by I did get a lot of cool handheld stuff that was that's great if the thunderheads and stuff. And really unfortunately, just in the location that I'm at a lot of that and I guess maybe for the better. But that lightning storm didn't pass right over my head, it was still a little ways away. So I could see the lightning bolts cracking through the trees can out in the distance more, a few they stretched across the sky pretty good too. It's just a big old, you know, from from east to west. It was like a big old chunk of boulders crack all the way across the sky. It was cool. So I got photos of the thunderheads, the sunset, the the big field out here, it's cool. It's a nice area. But I was also thinking about some of the other stuff that I want to be doing tomorrow. So I'm out in the Fremont National Forest, I'm going to be heading, I think, maybe south from here, and I'm going to try and explore a couple of areas that are still open. Or I guess it's all open publicly, this is like a pretty large contiguous section of national forest land here. And really, like that's a big part of Oregon overall, right? It's like 53%, public lands. It's cool. Yeah, if you look at a map, you'll see the cities and you'll seem like the highways and stuff. But if you have the right map, it'll show you where the BLM land is and where the different national forests are. And it's cool, this whole area, the Northwest is just, there's a lot of public land that you get to use. And there's a lot of open area that you get to go to and, and yeah, now that I've got a good map of the outdoor off-road, roads and some of the terrain and stuff with some good notes, and I'm able to kind of move around and get out to a lot more places than I had before. So it's been cool. The app that I'm using is the on x off road app; it's, I think 2999 a year. And so pitch that out, picked up this app, and then you can download offline, these, these really detailed off road maps that are supposed to show you all the trails, you know, even just walking trails, all the roads, all of the like the pieces of information you'd need for kind of moving around in the backcountry and really as surprising as it is as remote as a lot of these places are people go here, you know, it's it's also public land is managed by the the forest department forest Forest Service. Yeah, I think a lot of this does managed by the Forest Service, the BLM stuffs managed by the BLM. And that's why these roads are as good as they are or maintained. And that's why I like when trees are down on these mountain roads, you know, someone has to go through at the beginning of the year and cut all those out, rip them out filling the potholes, all that sort of stuff. So all these areas are, are known about and you know, kind of managed in a pretty significant way. In fact, I think, more so to come in the future. I think they just announced yesterday or the day before that they've passed the great American outdoors Act, which I really don't know the first thing about or, or what it does or doesn't do or what it puts in or leaves out. But I think part of my understanding is that it's supposed to change some of the funding mechanisms that go into supporting the the maintenance of these public lands that are out here across the country, but really significantly out here in the western states. So it's, it's pretty cool. I think, before that it was like, well, we should spend, you know, X amount of money, but there's a more important place for that money to go. So it wasn't like a guaranteed amount. Sort of what I understand, so if I understand it correctly, there's like I think they've said $3 billion a year of mandated funding for projects. I think here in the backcountry, BLM land, Forest Service land and like national wildlife refuges and stuff so pretty cool, but yeah, I think that's gonna, well, maybe we'll see a change in that. I think it's supposed to better fund the operations of BLM and forest service people as they're going through. And trying to get these areas ready for, for the public to be using more regularly. So it's cool. I think it'll mean a lot over the next few years, or what maybe we'll see how it, how it kind of transforms some of the way that these these areas are managed. I think maybe it's more for mining, I probably shouldn't even speculate. I'm not sure at all. But it's pretty cool. I'm excited about being out here and doing some camping and stuff dealing with this thunderstorm. I think it's one of those things whereby the morning, you know, it's going to be or at least I was looking at the weather, it should be mostly cloudy, partly cloudy, mostly sunny tomorrow for a while. So I think that's pretty cool. I'm excited to be hanging out, do some cabin stuff, do some podcasting. I'm in the back of my truck right now. Like I was saying it was rain in early after this thunderstorm. So I got that canopy on my truck. And I'm nice and dry, nice warm, kind of feels like I'm just inside somewhere. So it's, it's a cool cool rig, having the four wheel drive, having the canopy on the back, having your staff and your sleeping area. Just kind of set it back there. And I'm ready to go. So I've been having a good time being out here, and it's been pretty good. Pretty good trip so far. I so appreciate you guys checking out this podcast from me. I'm gonna do a couple more podcasts while I'm out here on this camping trip. And I'll I'll try and try and set up a little backlog of them on my website. I think it'll be a good idea. Now I kind of take the breaks and stuff. I'm sure no one no one keeps listening when it when it is there. But hey, if you listen to this and the podcast, shoot me an email time for the plugs. It's Billy Newman photo.com. If you want to check out my website, see some of my photographs, check out more podcasts that I've done, or books that I've tried to put together which is maybe what I'm going to try and do out here to try and get some photographs for another good book. That Yeah, Billy Newman photo comm you can check me out there. That's where all my focus is going these days write me an email, there's a forum they actually want to get in touch with me. And always good to hear from people, I suppose. So thanks a lot for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. appreciate you listening back

Comet Neowise

Viewing comet Neowise during its passage in late July 2020, remembering sighting Hal Bopp in 1997. What is a great comet? Photographing the night sky with a high iso and a wide angle lens, Traveling along the John Day River,

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

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150 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown Comet Neowise

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Appreciate you guys for tuning in to this episode recorded for the first week of August in 2020. And wanted to jump into a couple of the things I've been doing through the month of July and some outdoor camping and travel stuff I've been up to. I was going to run down some of that in this podcast today. I wanted to talk about a trip I made to Eastern Oregon. I think like last week before last is when I was out in this area, and I was trying to get some good observations in for comet nowise I'm not sure if any of you guys got to check that out while it was in its prime viewing section there I think that was why we had kind of like the new moon before it switched over to being gibbous moon or nearly full moon like it's been the last week or so. But I think it was around the 15th through the 25th or so of July. There are some pretty good observations to be made of comet Neo wise, and I guess after kind of reading about it a bit, it's not considered a great comet, like Hale Bopp was, or I think it was I talkie 9996 we hadn't had a great comment in a long time I've ever seen those when I was a kid though that was pretty cool. Like watching the Hale Bopp come through for it seemed like three months or something you know that you're just kind of looking at that in the low corners of the northwestern and Western skies was kind of cruising across the skyline I remember that still from like, third-fourth grade when it was coming through, and I also remember the year before that, when like straight up in the air you know like straight up in the sky at night for it was only like a week or so I was a kid you know, but I remember for that week you can see a real bright two-tailed comet those guns I think I can't remember how to pronounce I think is how you talk here. I think it's it's some Japanese name. Pretty sure. But that was a really cool one. That one I still remember really clearly I was only like, I don't know, seven or something when that like when that comic came through. But I really appreciated getting to make some observations with that one as a kid. I missed Halley's Comet, though, back in what 87, I think, was the last one if it came through. And I probably will be the few years that you know that decade or two of the age range that doesn't get to see Halley's Comet in their lifetime. So I think I was born in 88, of course. So if I make it past 100, maybe you'll see it; what is it maybe like 80 something years, so it's probably not going to come back around until I think it's like the 2017 or 2000 80s that I'd have to make it to for to see Halley's Comet again, that'd be fun, but I don't know, maybe we'll see our future. The future is at that time. But it was really cool to get to see Comet Neo wise; It was just a little below what would be the legs and feet of Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, or like the big bear as it observed. But if you kind of look at the deeper part that we're all most familiar with, if you kind of consider Ursa Major, the larger bear constellation that it's structured on, if you kind of look down below the dipper is where I was able to make my observations of comet nowise. And over here in the elevation area that I'm at, in Western Oregon, it's about 200 or 300 feet above sea level. And there's kind of a constant problem with haze and with light pollution in this area. And I think it has to do something with the well, I mean, of course, you know, the amount of population that's around and also something about the air quality or about how the air kind of flows out around here that just doesn't ever seem to be as crisp or as dark as you can get up in the mountains. And, and really it's just like a stunning difference when you're able to get out further and make some more clear observations. You know, the level of magnitude of stars that you're able to reveal, just in a dark night, is so much more crisp and clear. It's just like a total difference. So it was cool too. I think I was first able to spot just a little fuzzy bit of a second magnitude version of Comet Neowise while I was here in town, but I tried to make a special trip out toward Eastern Oregon out into the desert just to do some camping stuff. But what I wanted to do at the same time was make some good observations and also try and get some good photographs of Comet Neowise as it was coming through during its period, where you could, you could make some, some good sightings of it, but it was cool. So going out to Eastern Oregon, as it got dark, a little past 1030 or so as you look to the northwest, you can really see the comet and its tail spread for a couple of inches in the sky. And I was really surprised to notice how little of it you could really make out to see when you're in an area of almost any light pollution, once you're back in town, or once you're in a lower elevation area. With some light pollution and haze around, it was really difficult to make out in the same way that I could out in the desert or out in the mountains. And so I thought it was pretty cool to get to see and get to check out over there. But yeah, it was a blast getting to do some stuff out in Eastern Oregon. I went over to the John de River area. And I checked out that area. There's a lot of public land out in that area. But there's also some, a lot of private lands too. It's just kind of an interesting area, how it has sort of broken up, and it was cool to get to go out to the head out to Madras, and then I took off and headed over East there until I ran into the john de River. And then I was able to use this map that I have to go through and find some open off or just the open roads that are, you know, smaller gravel roads that are set up to kind of traverse the backcountry out there. So I was able to find a few of those that were open and travel around on those for a while. That was pretty cool. I was able to find some dispersed campsites and set them upright along the john de River, which is really cool. It's a beautiful area out there. It's kind of interesting, and the john de river flows through this sort of. I guess it would be, and I don't know. It's kind of like Canyonland. And it's also sort of these rolling grass hills that sort of make up the landscape of Northern, northern, and northeastern Oregon. And I think Yeah, as soon as you kind of get a little for like a little north of bend is when you get out of the Great Basin area. And you start to get into another kind of landscape that seems to stretch up north of the Columbia River up into Washington. I've heard that some of it are from ancient deposits from the river systems in the waterways that were up there and how it was like there are old deposits and then an erosion that's happened from those rivers running through the area for such a long time. But, but really cool to see kind of the rolling hills and then some carved out canyons that go through the john de river area up there. When I found the campsite, I was at, and I was pretty far away from everybody. And I was really far away from any substantial town. I think it was near. I don't know, and I don't even know what it is. There wasn't anything there. When I drove through, there's a bridge and a couple of little ranch houses, you know, real ranches, right? Like just a little, a little, a little house like a little two-bedroom house and then 100 acres of cattle to deal with. So it seems, uh, seems like another life out there. I wonder how they're dealing with, you know, kind of the way the world is things are this summer, but it was cool. Yeah, getting out there. I went to already kind of set up my campsite, and stuff had my truck going. And that was all pretty easygoing. But then I waited till dark after 1030. Yeah, comet neowise is really visible up below the Big Dipper; it was pretty cool to get to see out there in Eastern Oregon really bright, really clear, you can almost make out the second tail. I have my binoculars with me. I think there are some ten by 40 twos. And those read really well to view it to view the comment. Like really crisp through there through the binoculars, and yeah, really easy to spot most of the night. Even just to the naked eye, it was really easy to spot. It was like, Oh, yeah, it's right there, there's a comment. It's just a big whisper in the sky. So it was really cool to get to view it; what I did is I set up my tripod, and I have my camera with me. So I set it up with a really wide angle. And then I was trying to get some photographs of it as it was, as the comet was sort of coming down to set on the landscape of the hillside, you know, as the hours went on into the night. So I think I stayed out until maybe one or two in the morning when the Big Dipper was sort of scooping down a little low onto the horizon. And then, at that point, the place where the comment was dipped below the horizon and then was out of view for the rest of the evening. And I think even into the morning. I think by that time, when I was photographing it, and it wasn't visible any longer. Up in the morning sky. I think they said you know, at first in early July, you could kind of view it around Capella, if you were able to get out early enough, say three or four in the morning, but as the direction, as it was moving, it was kind of creeping up pretty quickly, you know, day over day. Every day, it would kind of move a good chunk through the sky. And in the direction that it was moving, it was moving to be more visible at the nighttime, which really offered more hours of good observation time, which I thought was pretty cool to wait until it was really dark enough in the northwest view of the sky, probably about 1030 onward, is when you're finally able to make out this kind of finer points of light in the sky in that region. So it was really cool, set up the tripod, set up the camera, set up some manual focus to get it kind of set sharp at night, you can't, you can't use autofocus when you're trying to take photographs of the night sky and the stars because it just kind of seeps back and forth, you have to set it to manual focus and then ring out your focus ring to infinity. And then just back a bit. You'll notice this every time if you do it. It's really frustrating the dark because you can't really always make it out easily and edit your mistake quickly. But if you go all the way to infinity, and then they fix pictures there, the night sky, you're going to notice that these points of light that are the stars sort of end up a little fuzzy, and it's because all the way to infinity, for whatever reason, just isn't quite in focus at infinity. So you have to go all the way up to infinity and then back it off just a bit. And that'll nearly ensure that most of that part of the image is in focus the whole way. And it's difficult even if you do have an F stop that's a little more tightened out, say like an f4 six or something; you're still going to get a lot of that out-of-focus softness if the focus ring isn't really dialed into the right spot. So I tried to work on that a little. And yeah, dialed in my focus was able to set it up with reasonable ISO to get some images of the night sky and pick up some of those finer points of light, and then it was able to take a series of photographs in a few different locations out there in the john de River Valley, which I thought was really cool is pretty to be out there, and it was a nice night really warm in the River Canyon. And really remote to like I was mentioned I think I was the only person out there for a few miles I saw another group coming in on a like a little midsize SUV, and they were going fishing out of the bend in the river a couple of miles up from where I was the size of my truck down a little further and camped out. Just on the side of the river. It was a cool, nice Green River up to the kind of high desert tan rim rock that runs the area around there. So it was a cool evening, a cool campsite area. It's a cool spot to check out comet noise too. So I tried to check it out. Up until I don't know what 130 in the morning when I couldn't see it anymore and then spent the night out there out in the john de river area and then the next morning got up and try to check out some different roads and stuff that went around in that area. So it was pretty cool. I was glad I was able to get out there and do some comment watching over the last couple

Wildflowers Foxglove And Oregon Grape

Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen

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If you’re looking to discuss photography assignment work, or  a podcast interview, please drop me an email.  Drop Billy Newman an email here.

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If you want to look at my photography, my current portfolio is here.

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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.

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https://billynewmanphoto.com/feed/podcast/billynewmanphotopodcast

149 Billy Newman Photo podcast mixdown wildflowers foxglove and oregon grape

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate you checking this one out. I wanted to talk to you guys today, I think for what is today, the 12th of June 2020. A lot a lot of stuff going on right now in the world. But, in fact a bit about the ideas around media that I had around that no last podcast that I recorded. This one, I was going to get into a little bit of the outdoor stuff that I've been up to, and some of the photo editing bits that I was on and also I wanted to talk a little more about editing with a controller board. What is it called? I don't know. They, yeah, like a MIDI controller. So yeah, the first part I guess I wanted to talk about, we're heading out to the wildlife refuge area. That's out south of Corvallis. Here. The Finley Wildlife Refuge went out there for a couple days in a row to try and check outs and some of the area out there I think it's now opened up a little bit more officially I think during the first weeks of the lockdown here in Oregon, the road that was gated up, I think almost for like two months, the road that cut through to the main section of the wildlife refuge had been boarded up or not boarded up. But I think there's like a gate that cuts across the front entrance of it. Even though it's really sort of a public road that cuts through to the highway on the other side, I think it goes from Bell fountain road over to highway 99 on the other side, so you can cut all the way through but they Yeah, they closed off both ends, I think because there's a visitor center in the in the middle there. And they didn't want people coming in and congregating or I guess traveling on the trails for a period of time. So yeah, I noticed that on a couple other spots a couple of the entrances, they said that maybe I think that you couldn't enter for a while then they sort of shifted those regulations around like we I think kind of talked about on a couple of the previous podcasts and then you could walk but then you had to remain socially distanced and the rest of it. So I think yeah, it's opened. It's opened back up mostly now and has been for the last few weeks. Normally, I think the the wildlife refuges in this area open up on April 1 and then close down again on November 1. And I think that's for the migratory bird I guess seasonal patterns that they that they are in so I think it's for I think it's an area for Canadian geese to come in. And winter in. If that sounds right. I guess that's fine. Oh, so it's loaded up there in the wintertime it's loaded with birds and grains and eat grits and stuff. It's really cool to go down there and, and take some binoculars and look around a lot of Eagles late in the winter. I think that was pretty cool during like February. And in March of this year, there were a lot of bald eagles out in that area, that Willamette Valley, just sort of roaming around. But it was pretty fun to see a lot of hawks too. That was really cool. So yeah, a lot of birds in that area. But I cruise down there this last week for a couple trips to kind of hike out to a few spots now that it's a little more opened up and you can kind of travel through it. It's nice, it's really close to the the area around here and it's a little more open that that's one thing I was noticing as I was looking for a few areas that were a little more opened up as a meadow. And that is as tightly constricted of a forest area. I'll talk about a few of those places next to but this area is really cool though the Willamette Valley area, just really probably a lot of Western Oregon in total. This time of year for the last couple of weeks of May, in the first couple of weeks of June, there's still so much water and rain and sun in the area as it as it's coming down that we really get a lot of flowering plants this time of year. And then later into July. Well, even even by the end of June. And then as you go into July for sure at August it just gets so dry that there's there's really no more wild flowering plants out on the hillsides and in the meadows. So that's what's really cool about right now is you can go out into a meadow and you're going into pretty tall grass because the grass is growing really tall as well right now, and going to seed and then there's a lot of different types of ways like milkweed as the white flowers that grow on it. There's another type of kind of Cecily weed that grows yellow flowers and then there's just additionally like a bunch of cool stretches of fields of wild flowers that are out there that kind of grow interspersed across these fields that have been specifically I think I photographed before talked about probably every year the the fox Glover and bloom this time of year, which is really cool. So you can go around to just about any hillside in Oregon. And you're going to see these really cool stocks of the stock with this, you know, kind of clumped pattern of bright, purple, magenta flowers that are sort of butted off of it. And you'll see him everywhere in this part Oregon for sure. I mean, gosh, like anywhere from I think it would be like Roseburg to Seattle, probably. I don't know if it goes that far. But I don't know if I really saw a lot in Southern Oregon. Just wild on the hillsides during the summertime. There's there's probably a bit out there right now. But really, this area of the Willamette Valley and up into parts of the Cascades before it gets too high in elevation. You see a lot of that out there anyway, that there seem to be like logging activity, you know, where there's, there's some down trees, there's an open field of grass. You know, it can interspersed and then, and then some sunlight that's able to get through to the bottom of the forest floor. That seems like there's these, these rows of foxglove that kind of come in, maybe they were invasive, but not sure how they really came through. I mean, they must have been like tracked in somewhere I see him I see him spilled out by roadsides all over. So it makes me wonder sometimes, but yeah, beautiful flowers really cool. And the way that they bloom for probably the next three weeks is really one of the the natural highlights of, of taking photographs in Oregon, or going out and looking at stuff in Oregon, it's really just one of the nicer bits of the year where you can go out and you can find cool, bright flowers just about anywhere that you can head out to. So yeah, I've always appreciate how you go out and try to get some photographs of that this time of year. I noticed that a little bit in Oregon specifically, probably anywhere that you photograph stuff, is that there's sort of a seasonality to some things where there's a two week period of the year, where a certain idea is just going to work better than other periods of the year. And you can travel around and do different things you can be dynamic, but but but really kind of thinking of it like okay, what am I offered during this period of time that the year provides me so you know, the wintertime, just kind of obtusely think, well, you get snow in the wintertime, and in the summer you get sun, I guess or in the fall you get colored leaves, which is I guess that's a, that's a pretty easy one to understand. But even that you kind of get in the, into the dynamics of taking photographs in the fall. And if you were to think about the, the crisp kind of bright look of early October, before everything gets real wet, or before the leaves really drop, that's when you're able to get a lot of the the crisp, like, kind of vibrant color and mix of colors where you get like the greens, the Orange is the yellows and the Reds sort of spread through the different trees in the air, you get that kind of late September, early October, but by November is still the fall, you get a lot of stuff that that just looks like it's, you know, it's it's a lot of trees that have lost their leaves. And it looks a lot more gray. And there's just kind of a difference of the way that the look of it is similarly in a place like this, with its four season base. And it wasn't like this in Hawaii, right? You know, it was almost the same every day to a fault almost. But similarly in an area like this, where there's changes throughout the year, this time of year, in late May and early June, like I'm talking about, you get these cool blooms of flowers. And that's just a different dynamic than we were going to see later in the year. You know, I mean, late July, August, we have a bunch of blackberries and bloom or something. And, and all through the rest of the year. There's different things but right now we get a bunch of Oregon grape, those bright, cool yellow flowers that are spread across the hillsides as you're driving out to the coast. Or like I was mentioning the the fox glove and the wildflowers that are growing as well. Pretty cool. So that's what I was up to trying to find out the wildlife refuge this time of year. There's really not much wildlife out there as maybe you'd figure but I think during this area this season of the summer, a lot of the animals that would naturally be there have had it off for a while. I don't know if it's up to the mountains. I think there's a good-sized herd of elk that go in and out of the wildlife refuge there. I've seen him a few times I think maybe I talked about before in this podcast, but like last winter, I'd seen him a couple times. But I think it was thinking specifically maybe sometime in November. I think that's near there. Right. But I'm not really sure the dynamics of how elk work. But yeah, I definitely saw a few bowls. You can see Yeah, they're big racks kind of walking through this open field of a have a wildlife refuge and then and then yeah, bunch of the dozer around. Oh, I think I mentioned a few weeks ago, maybe on one of these podcasts that we were out at the wildlife refuge. Well, yeah. So strike one I said almost I mean in kitten, but we were added a further south section of the same wildlife refuge, looking across the open field at dusk and we saw Well, I'm not sure what it was it could it was an elk. It was now cruciate, but we saw a lone elk maybe 200 yards out across an open field. And it just kind of cruised a little zigzag as it kind of like went through this field sort of scoping and bending down to chew. And we watched it for a while. And then we ended up taking off after 45 minutes or something. But yeah, we just have to hanging out and having like a picnic or something. Yeah. Hanging out. And yeah, this Oh, popped up and cruise around out there. So I guess that was, what was that? mid May or so when we last saw that. So that was kind of cool. But yeah, just that that lone elk. Also, he's probably headed up to the hills. I guess by the time that it's gonna get pretty hot out here. I bet the people around there sort of know their, their natural migrations a little bit better. But it's cool. Yeah, you can go out there in the wintertime, see elk. You can see a bunch of birds. I saw coyote out there. It was fun. But yeah, there's a bunch of bunch of animals, but natural stuff, which places you can hike around. It's just it's cool that we have a couple areas like that, that are designated as, as wills, or what it's a wilderness area to a wildlife refuge. I think there's another one north of here. Well, there's a bunch in Oregon, really, if you if you if you pull up a map and you look for wildlife refuges, you'll probably find one that near and about the area that you live, there's really a lot outside the Portland area. There's a lot, I think along but I 84 Columbia River Corridor. There's a lot I think, down this way into the Willamette Valley and along the coast, but there's really almost nothing, I was surprised. There's almost none in Southern Oregon. And there's a few but it's it's it's pretty dispersed out in Eastern Oregon. It's really I think, just considered everything in Eastern Oregon Public Lands or, you know, like, was BLM or, or a national forest or something. So why designated wildlife? I think they're supposed to be specifically, specifically set aside as viewsheds. Or like specific wildlife habitats that they want to keep intact. And I think a lot of that program was maybe put in place in the 70s and 80s. But I'm not really sure about it, is there's a whole there's a whole breakdown of the history, I mean, a breakdown I don't have but there's a whole breakdown of the history of how different segments of public lands were kind of attached and then set up. And so they're really not all as old as I might have thought they were, I think I think this one might be back from the maybe 70s or 80s, like I was saying when they finally had it established. And so even still, there's, there's like a few farms and a few, like, there's a bunch of buildings and stuff out there already, because they built things before there's ever any public land protections. And so now there's those structures there. And you drive through and it's cool, it's fine, I think, I think a lot of it's managed land. So they have like a number of fields, like I was mentioning that the elk kind of cruise across, but in the summertime, like right now. They have, they have a bunch of tractors down there, and they have gone through and plowed or not plowed but they've gone through, is it a combine, they went through and cut the hay, they cut the grass that was grown. And then they made these giant rolls not bales that those square bales of hay that you would see you know, kind of as a commercial product, but these really huge bales of hay that seemed like about as big as my truck around and as tall as my truck. And then they stack eight of those up onto a flatbed pick or not pickup truck but a flatbed semi truck. And then they have like a double trailer. So they have when I was 16 of these big bales and then they're they're doing runs that all day to take out this grass product that they've produced on the land there. And I think that's sort of one of the the multiple use cases for the land management that they do. You know, they do this kind of like I was talking about earlier, you know, you do this time of year, you do this next time a year. Because it's just it's just what the land and the environment offer you at that time. So I was out there the other day, yeah, watching these, these tractors kind of cruise around and pick up, pick up their bales of hay that they'd set it up. And then I think after that once that's done as it gets into the drier season, in the rest of the year, I think it goes it just kind of hangs out until the fall and then and then that's when the elk come back in and that's when the birds come back in. So it's cool going out there and check it out a few spots have been enjoying it in the afternoons. That's a good spot to kind of head out to and it's an easy spot to get to and you can kind of find like a bunch of open areas where you can kind of focus They're not just some real specific singular points, like, I have this 50 millimeter macro lens on my camera right now. So instead of just going out and taking a wide angle broad landscape photos, which is a nice area for you can go in and with that macro lens focus in kind of real specifically and tightly on to a cluster of flowers or grouping of flowers, I think kind of pick your angle of view. Or well, and kind of pick your, I guess, pick your depth of field and sort of select how just how you're going to make that image kind of pop, or how you're gonna get that flower to separate from the rest of it. But yeah, it's fun working with the macros because you can get kind of right in there next to it and still keep that object and focus like, like a flower or a bug or something. Any, I guess kind of small, small, detailed item, you can move that lens right up next to anything is that because if it's what is its minimum focal distance, I'm not sure what that was called. What is that when it's, you know, however many centimeters away from the front of the glass, the lens it is until you can first get something in focus. With a lot of lenses, like if you try this with a telephoto lens, some telephoto lenses I've had, like, I think I had a f4 telephoto lens and you couldn't you could not focus that lens. And something less than eight feet of distance, you got to be like nine feet away before you could get something in focus with that lens. With something like a macro lens, you can get, you know, six centimeters away from the lens, and you'll still be able to keep that in focus. And I think that's with some of the dynamics of how the glass optics are arranged inside the lens. I guess I'll leave it there cuz I'm sure certainly the rest of it is beyond me. But it's kind of cool. Thinking about some of the macro stuff. So it's cool having it on there. And it's cool getting to go around this time of year because there's, like I was mentioning there's just there's, there's all these different opportunities to go and kind of arranged these different little bits of flowers and take some photos of them. Also, I guess Miss Jane Yeah, big, big, wide open fields and landscapes and stuff. I mean, it's quite a full hearty landscape. I want to get out and see some real mountains are seen as get up in the Cascades or something and try and fix up them a little bit more. A little bit more extreme in the landscape side. But as it goes for a nice mellow field in the evening light of June. Let's go on pretty good. Taking some photos of fast foxgloves fields, a wild flowers. So pretty easygoing bit of time there. So by doing that, I also went up to Coburg ridge and I had like a pellet gun. This scene that I was like when we were kids and stuff Yeah, he had like a BB gun. I got like, like a daisy red Ryder. But there's also like the pellet guns where you put the the copper Bibi's but those little sort of little LED kind of parachute tipped pellets, right. Yeah. So you pop one of those in and I had a few of those. I guess when I was a kid, over at my grandparents place, we go shoot cans and stuff. But this one that I've got is like a single shot one like a pump action one. So I went up to Coburg ridge. So went over to Brownsville, and then headed out the back way went up to Coburg ridge. And there's a bunch of big different roads sort of cut off there out into the forest up in the hills and stuff where you can you can go up to a dead end and people go shooting up there all the time. And you know, it's interesting during this lockdown and stuff to where there's a bunch of people that aren't able to go back to work, but are still trying to occupy their time. There's, there's a bunch of people, though, it seems like you know, when you go out to a wilderness area, I talked about this a bit before in another podcast. But if you go to a wilderness or a more remote location, there's should be no one there, right? Because everybody's at work. But as soon as everybody's not at work. There's another 10 people that decided to go out to the middle of nowhere. And once 10 people show up, even though there's a lot of people in Oregon man, once 10 people show up in the middle of nowhere, it starts to seem crowded. And so even on a Tuesday afternoon, if you go up on Coburg Ridge, there's gonna be a lot of pull-outs and roads and different areas that you think maybe would be providing more solitude at some point in the past now you're going to come around a corner and there's going to be there's going to be a couple tracks pulled over already into a spot and they're already firing away. You just see that as you kind of do s turns around the different around that little forest gravel road as you kind of cruise around in the hills there. So I went out I found a spot that was cool. It wasn't you know, heavily crowded and stuff but yeah, I set up a little target and stuff and then was practicing with this. This little pump action pellet rifle that I was Trying to check out that was kind of fun. Bella rifles cruiser and doing some, some target practice really I was trying to get to be, I guess like a little bit more of a consistent shot at a specific distance. I've heard that before, we're like what you want to try and do if you're getting provided hear me, I'm Tina pelegrin. But if you try to get into some shooting stuff, and you want to kind of, I guess kind of refine your consistency, so you can get, you can get a good shot, I think the idea was like a 50 yards and then 100 yards, what you want her to try and do was get a pattern or you know, get like a probably something in about the size of a dinner plate. So what I had heard, where you want to try and get a cluster of shots fired into the space of about a dinner plate. And I guess that's sort of showing that as I take a shot and have the consistency to get it into a specific point of a target. That's, that's actually selected, even at a range of somewhere around 100 yards. And I think that's part like hear hunters talking about that, like, you're a good shot, but are you a good shot at x range, you know, which I think is the preliminary element of, of if you're doing any, any kind of gun activity, but or if you're actually doing some real shooting, but I don't know, I gotta try it more, I haven't been very much of a good shot through the years. I mean, I think like the most of the stuff I've done was like a BB gun at, say 50 feet or something. So that's not a lot of yardage to be firing across, what I want to try and do is I have a 22 around those my grandparents, my grandfather's and so I want to take that out to Eastern Oregon, or out to even some of the spots that I was at, and do some, but really, I want the range. So I want to go to like Eastern Oregon and set something a bit like 50 and 100, like I'm saying and then and then kind of practice on trying to get the, I guess the distribution of my shot placement into a space that would be about as wide a part is at dinner play. And then when I can kind of do that, then I guess I'd have the confidence to sort of consider that if I am taking a shot at a target or whatever. I'm not really gonna be a hunter, I suppose. But yeah, if I'm firing at a target at a range, then I know that the my shot placement is consistent. And after that, you know, my use of is consistent enough. That seems like I should be doing it. I hear about that with like archery too, you know, like when people are getting into I guess bow hunting more specifically, you know, where they want to try and make their shots at 30 yards, and then 40 yards more consistent so that if they do take a shot when they're hunting, they have the shot placement, and confidence in the shot placement at that range. So they can take a shot take an animal down, I suppose. Because that's kind of one of the worst things is if if you're outside of that, if you're hunting and you're outside of that that dinner, dinner plate size target patch, then you get a bad hit, they say, and then it won't, it won't be as direct. And then it'll really I think generally just cause more suffering as we maybe leave it there the conversation. But I don't think that's really anyone's goal, as far as you know, like when you're out about and so yeah, let's go do some target practice stuff, trying to get into that with some of the time that I've had. But I wanted to talk a little bit on this podcast, even though I've been going on for a while now about wedding photography. And I thought that the the wedding photography industry was maybe one of those interesting problems that we're going to see kind of continued to spill out over the next months, it seems like with this with COVID, and then with the lockdown. And then with the multiphase reopening plan that we have, there's going to be a lot of businesses and industries that come back online. And a lot of people seem to get back to work with a significant hiccup in the system. But it seems like maybe those industries will come back online and get back to work sort of smoothly. I'm curious about the wedding industry. Well, the wedding industry, the events industry overall. And then as the sort of trickle down, trickles down the the economic pyramid there, how does that arrive at wedding photographers? And that's sort of one of the questions that I've had I've been mulling over over the last weeks. I mean, it seems like everybody went through the experience of having any, any booked gigs during the month of April or May just sort of cancelled and evaporated. Right before everyone's eyes. So I was curious how that was for any wedding photographers out there. I mean, I remember. There's like a wedding back on like March 6. And now I think that just by snuck under the wire there. And then for the last many months, there's been no public gatherings of that type and no, no events for that kind of thing. So it's curious. Yeah, like, man, like, what's that gonna do to industries where it really you just have to have some level of confidence, you know, like market confidence to try and participate in, I was thinking about, yeah, like vacationing, or even a lot of leisure based stuff, it seems like a lot of families are going to be in a position where they've not been working for a period of time, and to some capacity, they're going to be in the hole, you know, I mean, with everybody's mortgage crisis, or rent crisis, or job crisis, or, I mean, please fill in the list of what we're going to be experiencing in the next six, six months, or whether it's going to be identified as experienced in the next six months, it'll be interesting to kind of go through, as I understand it, like even in places like California, where they're getting into their phase two, and then phase three parts of the reopening. I think they're gonna have bars, and then nightclubs return. And then I think maybe later into that, even is when you're going to get event centers to open back up again, that's more for like, like concert venues or sporting event venues, that sort of thing. But I was interested, just kind of more specifically, yeah, like, how is a wedding venue going to reopen? And I figure kind of given the news of some things, it seems like, there's just gonna be a lot of things that reopen. They're just about what we're open again, you know, at least in a numbers day, this seems like taxes is sort of moving that way, Oklahoma's moving that way. Seems like a lot of those kind of Midwestern and southern states are sort of moving in that direct direction pretty quickly. And really, as even I can say, a lot of places in Oregon, especially this rural area of Oregon, there's, there's not many masks, there's not many private business guidelines that you interact with. So it, there's just not and I mean, gosh, like looking at the the flow of traffic and the number of people out and just how things are, it's really quite a different environment than it was months ago at the beginning of this. In March, it seems like a lot of the concern people had about not going out or not interacting or not continuing on with their, their more regularly scheduled lives is is just not going to be interrupted anymore. I think we've, it seems like mentally A lot of people have just selected that. It that problem has passed. I might be one of those people, for better or worse. So as it goes, Yeah, it seems like a lot of stuff is reopening. It seems like events of some type are going to come back into place, but family of like voluntary family events like weddings, it just seems like Well, I don't know, I don't know how those events are going to be rescheduled. Definitely, like a wedding ceremony is a super important part of person's life. And it just seems like it's gonna be a hard year for that to happen and go smoothly, you know, and it kind of specifically for those folks who are in the industry that's supported by the wedding, the wedding events industry, it's like, we'll go out and DJs a lot of catering businesses, I'm sure have to wait for those live events to come back before they get a booking to go to a catering event. And then even still, you know, how are people going to be interacting with that sort of stuff? So So this was wonder about Yeah, photography, like for family photography, like any family photo gigs, I had, like, probably evaporated for the next couple months, I'm sure you know, like, when are we going to get? I mean, a lot of families that are together, I'm sure are fine. But do they want photos right now? Do they want to spend a significant amount of money after all this stuff has happened? Or you know, just like the number of people that would have been interested in a sort of a luxury purchase have larger photo package created for them, it just seems like wow, let's not have someone over at our house or let's not go out to somewhere as a family or let's not drop all this money on something that we don't need anymore. And I bet there's a lot of industries that are going to be kind of suffering from that as we sort of come out of a readjustment from what what is it that we need in the 2020s now and what was just sort of superfluous, like luxury item that we had in the past that's, that's no longer really necessary. I don't know maybe I think a lot of stuff in human nature will just kind of pop back to the way that maybe had been before like I was just mentioned, it seems like the season of considering this stuff for a lot of folks has passed. And then for a lot of folks in addition to that there's a lot of a lot of face masks and face shields and distancing behavior going on. So it'll be interesting to see how that divergence either comes back together or continues to divide. And it seems like right now we're in we're in a time where things like that just sort of continue to divide. So maybe that's what it'll look like for the next few years. But I'm not sure I think, as it goes, if well, as a consumer goes, I think that a lot of consumers will be able to get what they want, if they want to go out to eat, if they want to get married, if they want a photo package, they'll be able to get one, as it goes for the businesses, I think that that's going to be a little bit more concerning where all of those small businesses are going to have to compete for a much smaller whole pie. And that means their slice, I think it's gonna be a lot slimmer, as well. So maybe it'll be interesting, I think, I think it'll be it'll be it'll be a big dip. But then I think it'll probably return. I don't know, maybe a year or so. Depends on depends, I guess. And like, what the second wave stuff goes, like I don't I don't really expect to see any multi generation weddings, or family photo events coming around soon. I mean, gosh, like I was doing the family, family portrait stuff in Hawaii, or last year. And that's not going on at all anymore. What are they doing? I mean, I've thought about this a few times. And the first time I thought about it, but Gosh, like Yeah, what are these? What are these people doing now? The photographers or the hotels or any of that? But additionally, the families? When are they coming back? I mean, why hasn't opened up anything yet? They're still completely locked out. I think they're arresting residents to go outside in the wrong way still. So what is the confidence to go on a seven day trip to Hawaii gonna pop back in? And then when is that also going to include getting a Hokie photo package with your family? Man, or Yeah, like inviting your your elderly, grandmother or grandfather to a wedding or something? It just seems like, oh, man, I wonder, are these people just gonna be on Skype? Maybe they'll need photos and videos more than ever now. There'll be a multimedia wedding where you're just in an empty room with the bride and groom and pastor, and then it's streamed over zoom. That's gonna be a great future. I don't really suspect that I think a lot of people are pretty fatigued by the idea of working with zoom or working with these video chat services. And really, whatever happened to a phone call? I mean, this is audio, isn't it? Are you? Are you sad that I cannot be seen right now? I don't know. Maybe. So it seems a little too Max Headroom for me to just keep looking at someone on a half second delay. It's obviously a silly. So I really I think audio I think voice I think sound is a really powerful medium just on its own. And I've always been curious why, you know, like a conference call seemed to work quite well, in the 90s. It doesn't seem like everything has to be a zoom meeting, which is not an equivalent to face to face. Not yet. I think that's a part of latency. I've been trying to learn about this with audio stuff, too. And that's what some of the 5g infrastructure is supposed to work on to is the latency of how long it takes a packet to get made, and then sent across the network and delivered, and then how long it takes for return of that two round trip back to me, essentially, saying, you know, like, What's that? What's that little chunk of delay? That happens? on a phone like on a Skype call, where, you know, it's it's not real, it's maybe 900 milliseconds behind where it's, you know, it's just like a 10th of a second or something off. And there's an effect to that you're just the video motion to you know, like, if you make a reaction, there's just the moment of delay. Remember, you remember this, like on the news feeds when a correspondent was at a satellite location, maybe across the earth? And so the the news anchor would say, like, Hey, what are you learning in India? And then it would be, you'd be staring at the image of the reporter, waiting to start his report, and you count this like, silent bead of like, 123456. Like, what is why why is this guy that started talking? Yeah. And then you say, Oh, well, yeah, we're here. And we're covering this and then you think, oh, that that giant gap that big delay in the responses is when that person heard it in real time, and then started responding. And that big gap that we hear is the round trip delay that it takes for the signal to leave the studio and America wherever it was traveled to a satellite bounce around. Across a few satellites is supposed to The other side of the earth and then bounce down to the ground in India where it makes contact with a producer. They're at, you know, wherever this camera guy is on a remote, and then the anchor hears it speaks. And then it goes through the same process again, where it goes up to a satellite bounces around halfway around the Earth comes back down to the ground over another satellite, and then is broadcast out over the air. So that whole thing is latency. The whole the time that it takes that process to occur is latency. And to the degree that we can shrink that or shorten that, or use different information tools to make that happen faster, like packet sizing, or I don't know, network forming or what is it packet forming, so that they're able to make these these kinds of things a little bit faster. And so I think that's one of the hopes of 5g, and then I've also heard of one now it's that low latency, I think that's one of the problems is Satellite Internet, like one of the hopes was that you could get satellite in and then get bandwidth anywhere around the Earth. But the problem that people would have is high latency. And that's I think, because the satellite is so much further away than even a cell phone tower, like we were talking about. And that just kind of the way and the technology that was developed for the satellites wasn't wasn't low latency. So I think that's what one of the attempts of the starlink program is, I think you've heard about that, I hate to say Elon Musk's starlink. But that might be like, the easiest way to recognize it, maybe you've seen the satellites cruising overhead to, I've only seen him a couple times, or once a one night, I saw a number of them, which is probably what you would see to most the time, they're not there. And then there's a cluster of them. And apparently, they're going to be launching somewhere around 1000. They were supposed to cover a grid around the sphere of the earth. And then what we were talking about is that we create kind of a lower latency satellite network that would allow telecommunications of data packets to any location on the earth. And the hope is that that would have that would I guess, provide access to people all around the world to do some type of compute or some type of networked data exchange wirelessly anywhere on the earth? Yes, you'd have, you know, anywhere you don't have cell signal, you'd have signal because it goes to the satellite, everything's a satellite phone now is what the idea that that project is. So it's getting off the ground, it's getting into space, they've launched maybe 200 satellites. Now it seems like they go up with about 50 or 60. Every time I heard they had a launch, maybe every month since early March or so. I think there was maybe there was I think maybe one in January. There's definitely one in March. I think there was one again in May. Yeah, so they got a bunch of satellites up. I think it's pretty cool. I think that's what they're doing with some of those, those Falcon nine rockets when they're, they're sending them up to do you know, the SpaceX missions, not the, the Dragon capsule that went to the space station, but some of the other ones that they have for, for satellite deployment. I think that's what they're doing is deploying some of these starlink satellites. They got a panic, not panic, but a unexcited phone call from a friend. He said, Billy, look outside. What's this? The UFO we're being invaded. And I like to happen. And yeah, it's a stream of pretty bright. satellites are pretty bright objects that are lit moving quick across the sky from the southwest to the northeast. And they're kind of spaced out. Just a little gap between each other. It just seemed like maybe like one or two inches of the of the distance of the sky. like you'd be grabbed it in your fingers at your arms like, and there's just the stream and I'm kind of cruising at satellite speed across the sky look like a satellite. But most of the time, they don't move in that direction. They don't move that fast. They don't look that color. So it's like yeah, what is that? That's cool. And trippy and scared. It's like, Whoa, like, Are we being invaded? I mean, war, the world's was just the radio program. And it caused more panic than that. Maybe we're, I don't know. I guess we're where it's more settled into it now. But But yeah, I got this phone call from my friend. And I was thinking about I was like, Oh, yeah, this. This is the starlink program. This is that that satellite deployment, where they're all clustered together, and they're going to be visible for a period of time. And then I think they're going to be, they're kind of spiraling out as they go around the Earth. They're sort of getting further and further out in orbit from the earth each time they go until they get to a distance, that they're going to sort of remain as my understanding. And so I think they're pretty bright. Now once they're launched, and then over time, they're going to get a little like dimmer and dimmer and dimmer until they're really not as no noticeable I think that was a concern for a while for Astro photographers is that this deployment of 1000 satellites into the sky is going to disrupt long exposure night photography significantly, because we're going to have all these different extra points of light, that we're going to ruin all this this data gathering that we do for astronomy or for personal Astro photography, I hope. And my understanding is there supposed to be painted in this black matte paint? like they did with the Iridium satellites, more recently. And that's supposed to, I guess, affect the the flares that we get those Iridium burns that we would see where a satellite is, you know, is visible, but then all of a sudden, catches the glare of the sun. And then shimmers for five or 10 seconds really bright, brighter than almost anything in the sky and then fades again. It's called an Iridium burn for the Iridium satellites that were put up as like satellite communication. I think it's like how we get NBC or something. Yeah. We get some of those. Some of those satellite communications that we have now almost everything, you know, goes through this satellite communications network that was launched, I think back in the 60s, the Iridium network, and then a lot of that was replaced in the last 10 years, maybe with the new items. And then I think now they're watching, you know, watching all these SpaceX items. But yeah, it's cool. If you get a chance to see him You can I think you can look up online, like how to spot the the SpaceX starlink satellites that have been launched. And they're on a pretty specific timing, and they're only in like, a certain part of the world at any given time. And I think it takes a while for them to get to your part of the world if they're not there right now. So yeah, I think you can check it out. And you can find like, one of the sightings or one of the times that you're gonna have a sighting in your area, but it's pretty cool. Yeah, you can find it and see some satellites cruising by, hopefully, as the summer kind of rolls out a little bit more near Corvallis. Maybe I'd mentioned before. It has been around. June. Oh, yeah. So I think I'm gonna wrap it up there for this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Thank you very much for checking it out. Today, you can go to Billy Newman photo.com, for more information about me or my photographs, or some of the photo ebooks I put together, or I don't know, whatever other stuff. So hopefully, yeah, we get to talk again soon. I think there's a couple a couple topics I didn't get to on this one, I'll get back to some of those logic control things I want to talk about. And I want to kind of get into a deeper dive on that stuff. Next time. I'm just getting into working with this, this controller with the software that runs controls in Lightroom with it and I'm just really getting used to it where you can kind of use this mixing board to mix and match different colors and light ramps. So I'm looking to try and get into that more and then maybe make some some stuff around it. But I'll definitely get into that in a deeper dive next time. The podcast but thanks for checking this out. Talk to you guys later. Bye

Smith Rock Urges Portland Not To Visit

DMV says renew your tags in July. Planting Marigolds. Gardening in May showers. Oregon State Parks reopen, Smith rock urges Portland not to visit.

Smith Rock Urges Portland Not To Visit

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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.

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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.

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146-Billy-Newman-Photo-podcast_mixdown

Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. appreciate you guys tuning in. I think it's May 16. Today 2020 of everybody's doing well, and I think this accounts for like the first, the first full day after the 15th, which marks the beginning of phase one reopening here in the Oregon area. I guess a lot of other states are sort of entering into the same kind of thing with the beginning of their reopenings. And starting up. I think the start of the I think it's like a lot of retail stores. I don't know what's still restricted. I think there's still like a number of private businesses that can't really can't really get started, it seems like a lot of restaurant stuff is still kind of held back, was it gyms or something? Maybe that's the kind of held back? It seems like, it seems like a lot of places are really kind of getting going. But maybe it's like California, I keep hearing news out of there probably because, you know, there's so many people in that area that that are, you know, producing media and stuff. But I keep hearing kind of strange rules out of the lockdown that sort of continues to go on and the LA County area and along like the California coast and that area. So it's kind of interesting to see how there's such a varied approach and the way that they're they're sort of bringing stuff back. What is it like Arkansas you can have? I'm gonna have a concert, or something. I think there's a place trying to drive in concert idea sounds kind of fun, really, you know, everybody pull up in a car. It always just sounds like a good idea, I guess when there's not a pandemic going on. So there's maybe less fear than that. But But yeah, that sounds fun. Driving concert, I don't know. Or I think there's a limited seating in places for for some venues now that I think is Max, like maybe 150 people swept some places to try and some of those Midwest areas, I think maybe like Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, I think some areas over there kind of try and some, some live events stuff out. I'm not sure what it is for restaurants, and a lot of places still seems like social distancing standards are what's required. And a lot of those places I hear about restaurants operating in, like 25% capacity, and maybe 50% capacity. But even still, that just doesn't seem economically, like it's kind of work, I didn't really spend a lot of time working in restaurants. But even still, I have enough tangential experience with the restaurant industry to know that those margins aren't really wide enough, when you're making food, to if you were, if you were just supporting yourself on 100% capacity before all this, there's really not a good reason that that you're going to support your business on 25% capacity for the next foreseeable future. I mean, gosh, like, it just seems like you're gonna operate at a loss for six months, or more, I don't know if anybody can really handle that, especially after a big dip like this, you know, it's not going to be a better economic time after this for for a lot of those kinds of industries, or you know, just so there's like a rate limit on the amount of customers that you can have at any given time. So that seems to be a problem. I don't know how they're really going to handle that. They don't know, there's venues and stuff to try to come back, it seems like there's a lot of people just trying to do it to, to try and jump back in and be the first people competing again. So I guess in that standard, I understand I understand it, but it's sort of strange, I have to see what like department stores and stuff are doing I think, you know, obviously grocery stores that remained open and so a lot of places that I would kind of hop into, in and out of regularly on a weekly basis had been open, you know, kind of throughout this whole time and have almost forgot about you know, like, do I need to go to a clothing store? Or was there something at a shoe store or mall there's something you need to go through, you know, the thing that came up is on my truck, I gotta get my new tags for like the passenger registration stuff until What is it 2022 that you know that two year registration that comes up so I think I bought my truck now four years ago. Wow. That was like what may may 6, I think, I think it was the day after Cinco de Maya and it looked like the guy at the bank that was handling like the payment when I was making the the transfer of funds between my ownership or you know, like the other guys ownership to my ownership of the vehicle. The guy that was doing it behind the counter looked pretty pretty hungover. I was thinking, oh yeah, it was Cinco de mayo yesterday. I guess I got to take it easy on this guy. But that was four years ago yeah that I bought the bought the Colorado, and I've been driving around since, and so yeah, now I got to now I gotta buy new tags for it. So I had the letter in the mail a couple weeks back it was sort of before most of the pandemic lockdown stuff it started I think it was in early March that I first got my paperwork probably should have mailed it in at the time but but it was looking to be the day that during this period of the state of emergency things like car registrations and driver's license expirations are

I guess being handled on a case by case basis but genuinely being treated with an amount of leniency. So have that to look forward to, I guess that, yeah, if if you had a registration lapse during the time, the pandemic, you really asked to not participate in going to the DMV, I think they're closed in all cases. And I think there's maybe like one or two spots that are having, by appointment only type of events going on, there's some information on the page for the Oregon DMV, and there's probably information generally, state by state and stuff, like in Georgia, they're saying, like, if you were, if you were 16 year old or coming on to be a 16 year old, and you had an appointment to get your driver's license scheduled, I think you just you just get to drive now, you don't need to be licensed or something like that can't come in and get a license. And I guess there was a need to, to whatever decision making they they had come to there was a need for those people to have access to drive, I guess, during this emergency, you know, probably in a lot of those places. Like I don't know if this is the case, I don't know if we're talking about Atlanta, Georgia here, but, but it seems like out in the sticks. Even out here, you know, in the farm country in Oregon and stuff, you know, you're 13 or 14, and you're kind of learning how to how to move a cart, you know, how to move, you know, some kind of utility vehicle around a property when you're you're trying to do maintenance and stuff. I was driving a golf cart around all the time at the time I was 910 or something like that. And then that kind of escalated into like a farm truck or work truck by like a later age, I was learning to drive when I was I guess like a real vehicle. It was still like when I was 15. But yeah, it seems like you would need to kind of have access to that. So yeah, if you weren't able to get into a DMV to get any kind of licensing, I guess it'd be nice to roll your permit over to a license, or maybe it's something like roll your I don't know, roll into just have it a permanent without having to worry about it. Who knows. But it seems like yeah, that was something they were trying over, you know, in different states have different rules, as we're finding out pretty clearly, I guess, in the last couple months. But over here, I found out the passenger registration is is not required to be updated, I guess, when I was looking at that to the governor Kate Brown had extended the state of emergency. It's kind of a few different things going on, you know, there's the stay at home orders. And then there's also the governor's emergency powers that are established when they issue a state of emergency analysis. And that gives them access to federal funding for the emergency so that it doesn't have to come out of the state budget. Is that what it is? It's something like that. I don't know, I don't understand governance. But the state of emergency order, I think was extended into, like July 6, I think is what it was at latest kind of perhaps could be extended further than that originally, you know, when all this stuff started, it was you know, 15 days to flatten the curve March 15 to April 1. And that pretty quickly expanded into what we've been experiencing now, which you know, it could go in no other way. Right? When Has it ever been that? Oh, yeah, just 15 days of this. And it'll be we'll wrap it all up all the loose ends. We'll handle it in 15 days. So I guess that never happens. It didn't happen this time either. And what do you know, there's like, complications and communication, limited amounts of supplies for things that seem necessary now. This seems like that's, that's like how it goes. Every time there's a big national emergency. What was that movie like? where it was, it was covering the Russian soldiers and the world war two front. And it was like kind of the front lines. The scene was, and you know, one person it's in factual history, right. But one person got a gun than the person next to him got a box of ammo and no gun. Right. So it just seems like yeah, that will be they only had they only had enough for one of each, you know. So Yikes. It seems like that's kind of just how it goes sometimes. So unfortunately, we're not in that kind of like, we're not in that kind of hot water. It seems a lot better than that. Unfortunately, it hasn't been as problematic as maybe we maybe first anticipated Hawaii. So I don't have to worry about my check registration. You guys are excited about that. I was thinking I had to go to the DMV.

I don't have to.

It's cool. This last week, I've been doing a bunch of gardening stuff. The weather kind of turned a little bit to the Rainier side of saying so I don't know, I was kind of discouraged from doing some camping stuff that I might have wanted to do or really I'm trying to figure out some time to get on the eastern Oregon and make it to a few of the more distant spots that I haven't been to in a while. And it's a tricky time of year because it's like I don't know what it is. So what am I saying? When it's real cold in the winter, some of the pasturelands stuff isn't really out, but it's real cold. So like the ticks aren't out as much the mosquitoes, I desert mosquitoes, yikes, they're not out as much. Some of those things go a little easier when it's colder earlier in the year. And then later, when it's more towards summer, it's a little bit easier with the environment that you're dealing with, it's not as harsh or extreme or cold, you know, you're not freezing all the time. But there's like a few other harsh conditions of heat that you have to deal with. So there's kind of like a few different pockets that you can hit. And right now it's difficult to because you know, it's like, it's, it's, it's the more wet season over there, you know, it's not raining, now, the snow is probably melted off. But we will Yeah, there's like a bit of rain, that's, that's still falling this time of year. Some of the areas out there, they dry up real fast in the summary. So what you would normally find the beach is trial and out there, this time of year, it's a flat like low lying area, it'll kind of turn to this, this Marsh or like sometimes a lot of these areas, it almost looks like a lake or something, you know, it's like a one foot, it's like one foot deep or one or two or three inches deep for most of it. And maybe it maxes out at six inches deep at the center. And, or just these areas that turn real marshy and then after a week or so you know that water sinks to the ground and just grass rises up from that. But this time of year, it can be real, real tricky out there and some spots don't and then they, you know the texts get really bad. And it seems like April and May be part of may two. Not a big fan of those. or other weird little stuff out there guys remember find like a scorpion out there in Eastern Oregon. Like a real like a tiny one. I was probably like three inches, three inches or so sad at night with a flashlight as like guys. That's another scorpion. I don't need to see any of that stuff. But yeah, we're trying to find some time to go out to Eastern Oregon. But the weather instead of is kind of turned a little bit. So that might be a week or two before I do that. And it's Yeah, it's just kind of been a weird time with a bunch of that stuff. I was looking at a thing where I think it was on Oregon live there. They're getting to the point like we were talking about a bit ago where we're even on the last podcast. So there's some public lands that are reopening across Oregon. And there, they're open. They're opening up the state parks, I guess pretty soon or like the state public lands. But there's still like asking sort of strange rules about that. I think there was something about how they're going to, they're going to open up Smith Rock State Park, north of bend that rock climbing area. But they're saying that they're opening it for locals only is sort of what they're listing. And there was an article in the Oregonian that said that Portlanders are not welcome. Oh, okay. I don't know how enforceable that is, or how that's really structured. Part of what was advised in the language was that you're you're not supposed to travel more than 50 miles from your home for outdoor recreation. I don't, I don't know if that's the rule or regulation, or what's really understood is Oregon has really just reopened hunting and fishing to out of state residents.

So I mean, this app does that line up, you can come in from Utah and hunt. But you can't go from Portland to somewhere out in Eastern Oregon, and hike or walk around or go to an open State Park seems like if you're within your own state, you're you're in your state, you know, they should have made it smaller states that they wanted you to not travel that much. So I don't know, I understand if they want to lock down the state or try and keep you more confined to that area. But it seems a little strange if you are reopening if you're closing. Close. You know, but if you're reopening, and it's open. I don't know. It sounds like it's open. I think there's a there's a number of places that are kind of concerned about it with kind of some good reason. And really, I've been kind of concerned about this as a growing problem. For me, really, I think, you know, it's just gonna be escalating as everybody's kind of been cooped up for a long time. Anybody that wants to get out has been stuck kind of thing and maybe they can't get out and I think real soon like this weekend, a really next weekend and the weekend after for Memorial Day weekend. I think it's really going to flood a lot of a lot of places a lot of public land places that I'd want to go to just because the lessons like that somewhere real remote. These areas are all being stated as being reopened. People have been stuck inside for a long time. It's Memorial Day weekend. So it's kind of it's socially known as the weekend to go out and begin camping. It's probably going to be the first time that in Oregon, we're really getting some nicer weather system. into the summer. And as many people that will still exist that don't want to go outside related to the pandemic stuff, there's going to be so many people that do want to go out that I think it's really going to flat out a lot of a lot of areas in the next couple of weeks. And we're probably going to see some weird regulatory reactions from that. You know, like, I don't know, Kate brown kind of around Spring Break said, you know, go out, go, go to the beach, walk around, it's important to get exercise and everybody did that. And he said, How dare you get out and go to the beach and walk around as much as he did. So then they closed it all down. So I think we're going to kind of see something, something like that here soon to where they say, Yep, Oregon State Parks are reopening. But don't go. Oh, and it's Memorial Day weekend. And you all went. So now we're we're closing them again. So you don't go? I don't know. That's speculation, I suppose. But yeah, it's funny to see an article saying Yeah, Portlanders don't come. So Oh, okay. Sure. I don't know. It doesn't sound fair to me. Yeah, state state parks and stuff, I'd probably stay away from a lot of state parks for a while. And just given their Well, they're just they seem to be in sort of a regulatory flux. So it seems like things that you might understand as being acceptable. Public Land Use stuff at any other time. I might be a little different on the state lands right now. So yeah, if it's a state park, like a, you know, a place with facilities and, and little trails and stuff that you have to pay a fee for? I don't know; I might stay out of there for a little while. Like, what was it like silver Falls State Park? Smith Rock State Park some of those spots? I bet we're gonna be we're gonna be really overcrowded for a couple periods of time. They're kind of recommended. If you don't find parking in the parking lot, then you should go home because it's too full. Okay, yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's probably how it is most most of the time. So yeah, who knows? But I was saying earlier, yeah, I've been kind of doing a bunch of gardening stuff this week. That's pretty exciting. So yeah, I went down and I got, I got a bunch of railroad ties to put together like a garden box, and then some soil amendment stuff. So I'm trying to fill that, and we got some starter plants to, you know, a couple different vegetables and, and, and things like that, that we're going to try and grow through the summer. So we're, yeah, we're trying to carve out a garden box spot now. And we've been having like deer that come through pretty frequently. And we're gated off too, but they still kind of come in from this lower section over there. That's, that's more opened up that we don't really have control over. So well. I don't know. We'll see how those deer do but, but I also picked up I think of I think it chicken wire that I'm going to try and put across as like a fence for it. So kind of see how that goes. But that's gonna try and protect him protect some vegetables from from the deer that we got. Yeah. So I don't know that some of the gardening stuff that I'm up to you and been trying to do like different yard stuff, trying to clean things up. That's very exciting. That's kind of the same stuff that I've been up to for most of the week was just kind of chores like that. Well, isn't driving here and there. I wanted to read this story. This was one in the Oregonian, and that will probably wrap up with but this one was

one that says more state parks reopened on the Oregon coast from Lincoln City to Florence. This is one of the things that a lot of the smallest, like kind of like we were talking about with Smith rock two and different state parks. Right. But a lot of the the smaller towns on the coast had been talking about how they have low just not enough facilities, a lot of those smaller towns, you know, Port Orford, and they don't have a hospital, do they? So there's that I guess problems with the amount of publicly available medical facilities for people that might end up getting sick or or exposing the community to Coronavirus. So even though they are reopening. They are saying they're not reopening. Right, or are they? So this one from the Oregonian. I think just published yesterday on the 15th says more state parks reopened on the Oregon coast Lincoln city to Florence. The gradual reopening of the Oregon State Park System has now reached the Central Oregon coast. The Oregon Parks and Recreation Department reopened 25 State Park sites on the Central Oregon coast Friday, including popular beachfront sites like a seat ahead seal rock, South Beach, Jessie M. Honeyman and Drivers state parks, some parks have fully reopened, but many are open with limited facilities and services. Another 10 state parks along the Central Coast remain closed including Beverly beach, boiler Bay and roads and state parks. I don't really know those places or roads and I know Beverly beach that's a pretty popular one. The entire Oregon State Park System close to the public on March 23, to help stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Now as counties getting approved for the state's phase one reopening plan, park officials are slowly reopening those parks to the public. Now it says a full list of Oregon State Park reopenings is posted online at Oregon State parks.org. So that's probably a good spot to go if you're looking for some information about the public land reopenings here in Oregon and go to the Oregon State Park site. I also like I was saying in the last couple ones I'd gone to the to the Oregon was it Oh, DFW the Fish and Wildlife site to see what those people were saying and what their closures were related to the COVID pandemic stuff and like I talked about, I mean, there was like individual individual choices for a lot of those National Park systems or BLM lands, but a lot of them would remain open to the some capacity. So yeah, it's worth it to kind of go and find out some stuff, but yeah, now that it's it's reopening. There's some stuff that is definitely reopening. So continuing with that article, many of Oregon's most popular state parks remain close to the public, including all sites in the Columbia River Gorge and others close to Portland, like silver falls. Was this one Milo, MacGyver and subs stub Stewart. State officials continue to urge Oregonians to avoid non essential travel, including day trips, and for those in urban areas to not travel more than 50 miles from home to recreate. That's an interesting sentence. And I don't think this is a law, by the way. So thanks state officials, state officials continue to urge without making a law regulation. Oregonians to avoid all nonessential travel, including day trips. And for those in urban areas to not travel more than 50 miles from home to recreate. Is that like the one urban area of Portland? Is that what they're talking about? Um, I don't know if I'd trust that as a rule probably could get shut down. I think if you want to get out and you know, you could get out, you probably can this is what I was also thinking to is it might be a good time to get a fishing license or get a hunting license. I think they're like, you know, 35 bucks, you can get the super pass or something for like 75 and get both of them. But

that gives you It seems like some rights to to be traveling around. I mean, even still, if you just kind of claim that as what your occupation is, while you're out you probably get more leniency to but it seems like yeah, that those who are initiated seem to have more access now than than those who then just read this article. So yeah, it seems like if you had like a fishing license, and you're traveling around and you went to a place to go fishing, because it's an allowed activity, you could do that. It seems like an error. You know, like, like I was mentioning a minute ago, it's like he can't travel more than 50 miles from your home to recreate. But Oregon is reopened public lands to out of state, like hunting and fishing licence holders to come into state to use the lands for recreation purposes. So it seems like if outside people can do it, then certainly people who are in the state can go to travel to participate in those kind of activities, too. But I also understand that Yeah, maybe just traveling to a state park to go hike with 100,000 other people is probably a bad idea. Or, I don't know, an undesirable idea at the time. And so people who visit state parks are encouraged to take precautions to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 official said visitors should wear face masks and bring their own hand sanitizer soap and water. Probably because the bathrooms are still going to be closed or strangely closed. Not a bad idea to bring hand sanitizers and soaps and water to outdoor places normally, but I don't know if it's going to be a big deal on this one. People are also asked to keep six feet apart of social distancing while out at Park sites and to leave one space between their car and the car next to them. Hmm, I don't know about that one. Visitors are asked to recreate only with those in their household. Well, thanks for the information. Okay, so that's the idea, I guess from the word of State Park reopening so it was the Oregon State parks.org was one of the sites you can go to to find out some of the information about the May 15 phase one reopenings of Oregon State Park public lands. Yeah, sounds fun. At least there's a couple spots, open it up back like that. It seems like still a few places around Like the city parks and stuff, those are still all shut down. So I'm not in too much of a draw to go to any of these state parks really, you know, this is one of those things where you see this article. And this is one of the things where if you're a little confused about the delineations of different public lands, it can be it can seem like, and this is what I had thought, and sort of the the layman's view of it before, is that when I saw something like that, if, you know, state parks reopening, I would have thought, Oh, well, like they were closed before. And I guess the parks were, but I would have just sort of assumed that to be almost all public areas that you could go out to, or go outside to, or I wouldn't have really known of places outside of just those limited areas of state parks. But I think like we talked about, on the last podcast, a lot of those national wildlife refuges were open, a lot of the wildlife viewing areas are still open wilderness areas are of course, still open. You know, there's still a lot of things that were that were publicly accessible to go out on and go hiking on. And a lot of those places are going to be way less populated than their their state park counterparts. I think just because of the the notoriety that they have, I mean, you know, there's, there's good reason, really, I'd suppose why the Columbia River Gorge hikes are closed down right now, those get very busy during a lot of the year. And I just don't know, if they could, they could handle that kind of use capacity right now. It just seems it seems like a lot of stuff. Same with silver falls or, or even Smith rock and some busy days like that, you know, I'm sure in the spring, it can be super busy out there. So if the reopening and there fell in the parking lot, it's probably going to be busy enough. And it's probably going to be busy with a lot of folks from Ben that haven't been there in a while I understand the idea of people locally wanting to get out and go to those things. But it seems like an odd and just sort of beyond what is legally regulated for them to ask that people not go just for just for no reason. So I'm probably not going to go, but I guess it's for my own reasons and stuff. So we'll see how it goes. I'm going to try and get out a little bit before the Memorial Day weekend, which is when I'm kind of suppose it's going to get a hit another maximum. And they're going to probably try to and more sternly asked that people not go, which I'm not looking forward to. I don't wanna follow this rule. I want to go. So I'm gonna wrap up the podcast around here and continue my day with cool gardening stuff outside like I was talking about earlier.

Do you have that to look forward to on the next podcast? Did I plant the miracles or not? Find out next time on The Billy Newman photo podcast. You can go to Billy Newman photo comm to see some of the other stuff. I've been working on some of the posts that put up some of the other podcasts that I've put together in past years as well.

And, yeah,

I suppose that's it. I'm gonna try and go out and do some stuff for the weekend. Do some gardening like I was talking about, maybe I can get out and do some fun photo stuff. And that has something cool to talk about. That's a little more photo news related. But thanks for tuning in to this episode of The doing photo podcast. This is Episode 146

Oregon Public Land Reopenings

Billy Newman Photo Podcast | 145 Oregon Public Land Reopenings

15 degree sleeping bags. Down vs synthetic. Fishing for Trout on a bridge. Morning light, easy light. Oregon public land. National forest land open. Trailheads begin to reopen.

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.

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145-Billy-Newman-Photo-podcast_mixdown.txt

Hello, thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded on May 11, 2020. How's it going? Thanks for checking this one. I finished up that camping trip I was doing up the mountain Creek there in the Cascades a couple days ago. What was that like Wednesday, I think it was like maybe like Tuesday, Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. I think that was the super moon that was coming up that night. If I remember right, and that was pretty cool. It was cool to see the full moon up there. And they always talk about the Super Moon, which is kind of a, I don't know, it's a little bit of a misnomer. But it's, it's cool to see to that thing to talk about happening every six months or so. Really, it's just kind of the oscillation of a bit of the eccentricities in the orbit of the moon that make it I think about 25,000 miles closer than its maximum, and then maybe about 25,000 miles further away. And it's distant maximum. But I think it's really only like a little bit of a sliver larger than it normally would be. If you notice though, it's a thing I learned way back. And I think that they show it at a scene in Apollo 13. But if you put your hand all the way out and you put your thumb up at all times, you're able to cover the entire Full Moon, just with your thumbnail. It's pretty wild, man, you can always like visualize the moon is being this really big thing in the sky. And really a lot of the time it's, it's just as big as your thumbnail it at arm's reach, which is kind of a trip. But it was kind of it was cool to see the supermoon that night was really bright, it was cool to kind of watch around and kind of LIGO was illuminating the forest and the trees and the mountains and stuff around me. That was kind of nice to see. Cold that night, though. Man, I tell you so have a 15 degree sleeping bag. And that's great. 15 degrees is fine. But envision degrees really is more than adequate for most circumstances that I ended up being in during the summertime. Where it's done, I was just not too big of a concern about how cold it gets. But when is this 15 degrees really means you're going to be comfortable down to somewhere around 35 degrees, but anywhere under 30 degrees is a pretty uncomfortable experience, I think it means you're going to stay alive. That until it's about 15 degrees. So if it were me again, buying something for maybe I don't know, a more heavy three season camping experience most of the time, probably a lot of the nights out that I do. Even though I like to go at all times a year, it seems like the majority of nights I go out or during the summer months or you know during like pretty fair weather seasons. But if I were going to buy again, which I'm going to try and get like a two or three sleeping bag system going, if I was going to buy again, I probably get a zero degree or maybe a negative 15 degree. And I could really use the warm because man, what I noticed is even if it was just a little bit down to what would have been probably, maybe, I don't know, 29 or something like that it was you know, as a bit below freezing. Who knows how cold it really was, it was only like an elevation of 2500 feet and it was a canyon. I thought it was a clear night, but I thought it would be relatively sheltered. And yeah, it was a lot of it was a lot of ice on my window when I woke up. And it was a cold, cold night to sit through too. So. So yeah, that 15 degree bag was was just holding up out there. But yeah, if I was gonna go again, I think they have like a zero degree bag. And then down below that they had like a negative 15 and then maybe like a negative 30 degree bag. Negative 30 sounds like a real warm, like down bag. So I think mine's a synthetic bag. They talk about this sometimes where there's like differences in the thermal insulation qualities of the material that your sleeping bag is made out of. And I think that the for it was it was an improvement actually, you know, above whatever whatever cotton we were using for a while they were using wool stuff, which was pretty smart I that that works really well to to be an insulating material. And it doesn't. Alright, that works well with moisture and stuff and all the other things we know about. merino wool is really cool. Everybody knows about that kind of stuff but but we had like, you know, those really terrible big cotton sleeping bags way back. Those arrived. I don't know if they were really even that insulating. Then they switched over to those synthetic materials, which is probably all oil based. Does that sound right? Like a petroleum based plastics product that was made out of synthetics. I think that's how they spin up a lot of those. Those Biologists those synthetic types of materials that they're making these nylons out of.

So I think that was how a lot of this, this synthetic stuff had been made. But really, I think what they they talk about being the superior insulator is down. And that's what I'd hoped to try and find as another zero degree or negative 15 degree sleeping bag would be a negative 15 degree down bag, which is normally a bit more expensive. You know, when you're looking around at the price points for these different sleeping bags, if you're trying to get into some colder weather camping stuff, where you're gonna find is it those name brand or land even name brand, necessarily, but just a bespoke manufacturer for quality, technical outdoors product is going to be very expensive. And so that's where you're gonna find. I don't know whether you know, 399 for a sleeping bag. 299-490-9699 I've seen like a lot of pretty expensive prices out there. I think NEEMO makes some bags that are looking pretty cool that I've seen recommended a few times. I've heard a big Agnus. They make 10s most of the time though, right? They're 10 company, aren't they? Yeah, stone glaciers one that I keep hearing kind of pop up here and there. Now, for some sense. Marmon, I think has bags. Alright guys, is you know, a retailer of recreational equipment. They're closed right now though. So I don't even know if you get an order from anyone like that, but, but they have some bags, I think that's where my synthetic bag was from, that I've been using for the last, I don't know, seven years or so. So that's, it's been fine. But I also tested out the sleeping mat I got I got a new Thermarest sleeping mat. And now big news. It's pretty exciting. Guys, stay tuned. It's a Yeah, it's a larger sleeping mat than I had before. But it's a it's a coated one with I think it's kind of like it's ballistic now. But it's that nylon coating over it. So it's not just the rubber mat at the base of it. So you can throw it on the ground or on the barrel, semi abrasive materials that it would be outside and is working great. I think it's about one inch thick or so it's about 25 inches wide at the shoulder point is long enough to fit my whole body, which is probably the one for me. So yeah, I got a solid camp man. I think for the last three years, I've been sleeping on one that goes flat about four hours after you start sleeping. So that's kind of nice to swap out. I don't know why I put up with so long really shouldn't do that. Sleep is like one of the best things you can get, you know, if you can figure out just like a couple easy things to take care of when you're out camping or out in the woods and stuff. It's probably sleep. I mean, that's like the thing that takes and it's frustrating, because like even this last one I'm talking about, didn't sleep very well, way too cold part of it, you know, no shelter and enough stuff that was kind of comfortable. But really as it is, yeah, it's like I need to, I need to figure out a couple other extra things to kind of throw in there. But yeah, there's just a couple things you can figure out when you're going camping, like how to stay warm, or how to be comfortable when you do go. Or like when you are sleeping is like one of the most important and most, I don't know, effective things you can do to kind of improve the way that a trip goes. Because like, I can be like I can be brutal the next day if you don't get any sleep the night before. We just have probably the first half a dozen camping trips of the year. You know those first half dozen or so overnights of the year. I'm just always kind of groggy and like what I have to get up right now. We just sort out was Wednesday morning when I woke up. I popped up. And I think it was probably about 5am so that I that I got up I think it was just about first light. The sun had come up Yeah, but there's a little bit of light up in the sky, and the stars were kind of washed out by the blue sky. So I have to up and the fire was out. I think from the night before like I was mentioning how those the sticks had worn out and the coals that started burning down even I think by the time I was near the end of my last podcast. I hopped out, and the back windows were clear. There wasn't any frost on it. But the front window the windshield was ice over pretty hard really. I mean it looked like it was, you know, like coated or water and then froze over solid. So it wasn't even just kind of like a fluffy bit of white frost or something that had built up on it through fog. It just look like a hard coating of just an ice sheet over the windshield. Great. I don't have a nice grape or something with me. I'm thinking that it's me now. Who needs an ice-scraper. I'm taking a sip of coffee.

So yeah, I don't know. I grabbed a box. I think it was a Visa card. are bored out of the bag, but I could kind of flex around a bit through that over the windshield, try to run the truck for a bit try to warm it up and took a while to but yeah scraped off some ice scraped out of the hole big enough to kind of get started on the drive and then prepped to take off but yeah, take some photos and stuff around the campsite for a bit first in the morning. Nice draw in the valley like I was talking about that goes up to that that ridge point that you can kind of see off in the distance and I think I could see like the the fire from the smoke or the smoke from the fire of the neighboring campers over there. I don't know if I'd mentioned it well Yeah, I definitely didn't the last one. They were they're kind of doing Brody's out in the on the road. Around sunset. I think I got a little clip of it on video. But yeah, it's like four or five of them. And he's kind of beater late 90s for about four trucks doing spins out in the dirt roads. So it looks fun, I don't know. But they were getting getting the fire going and stuff in the morning to or whatever they had gone from the night before. You can see a plume of it coming up from the area they would have been camping over by the creek bed down hill. And yeah, it was cool. took some photos and stuff that morning, walked around kind of cleaned up the camp a little bit. But the fire stuff out and jumped in the truck, had that little hole in the ice to see through. And then yeah, popped on a podcast and cruised down the road. And so what I was trying to do was was take off down to a couple other spots along the creek while it was still morning and then head down ultimately to the area where the lake it started to build up. And so kind of how it works is like it kind of flows down the creek. And then there's a dam at a point ultimately, and then back right behind the dam is a reservoir where that Greek is kind of built up. And I guess now is Yeah, body of water out there. So drove down a ways and took some photographs of the creek and the morning light and some of the water and stuff coming through. I really like that kind of affected the sort of early spring, kind of fresh snowmelt mountain Creek stuff that just sort of looks really crisp and forested and natural. And then it came down a ways further to a bridge that kind of cuts across the span of the creek as it starts to sort of widen out into the reservoir area. And it looks like, you know, a big stretch of calm water out on the edge of the bridge where I think two different groups that were doing some fishing in the morning. And yeah, it seems like people are still out. It was a busy area up there is still still definitely pretty fully populated set of people. You know, even during this lockdown period, there was a bunch of people out there hanging out and fishing. I think it was too different. The different groups to maybe they were they were all kind of connected. But yeah, they were they're out there with a couple lines over the bridge. And they were picking up a couple things, I think so I saw a lady that was pulling up and a little a little blue kayak to the ramp on the first day. And on her What is that thing you know, when you you ran it through the gilling you got the fish and stuff anyway, she pulled up with like guns like four or five trout or something on her

on her

inner guy, that's where it Leave it, I guess, but she pulled up before if I tried. So I figured you guys, these guys were doing a little bit of trout fishing out there. Which sounds fun. It's a nice, clear, crisp morning and stuff like I was saying. So yeah, it sounds like it'd be nice to be out there for a couple hours doing sufficient. And yeah, it looked like they were they were up to what they were getting a couple things. Let's go to a sound ospreay that the took off, I think over the lake area just at that time. And we kind of like pull up at certain spots over the water, kind of back flap to hold in the same spot, look underwater and see if there's something I didn't see enough, or I didn't see a prime opportunity. And then we're going to swoop off and then take off to a different section of the lake, then do it again. So watch that about three or four times, try to take a couple pictures of the area. What's your nice do I like the photographs that I got that morning, it's good to get a nice a nice look to it really, you know, a lot of the time that the photographs really look a lot better when you just select the right time of day to be somewhere which you know, is obvious, but just the types of colors and the types of saturation and dynamics that you get in the look of a pretty simple, you know, set of trees and water, it just comes off a lot better when it's just the right type of light. It's really amazing to to kind of see what differences it makes when it's a cloudy day or a sunny day or a morning or an evening or midday. Really, it seems like the dynamics of the light change so much that you can get like a totally different look in the photo, which is always kind of interesting to pay attention to and sort of see how that how that goes, What changes about it and sort of how that affects the photographs that you're making. I mean you can edit you know some cool at any time of day but you It's kind of cool to figure out how it works for you or how it works, or what I'm trying to do is how to figure out how, how it works for my photographs and what I'm trying to do. Which is nice. It was cool going out there and climbing around the creeks and stuff in the morning and taking a cup of photos and water nice, Brian, going over to the Lake area that's trying to work on similar stuff to what I've done before, but kind of that mirror look of that really calm water as it spreads across the lake in the morning. And then the reflection of the bright blue, kind of pre sunlit sky, or how's it you know, like before the sun is actually up over the horizon, there's not a lot of intensity. So it's just kind of a softer blue glow and a lot of ways. And then there's still enough illumination that you can see the greens and the trees and sort of the soft calm water in the morning before it gets kind of agitated through the rest of the day. So nice kind of peaceful looks to the photos and sort of the the natural stuff that I like to go kind of capture. You know, really, ultimately, though, there's some nice stuff up there. And I was really like, happy to kind of photograph some of the some of what I was looking for. But I was also also frustrated in the area too. I think there was a there's a little more choked off than what I normally like. Like, there wasn't as many opportunities as I had hoped for I did try to, you know, utilize the ones that I found. But there wasn't as many opportunities as I had hoped for for kind of an opened up wide scene that you could set up a landscape photo and there wasn't a lot of elements to really work with, it was just sort of like some rolling hills off to a Green Hill. So. So sometimes I'm trying to find some stuff that's a little bit more dynamic, and it look than that. But it was fun, though, even is anyway. Though, I'm trying to think maybe, like I was mentioned on last when I got stuck and turned around, but the snow and I didn't want to deal with any of that right now. But in the next weeks and stuff, I want to get up to Mount Jefferson or Mount Washington or a couple of these other wilderness areas that that have a few kind of visual landmarks that would be worth taking an observation of. And you know, this other thing I want to bring up? Maybe I could talk about it here. Where is it? I think that it was on Oregon live. So there's the Oregonian, the Oregon newspaper here at a Portland I suppose, right? Or is it the state newspaper?

I think it's the Portland none. But Oregon live comm there was a news article that I was gonna check out says, What outdoor spaces have reopened in Oregon, which are still closed, published on May 8. And I was gonna check out a couple little pieces in here. But it does a good job. If you if you look this one up. It does a good enough job though it also has a little bit of sly language. And well, I'll tell you kind of like I'd been mentioned in the last couple of times, there is a bit of language that is meant for the initiated in this sort of thing. So it'll say you can't do things. Sometimes you can do those things. So you might have to check with them each kind of local area to see what your access to the lands are in that area. But But this article is the first one that I've seen in a while that actually goes through and seems to make a comment a little bit more specifically about different sections of land that are going to be open and what types of facilities are going to reopen in that area. And what are what is not going to, you know, like a visitor center is going to stay close, but maybe like the restrooms will be open or, or all of that sort of stuff is closed, but the trails are open. So let's see what we got. I think in this is Oregon State Parks are going to gradually reopen. And I bet that's gonna take a while it says all campgrounds are going to remain close. I was looking at Wildlife Refuge areas like the one that's south of where we are. I think there's one there's another one north of us too. Those are I think they visited centers are listed as being closed. But the lands themselves are open. So if there's like a parking lot area where people will congregate, they might have gated that off. But the land itself is open to do hiking, I suppose. So you can do the Hanceville. And in Oregon, there's no there's no mask requirement as issued by the governor. I think there is a mask consideration request that has been made, then private businesses can add that as a requirement to do business with them. But outside you can choose to walk around without one. I think there was a mention that, you know, there's a measure of Dr. Fauci saying that if you were in and out area, it might not be necessary to wear a mask any longer, which I don't know. We'll see it. Pick it up. It's fortunate that in this area, at least there's a lower caseload than probably a lot of the parts of the world. I think it says over in the Oregon coast, which has been kind of a hotspot when it was talking about land access. A lot of those beach towns didn't really want to have to deal with people from Portland shooting over and taking a beach vacation and getting them sick I think was sort of the idea or overrunning their facilities and in their ability to handle it. So I think a lot of those things that still been shut down, but I think there is some of the same that like beaches are technically open in Oregon. But all public access points are managed by the Oregon Parks and recreation department are closed until further notice. Well, Cannon Beach has banned visitors through at least June 2. seaside has entirely closed its beaches to the public. Tillamook County has closed all beach access points and parking lots. Lincoln County from Lincoln city to yachts, has temporarily banned short term vacation rentals. county parks have reopened enqueues and Douglas counties this summer only open for residents and some public health restrictions still apply. Columbia River Gorge virtually all recreation areas in the Columbia River Gorge remain closed, including state parks in both Oregon and Washington. All US Forest Service lands in the Columbia Gorge is closed, including wilderness areas really wow. That's one of the most strict closures that there are. It must be to really just control like the population of Portland going out and do an ageing which is strange man if you want to do a two hour drive you got everything open to you but less than that it's closed. Some recreation sites are still open at the Bonneville, the Dow's and the john de dams. Some recreation sites are open at the Bonneville the downs and the john de dams. Well, at least those are open. Everybody go recreate at the dams? Why are those open? Everybody was gonna the john de damp the recreation centers open mountain hood all developed recreation areas on Mount Hood are currently close to the public including all trailheads boat ramps, day-use sites, snow parks and campgrounds, Forest Service roads and dispersed areas are open to the public as well as trails not accessed by developed trailheads Yeah, so that was one of those those tickets where the governor has close to trailheads. Oh, trailheads, okay, well, so any any strange technical way It means that the trails are open. If you are able to park

off the trailhead, and then access the trail by going back and tree right, you know, cutting over to the side, and then getting onto the trailhead by going around or getting onto the trail by going around the trailhead. You are following the law. ski resorts are now allowed to reopen. Hey, great may 15, or get getting some scheme, though so far only Timberline Lodge has announced it will do so for now Timberline Lodge remains closed. Okay, well, yeah, there you go. national forests. Here's the ticket. All developed recreation areas in most of Oregon and Washington National Forest are closed to the public recreation areas. Okay, so that means like a developed kind of structured site. Or does it What does it say here, including all trailheads, boat ramps de use sites, snow parks, and campgrounds, the US Forest Service has announced it will begin a phased reopening of those sides. The no timeline has been made public Forest Service roads and dispersed areas are open to the public, as well as trails not accessed by developed trailheads. Hunting and fishing is allowed in undeveloped areas. Well, there you go. So really, yeah, so this is one of those things that is how would you say like a dog whistle to the initiated, as that says to you, or maybe not you you're probably the initiated, right? You're listening to this podcast. That's the secrets. So yeah, when it's talking about that stuff, it's kind of a little bit of a, I don't know, a layman's trick or something. I think it's saying like, Oh, yeah, it's close, like recreation sites are closed or trailheads are closed or visitor centers are closed, like, that's what anybody cares about when they're going out to a wilderness area. So it might mean that a bathroom is closed or that it's not been cleaned, but If you're going for a remote or dispersed forest experience, those are all still as open as they ever would have been. Because I think they're your public lands, you know, you have access to those kind of places. That's where it seemed like dispersed camping, hunting and fishing is still available. Forest Service roads are still open to be traveled on. But really, when it's saying like a recreation site is closed, I think it's talking about a developed Forest Service campground, a developed Forest Service like bathroom where they use site like it was saying a snow Park site where you'd have a parking lot and a congregation of people or a trailhead site where there's a parking lot, and a congregation of people. Normally those places that have like, some kind of day-use parking pass for you know, give $2 to an envelope and put it in a box or something. That kind of places I think still remain close, but those lands are still open. And it is a little bit more complicated, kind of on the coastal side of the cascade side besides you get out in the Eastern Oregon a lot of those Forest Service lands you know, the the national forest land, or BLM land is just so wide open, as in there's just like, it's just, it's just wide-open landscape that it's, it's pretty accessible. You can go to a lot of places out there, like the john de dam, go hang out there. Let's see back to this. It says the Umpqua National Forest will reopen most of its boat ramps and trailheads. On May 9, the trailhead to Umpqua hot springs remains closed as we talk about unquote hot springs the last time remaining closed I guess this hot springs would probably mean that'd be gross like hey, I wonder I wonder the person in this hot spring before me I COVID Oh, that's gonna be a great thought for the next year I'm quite National Forest on May 9 that means it's already open for like two days now. People can trailhead and and boat ramp all they want to wow I wonder how that's gonna do for like river recreation stuff that's just kind of interesting how it's working. Let's see what do we have? There's like some other stuff national parks. Crater Lake National Park is currently close to the public as well as john day fossil bets Lewis and Clark National Historic Park tours at the Oregon caves National Monument not tours at the Oregon caves National Monument are closed, but hiking trails remain open. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, the Oregon caves down outside of the cave junction in Southern Oregon. I've been there a few times for field trips and like the seventh grade and whatnot. Really should go again as an adult. I don't really have a clear memory of how cool it might be. I think it was a I mean, it's a national monument. Right? It's got to be something cool. So yeah, the tours are closed. I remember that was kind of the thing I was always bummed about is like the lava the lava caves, you can go to an Eastern Oregon. Those are open you just be just drive up and walk in yourself and

you should bring a flashlight, you know, it's up to you. The the caves that the caves in outside of cave junction. at the Oregon caves, I don't know. It's just too on rails. It was just too much of like a 45 minute tour, and then you'll leave, which I've never really preferred even as a kid. But as you go, not be any cake because I bet they treat you with kid gloves when you're 10. Hiking trails remain open out there. Well, that's good. Metro parks Oregon State Forest day-use areas campgrounds and restrooms are closed. In Oregon State forests, though dispersed camping trails and target shooting remain open. State Forest officials have asked that people delay travel as much as possible. Let me check that again. State Forest officials have asked that people delay travel as much as possible. Have they asked that maybe they have out there? I don't know if they have the right to do that. Again, I think that's kind of speaking to the uninitiated in that setting. So I think if you have a hunting license or a fishing license, or you're actively participating in a planned event, I think like there's bear season still turkey season, maybe that's and ended. But I think there was like a spring bear hunt that it opened up. And there's open open season and whatever else. And I think that those were dispersed experiences like that were still acceptable. So I don't know if they have the right to ask you to not attend your public lands. It's sort of one of those things I'm talking about, again, where it's like, well, but they're not in charge of it. They're in charge of managing it for you, but they're not in charge of it. Wildlife Refuges. Wildlife Refuges managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service remain open to the public. It says the parking lots access points and visitor centers may be closed. I was kind of what I experienced when I went out to the Finley Wildlife Refuge south of Corvallis here, and it's a big area where like Canadian geese, and elk and birds of other types rest up. I guess during the winter, it's just sort of I guess technically it would have reopened or more open access to the public on April 1, but due to the Coronavirus stuff, it had been kind of closed. And I think at first they were putting up some signs that said, like, hey, the governor said that this is closed, but I don't think they said that. So I think really, it was just at the visitor center. That was a section of that, though, no one really cared. I mean, I want to see the wildlife I want to see the visitor center that that Visitor Center was closed, it also closed a gate that goes to Well, it's really just a road the drive-thru, but I guess that would go to a more congregated parking lot area. So that had been closed, but people have been parking on the outside of that and then walking in because they have right to their public land. Which is cool. Yeah, you can go in there. And it's a beautiful spot. You can kind of hike around through there. There's a bunch of trails, and it's a pretty remote area, or, you know, just as it is, it's not a lot of people that are trying to occupy it. And given that it's a wildlife refuge. There's just a density of wildlife that's collected there. That's pretty cool to check out. You know, there's a lot of I think that's where we saw an elk a couple weeks ago. Before that, we'd seen a coyote walking around out there we kind of I bought a bunch of bald eagles and a bunch of hawks and what else has been out there? A lot. So what was out there a couple weeks ago that biplane was out there a couple of weeks ago. That's where I was checking that out. So yeah, wildlife refuges, I guess, remain open to the public. For a lot of access points. I was looking at that there's like no wildlife refuge, land allocated in Southern Oregon as I was kind of looking through there. I think there's one just south of here and one just north of here near Salem. And then there's like a bunch of along the coast. There's a bunch over in Eastern Oregon a lot up along the Columbia River, but there's nothing at all in Southern Oregon. To know I live down there, I guess. BLM land, I think we're wrapping it up here. This is near the end. Thanks for reading an article. BLM land most day you sites and many restrooms on Bureau of Land Management land are closed to the public, as well as all campgrounds, visitors are instructed to contact local BLM offices for specific closure details. The acquaint ahead outstanding natural area and Oregon Trail interpretive center remain closed. Mount sounds like they're saying that it's closed. Many restrooms on Bureau of Land Management land are close to the public as well as campgrounds.

Okay. Yeah, so

I think that when they're talking about campgrounds, and restrooms, I think, again, they're talking about the develop locations that would be at, like congregation points, that would be kind of more similar to where you'd be like, you know, just like a campground kind of thing. But any of these dispersed locations are still available to the public. And when I was up on the, like I was saying, when I was out into the national forest land, as soon as you get to the area where you're in national forest and camping is allowed off the road. There's these fairings and campsites built up just off the side of the road. And those were all loaded up. All of them had an RV or a fifth wheel or trailer or a truck content and stuff set up with a bunch of wood and people hanging out there for what seemed like a setup for three or four or five days or something. So it seemed like there's a lot of locations that are like that across Oregon. earlier in the month, early in April, when I went out to Eastern Oregon, I was checking out an area to camp out there that is normally way remote, you know, you'd only see people kind of backed up in there during a hunting season or something. And it was loaded up, you know, just early April, it was loaded out. And I think it's because out of all the millions of people out there, and all these people that have been set aside as non essential workers with a lot of time I mean, you know, for millions and millions of them, they're staying home and for maybe, I don't know, 80,000 people or something, they're all taking their trucks and going out and that 80,000 people is enough to fill up the 5000 good spots that seem to be spread across some of that remote land out there. So it's kind of funny to see sort of where people are lining up and how things are going. And then I'm one of them too, right. You know, I got the time, and I'm trying to go out and try to check out some of these still open areas. So it's cool that we're getting to phase one of the reopening process. Hopefully, people are in a good place for that as we're coming into the middle of May and then Memorial Day weekend and some of the kind of onset of the summer season stuff. I think that it'll be good to have a more reopened kind of vibe of it going on then, man could you imagine staying close through Memorial Day. You can go out you can do some river stuff or something. stuff or some land stuff, any of that kind of outdoor stuff that I'd want to do. It'd be terrible if it was, if it was shut down to me. So I'm glad it's open and available to us. And yeah, thanks for going through. And looking at some land access that we have across Oregon as we start to reopen into phase one. They sort of, I guess, listening through some sleeping through a cold night and taking photos in the morning stories from the cabin trip the other day talking about the supermoon a little bit covered a bit of stuff. So I think we'll probably start wrapping it up there. Thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. You can see more of my stuff at Billy Newman photo comm where I put up a couple blog posts here and there some ideas about some photography stuff, a bunch of these podcasts are up there. And other ways you can get in contact with me to do some business with me or, or I guess talk about some photo stuff with me if you're interested. So yeah, thanks a lot. I'm going to keep enjoying my cup of coffee on this Monday morning and seconds about the stuff done. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode of doing a new photo podcast I will talk to you again.

Creek Camp

Spring Camping on National Forest land during lockdown. Finding the snow line. Low Bridge!

Creek Camp

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Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast recorded on May 6, 2020. How's it going? Thanks a lot for tuning into this episode, I'm catching up on sun, national forest land right now about cold Creek in an area, kind of outside of where I'm living in Oregon. And it's gone pretty well, we're having a good day, I'm just here by myself. So I'm doing a solo camping trip. It's the first solo night out I've done this year, and I'm excited to be doing it. I think it's gonna be kind of cool. It's been fun. So far too. It's been,

it's been pretty mellow. I'm out here at my campsite, I got my recording gear, rigged up and I'm at the tailgate of my truck, and made a fire earlier in the fire rank. And it's a pretty clear night, pretty mellow weather seems kind of cold up here. It's sort of a mountain. And I think it's close-ish to the snow level. But still a few. It's still a bit above me, I drove up to it earlier. So earlier, when I was coming in, I left at about noon today. And I took off and drove to town up into the forest and then up kind of on this meandering Forest Service road. And you think right now that you know, maybe a lot of stuff would be empty or or you're not in a lot of use. But really, when I got out here, I noticed a good bit of traffic, it's a nice day, it's May, it's may 6. So I bet people are kind of getting out and and just kind of given the environment that we're in right now where people don't get to, or you know, that are just kind of stuck at home or they didn't they're not at work or something, they're probably the for the first time, you know, a lot of free time for a lot of these people do. So it seems like this area here. As soon as I got to the region that you could camp, it was full of campers, I was noticing that when I was coming up. So there's an area where I think you have to go at 17 miles up the road before you hit the area where you can begin just camping on the side of the road. And I think that's that's probably the spot where the national forest land begins. And before that, I think you're in a region of BLM land that structured out below there as you get kind of closer down toward the highway. And so this further out, made it through the BLM land, that's I guess there's no camping, I think you can do like a lot of day-use area stuff out there a couple campgrounds a past just sort of like Forest Service campgrounds, or BLM campgrounds but sort of a more organized, pull out with the bathroom, those were closed, or you know, there's like I think one of them at least I saw the picnic area had remained open for day you stuff that you know, you just kind of walked down to the river or something. There was a number of people out by the lake earlier down in the area, I was lower down on the mountain side. And then as I kind of had come up here into the hills, most of this road had been paved. So it's a pretty commonly used road. And I think I think it goes pretty well, I think it goes all the way through. So if it were clear, you could get from here, or from the side that I was on, I guess it would be kind of the South, the southwest side to the northeast side of the corner of the forest and kind of pop out on the other side of the highway. And when I was driving through earlier, I'd gone just a bit further than where I am now. And I traveled up uphill a bit more and it kind of started getting windy. And then I started noticing a little bit of snow in the shade your spots the the north facing slopes and stuff. And then after a little bit further, it was pretty crazy. It was it was probably a couple It must have been a couple 100 downed trees that had come come down through the road. And so the truck had come through so far. And just cut out a small route, you know, just cut out maybe eight feet of the tree there. So you could get a vehicle through investment more than that. But it was just enough to kind of squeeze a truck through, but really the the posts of the logs are still just kind of sticking out strewn across, like toothpicks. What was that like pick up sticks game that you could play? It was kind of like that when they were just kind of like all stacked upon each other. We were just kind of laid out over each other all the way up this road. And I go over or go under a couple low bridges to you know, we have to like skirt around to the side that you know the tree was still just hung all the way across the road or hadn't been cut down. I think it was too high. I'm not even sure if it was a forest service truck that did some of this seems like it must have been given the effort. But it just seems like they just started or they haven't really got around to finishing the work. I don't know maybe maybe the snow had just melted up at that high of an elevation but as I gotten just a little bit further up the way I saw, I saw like the road was just packed out in snow and there was a couple tire tracks that had gone in about four feet and then backed out and twisted around. And then I guess come back the other way so it seemed like I'd seen a couple cars come from that way and I guess they just turned around before I did you know but it was good. I travel all the way up there and checked out a couple spots out man it was there was a spot where there's there's this man I I would hate to have to be the person or the engineering crew that was putting in bridges out in these really rural areas. I look at some of these engineering projects, you know, just like steep, steep cliff sides, really. And then they have to reinforce this wall.

And then build like a bridge out over it too. But there's this area that I was passing, and I must have been a couple of years ago, or whatever it was, but they built a new bridge sense. But the old bridge, the bridge that used to be there for years, I guess had been washed out in a snowstorm or a flood out. And it's only, you know, 100 yards, down the creek way there. And you just see this, this giant button, not a very large, probably 75 footbridge structure, they're supposed to cut cut across this creek is just kind of laying out over the rocks downriver. They didn't go well, hey, there's a bridge is washed out over there. So it's a trip. But I've seen a few of those things out here in some of the spots of the big rural areas where things get washed out. And it takes a couple couple years for them to kind of reestablish whatever was over there. So I don't know. But it was cool, I took a took a couple photos of it. I've been trying to take some photos of this Creek area here. And it's cool, there's a lot of a lot of nice river rock and stuff at the base of it and a lot of fresh snowmelt too. So the water looks really really green, or you know, just kind of that pure kind of Emerald and

aqua blue look that you can get to some of this mountain water that's up here in the Cascades really pretty really fresh,

really crisp kind of kind of area. I noticed though this region as opposed to others, is maybe a little drier in its it's kind of forested climate, how is that see I'm in the area that should be pretty mossy and stuff. So maybe I'm not sure what I'm talking about is interesting. There's just different regions of the environment as you kind of go through areas Oregon, but even though this is a pretty forested area, some of these areas real near here are real lush and wet and or they just have you know, kind of a lot, a lot going on in that manner. This is really a little bit more arid of an area, but it's a nice forest area, it's it's a big area to I think just a ways up, there's a wilderness area and a couple trailheads that'd be cool, but I bet they're kind of snowed in now given the elevations. So we'll see if all my plans come together, but as it was, for the most part, it was to travel out and to try and get some some photo stuff done some photo work, I'm trying to do more on the side of, you know, just kind of like creating stuff that I'm really interested in, you know, like the photos that I really want to get to, I'm going to try and put those together and and kind of put those out is you know, a little publishing pieces and stuff in there. But that's really my main focus is trying to work on the the images and the art stuff that it really wants you right now and not Man, what a great time to so I just you know, with a lot of things kind of shut down. It's really unfortunate for a lot of people that have a lot of their primary activities kind of shut down. But as it is, you know, a lot of the stuff I want to do is just related to self publishing, there's really no one telling me what I can't do, or you know what I have to stop doing. And so I really appreciate the the kind of flexibility and man if there's just there's just a lot of opportunity right now, which is kind of what I'm excited about, you know, it's it's sort of a reset for a lot of people to kind of come back in and figure out what they were doing before and what kind of stuff they want to be doing. And I still want to be doing the same things, just a lot of a lot of media creation stuff. And a lot of, you know, photography, publishing, but what's cool about now is you just it kind of shakes things out a little bit, you get to you get to kind of focus on it if you think that's what you need to focus on with your time because man, things can change real fast. Things that you think we're really stable, maybe won't be the way the earth is, you know, the way the world is the way society is. might seem real strong, but maybe things can kind of change up on you real fast too. So it's it's been maybe a little bit of a lesson for a lot of people. Oh, people aren't, aren't too worried or too, too afraid. individually. There's a lot of a lot of circumstances where maybe that's more appropriate, but here in the Oregon area, it's nice that I apparently the the stats for the virus stuff are going down I think there's no new cases reported was I think a recent headline, I was looking at the county stats that I'm in so it's been holding steady at 39 cases reported and two deaths in the in the county I'm and that was from early in April that had been kind of kind of set so looks good for our rural area. And I'm hoping that it's going that way for many of the other county areas that exist out there in the United States too. But as it is, yeah, getting out and trying to work around what I'm what I'm learning from the US Fish and Wildlife Department. So I went to the Oregon website for the Oregon fish and wildlife. And that's trying to understand a little bit about what was going on with the regulations right now. And what was clear was open. I think in the last podcast that I mentioned that things are more open. And really, in a lot of ways, they are it's really cool. In Oregon, there's a lot of flexibility. And probably in most states there's there's still a lot of flexibility. Even in lockdown an essential activity is you know, is outdoor activity or is still qualified as it so you can't go to trailhead, you can't go to campgrounds, again, go to parks, or national parks, or state parks, right, but you can go or state land, right? I don't know. But you can go to BLM land, you can go to national forest land, you can go to a number of these trail areas. And what's fortunate about a lot of the area in the western states is most of these western states, it's like 50% public lands. So there's still a lot of regions that are that are publicly accessible, a lot of opportunity to be by yourself, or you know, there's, there's not gonna be a lot of crowds around as it is. So not a lot of risk out there, which is cool. And given Yeah, that's a lot of the stuff that I want to be be trying to get out. It's a great time of year to be doing it, we're coming into the pocket of the springtime here in May. I think we're still coming through like a few more of the last rainstorms that are well, I don't know, it's this area, this is region of the world kind of gets a lot of that through June, it seems.

I'm hoping we can avoid that. But we got a pretty nice spring so far. Oh, but I hope it turns around a little bit, or kind of kicks in kicks in a little bit more, but we've had a few rainstorms just last couple weeks, and it's kind of a dampening the interest I've had and running out and trying to camp and stuff some, as I'm sure as it starts getting nicer, probably everybody's going to be itching to get outside more and more, especially the folks that are that have been kind of cooped up in apartment areas or more densely populated regions of of urban centers, but it's great being out here, in a big campsite area, I got a nice view, I got to drive around forever out here to to find a good spot to camp. So there's, there's plenty of spots, there's also like I was saying a good crowd too, you know, so just about every every one of these areas. And as a firing, it has someone camping out it, you know, all the way up the creek, there's a lot of spots like that. So that's really not my favorite kind of environment for this circumstance, you know, I'm not really doing like, I don't know, ultimate camping experience kind of trips right now, but, but I am trying to get to some locations that are good to take some photographs of. And so if I need to, like you know, just camp out for, you know, in whatever location for a couple hours and then wake up real early and take off and go to the spot that I need to go. That's pretty functional. But even still, I really like to have some more space and get to kind of set up the camp the way I want to. And that's really the great benefit of trying to go to an area like BLM land or national forest land where you can really kind of do that and you have a few more your own rules that you can make and follow like you know, I set up a fire here and a fire ring. And I gathered my wood out here and I've got no one around me really there's there's some folks down the road here. There's a junction, and then you can kind of take another another road off and head down the hills uphill right now, you can head down the hillside toward the creek. And there's I think a pole out over there where there's a there's a group of probably five or six it seems like five or six-four by four trucks. Some young guys probably my age are a little younger probably out travel around with the time off that they have to, but it looks fun. Yeah, taking off for about four and around.

I heard him rallying around out here before sunset. It was funny. Doing some donuts. The yeah but I just just before I started this podcast, there was a there's a guy and like a white

like a white Sierra that had cruised up now as a ram. I'm pretty sure yeah, yeah, cruised up the main road here and then yeah, just like pulled off onto the road that I'm camping on. I came back here a couple 100 couple 100 meters and swung into the big area I'm camping out in and and then it rode that kind of cruises by and so took off. It's a remote one though there's not enough destroyed dead ends. And dead ends just two minutes up this road or something I went up there first when I was checking it out seeing what was around here, seeing if it opened up anymore, further up the way but really just kind of pulls up to like a ravine, that's the straw that's been pulled out by a creek and then it kind of follows a sort of steep contour up into some sort of thick remote on prepared logging road sort of stuff up there. And I'm still I'm still kind of taking it easy. So you know, I don't need to get into that right now. I think I'm fine. So I cruise back down here to this, this nice open spot with the view and got I got a wide-open view to my South Sea seems pretty south. Yeah, it's pretty south and it goes off a bit, and then you can see like a ridge that's up on top of the mountain. Out in the distance. It's kind of cool, you know, just kind of this this kind of these rolling cascade hills that are out there and a lot of forested land and be up at the top of it. You can kind of See this outcrop a rock. And as that kind of draws down this, this kind of Creek collects and then comes down to the main Creek over here. Cool area. It's nice and it's really pretty. I think right now. I think I see the moonlight coming up. It's cast and light onto the trees up in front of me I see this more headlights. Nada, it's the moon. Well, I think I see Venus out here. I think I see my fire going low. So that's good news, I waited till just about dark, and then using up all my firewood that I gathered. That's cool. It's not a big deal. It's Yeah, there's this area, I think the spot that I'm in specifically was like, I think I've been logged out. In fact, as I'm looking up the hill, I see like that was locked out at some time. And this area that I'm at was was is flat, it was logged and then flattened out back out when they're putting this road in. However it is. So there's a big, there's a big pile just just down here of whether it comes through some years ago and cleared out a bunch of brush and stacked it up in a pile over there. And so I just got walked over there and pulled out some some dry sticks they've been they've just been dried out over there for years. So they're seasoned and ready to go. And they they pretty small. Probably probably like about I don't know, a little bit thicker around than your thumb and no bigger than, you know, the thickness of a wrist or something around as a stick. So I just gathered up a bunch of those. And I'm throwing them onto the fire here.

I used some old dried up Fern earlier that's trying to get the fire started. I just had like crappy sticks, and some of them are still kind of dewy and stuff. Just kind of from from sitting around. And you know, it rained a bunch yesterday, I think it rained on me earlier when I was driving around to so that wood wasn't wet and it's dried out pretty well. But it just isn't small enough. And I got a gun through I was learning this, this tactic called feather sticks. Do you guys heard of that it's like a bushcrafting term, I hate that word; I prefer like camping or hunting or something like that. But in the world of bushcrafting, which I'm sure you can YouTube, there's, this is actually a really brilliant idea. And a lot of that stuff is great to have generating the skills that you'd need to run to manage yourself in the outdoors. And think kind of the thinking behind it is the more that you know about how to work with your environment, the less gear you need to carry with you and and really the more apt you are to make proper choices in a short period of time that will help you out. So that's that's really helpful. So you know, just kinda like having fire building skills or knowing what to do and how to set up camp or how to run a tarp or how to get water, all that sort of stuff. Anyway, in this case, you take some of these sticks that I'm talking about some of these drier ones, you take your knife, your sturdy bushcraft knife, that people still like to talk about anything, you take around 24 inches of that stick, and kind of break them down at 24 inches or so. And then we're supposed to do is take that knife and sort of what would it be like kind of like peeling a potato or something or like you know, if you got to like kind of peel a carrot, what do you want to do is kind of start at the top. And then you want to peel into it, you kind of cut in with the knife just a little bit and then run a slice that down all the way down to the the end of the bar. But you don't you don't slice off that flake of wood that you've been pulling up, you can make it pretty thin, too. It's called feather sticks for a reason, right. So you try and kind of make it like a thin strip of wood that's kind of pulled up from it. And the wood will just kind of naturally curl upon itself. As you chop on it, it takes a lot of getting used to you kind of have to get to get to get the hang of trying to get those feather pieces down, you have to hold it onto the stick itself. So you cut down all the way to the last like two inches or so of the wood and then you leave it. And so what happens is I used to cut, you kind of rotate the wood and you cut down, rotate the wood and cut down. And so you get after doing that for a while. It's just a bunch of these real thin flakes of wood that are all gathered up at the top end of this stick, and then you have a nice dry piece of kindling, that sort of work down next to it. And so what you do is people that a lot of bushcrafting and camping stuff is just doing a lot of preparation and a lot of work that sort of seems like man should roll lighter. Or you know, jetabroad some newspapers or something that would have done more. But if you're in a bushcraft and yeah, it's one of those things you can do if you have nothing, nothing around. But yeah, you make these feathers sticks, and they're good fire starting material if you get the right wood that's that's drying, if you can kind of run down and you get these plumes of these this kind of saw or Masada is but these little like plumes of wood flakes and they'll they'll burn up real quick when you get when you get a fire going on them. But what I did for this one, oh the other fire tip. What was the one I heard? Cotton balls and Vaseline. here that's that's like the fire starter ticket because it's pretty, pretty neutral. You can use the Vaseline for a couple different things and the cotton balls too but that petroleum jelly. That petroleum jelly that makes up the Vaseline will rock a fire and the cotton too. So yeah, you just take a cotton swab from the bathroom, Vaseline you put that in like a Ziploc bag, and then you pack That into one of the pockets of your backpack. And you can get a fire going with a lot of stuff, or you can get the base of a fire gun with a lot of stuff like that would work great even with the gun was like a flint Flint rod. I can't remember what the other word is for it. But those Flint rods that you strike and then you run a spray sparks onto instead you can do that I always bring a lighter a couple lighters with a gun in my pocket right now. But those are really easy fire starter tools where you can light that you got a good flame going for a sustained amount of time running out the petroleum jelly and the cotton and then you can stack smaller twigs and sticks and stuff on it, and then run bigger branches on that really quickly. And that that helps out a lot. In my case, I didn't know that I had a couple couple napkins from lunch. And I had some Fern that I spotted over here, and it had died out. And so there's these these dried out fronds of Fern leaves over I don't know about 50 feet over here under the side of the road.

So I went over there with my knife, and I cut down a couple handfuls of those, I came back over to the fire I laid out a better the smaller sticks at the base. And then I stacked in a bunch of the dried Fern is a bad there. And then I put some of the strips of paper towel that I had balled up in a section there and then I stacked up kind of a little fork like a little lean-to four of some of the smaller sticks and then had some of the bigger sticks are ready to go but lit up the the what was it the paper towel and a couple in like two spots is what I tried to lift paper towel in two spots with the lighter. And then real quickly, I just kind of held over the ferns was dried ferns and they lit up real fast here. So that was a great fire started piece. And that cuts you know cuts a big flame really quickly. And then I put that over it. And then that kind of got the lower ferns sort of burn and and some of the sticks go in and then I threw on those smaller twigs over. And then that cut through the bigger sticks on there. So dropped a couple logs on there. I was kind of scavenging them from some of the other firings that I was passing along the way, even though I'd gone out. What was it a couple, I don't know, it's probably a month or so ago now, and I collected a good bit of firewood up in some of the areas outside of where I was working at. And yeah, I'd kind of drive around and if I see like some some downed, dried out wood on the road, I'd throw it in the back of the truck and I brought it home and I cut it up and then I stacked it up. And so some of its guys seasoning out now we've got a little fire pit at home that we're kind of we're kind of using it with but I was gonna bring some of that some of the twigs and some of the kindling that I had and then I forgot about it and didn't bring any firewood with me which is fine to know. You know, it's cool. Really almost anytime I've gone out camping in the past I've never brought firewood with me even probably at times I should have or you know places that you're not supposed to scavenge firewood or that it's been so used that there's just no firewood in any capacity left to scavenge. batch Where was that? is in Wyoming? Yeah, I was in Wyoming, we were traveling, we were camped out at a spot. And cabbages go through there. We were in September. So I'm sure that he has been in constant use from, you know, April until the end, right. You know, it's just been constant use. And it's been like that for the last 100 years. Or how long, you know, we're not the first but in that in that area out there, there just been nothing available to burn. So all the all those flammable resources has been collected by other other kindling hunters in the past. And it's kind of interesting to see how that goes. So we kind of had to be resourceful, and we had to kind of figure out how to gather enough stuff. But we did pretty well you know, like, we kind of go to like pine needles and pine cones, sometimes those those were pretty well are often pretty dry, and will burn well enough, they're not going to be a sustaining fire, they're not going to really like get up embers go into the degree that you can really cook on an effective way but, but you can't cook on it, I mean, you can get some stuff going and in some other ways you can get you know enough of a fire gun that you can you can get a log on. So that's that's normally what I would have is you know, you have like one or two good logs that can kind of keep things kicking for the evening. But to get that going, you need to you need to have some smaller stuff. And normally that day, you just don't find where you show up because you can't be here there's gonna be sticks around, so you try and gather that stuff up. But man, if it's a busy area, that stuff will have been scavenged shoot, but that's not my problem now. So I'm, I'm loaded up on some firewood and I got to get better coals go and that I can get this stuff set rockin with. But it's cool being out here in the canopy, sitting out of this campsite, run into fire for a little bit. That's kind of nice. I was trying to do some writing stuff. I got my journal open over here, and I'm trying to kind of sketch out some of the ideas that I want to do for some publishing stuff. I'll get into that some some future podcasts are always always talking about it too soon. And I'm like, maybe that ideal change. But But yeah, I'm trying to sketch out some new stuff for what I want to do through the through the rest of the spring and the summer and stuff but probably a good bit more of this kind of thing. It'd be kind of fun. I'm looking forward to doing a bit more of this stuff. What was the other thing I had, I gotta turn my headlamp on?

Oh, yeah, my phone is definitely out now. You Stoke it,

I think I'm gonna have to run down to that area, or that, you know, that's this, this was at that setup, bunch of dried out sticks that are kind of down the way for me, when I have to walk down there, read my headlamp, try to figure out if I can, if I can pull some firewood up and get this thing going again. But also, I might not have to it's, it's late enough, I could probably kick just kick out whatever embers I have here to keep me warm for a bit and then stack myself up in the truck, try and sleep it off for a couple hours. And I'm hoping to get up early in the morning. And get back out of here and try and do a couple couple morning based photography things if I'm able to on the drive, and I tried to scout out a couple locations, sort of by our lakes side down here to try to check out so there's sort of this, this Creek area and then that ultimately ends up running into I think it's a reservoir really, but this, this, this reservoir area down the way and that had some some stuff that I wanted to try and work out. And along with this creek to this creek is pretty cool. So there's a few pull outs here that I want to try and do some some under the water. Rock stuff are you know, kind of I guess just sort of like working with flowing water. And then also working with some still water. So yeah, I was hoping to do a couple, a couple photography endeavors down there before it got too late in the morning. And if I'm just kind of hanging out camp, and maybe that'll be the case, but also not in a super hurry. Or at least a Subaru to get completely back what what's beautiful about this camp setup is I don't I don't have anything pulled out now. It's awesome. I just have it all in this canopy. It's all in the truck, which is kind of great. It's sort of returning to what I was doing originally in the Camry way back, you know, when we kind of figured out that that is great to have, you know, your tat and your other camp stuff when you're running backpacks or run into a real campsite. But in certain in some and search and in many situations, having a car that you can have set up to crash out in is a great thing and just saves a ton of time and ton of kind of confusion or frustration about how to set stuff up or what's going to make a good campsite or what's going to be effective or not. So in this case, yeah, I just feel I got got my sleeping bag got my my cooler and stuff set up here in the back of the truck bed canopy. And then yeah, it's it's pretty similar to maybe probably the best ad set up. And the four runner back in the day when I was camping out living out of that thing for a while. So yeah, it's cool, kind of kind of returning to some of the stuff that I liked a lot. I think some of the last times I was camping out by myself. Well, I camp out by myself, you're in there and we do photo stuff. But really a lot of it's just with Marina and I when we're traveling around together, do photo photo trips. But I remember I was kind of going back to it while longer one that I did back in I think it was 2012 when I took off, or I don't know, it was probably three weeks or something like that. And I was just kind of slowly kind of turn through some regions of Oregon,

like Crater Lake and through some of those, I guess like the robe, and Klamath national forest areas and stuff. Yeah, it's kind of cruising through there and go into a number of different spots. I think I spent like, four days ever by the Umpqua hot springs. And I think that's when they were still open. And maybe maybe now it's changed. But I think that they've been closed for a few years now to overnight camp. And because of the amount of abuse that occurred out there, just abuse to the land, and abuse to whatever kind of social contract had been unstructured. But I think people have kind of turned that to a pretty freaky party spot after a bit there. So they had like that a dumpster for you know, public, public use of refuse, but it was always and often overflowed. And just just, I think they only picked it up like once a week or once every two weeks. But man, that thing would just be overflowed with trash, and trash stacked around and trash stacked at the campsite and broken glass of the campsite and broken glass at the hot springs. And they just said, Hey, no more, no more overnight stuff out here. So super, that kind of management has to go into, but that's the tough thing about some of these spots, these individual places that are really cool. Just kind of, I guess kind of getting too much attention by a certain segment of the general public that just doesn't have a respect for the the use of the public land out here. So it's frustration sometimes when when you lose some of the access to some of these these cool spots, you know, some of these draws like oh, yeah, I do want to go to that hot spring that's a you know, just an old-timey open place. It's cool areas just been rides, it's hot water coming into the ground. It hasn't just happened. So it's really cool that you can kind of go to a place like that, but the Cuz it's a draw, because it's a piece of attention that that would be sort of a site to go to, then it ends up ultimately just getting shut down. That's kind of a frustration sometimes. But it was cool. Yeah, back in the day in 2012. I camped out there for like, four, four days or something like that. And then I travel around to the day, go to a couple different spots, go to some different waterfall waterfall areas around there, do some photograph. Once you do photography, a token he falls Watson falls, I think was over there. Those are beautiful waterfalls in that area. And then I go back to the hot springs campgrounds area where I had a camp set up. And I think it was Yeah, sleeping in the Camry in the back of the camera. And then I had some stuff set up outside of it, I take a hike out at night, and I got to the hot springs and stuff and hang out there for a while and then cruise back to my car. Yeah, it's a good time, kind of just being out there by yourself thinking about stuff happen, people, sometimes they you know, but really, you're just kind of there by yourself, or there's not a lot of other, you know, public around and stuff. That's a weird thing dealing with the public or what is internet dealing with some other people when you're out in the woods, it's always kind of freaky, even here, you know, like, what back right before I started this thing, I was gonna start it. And then I heard a truck. And then like, I was saying that truck guy came up, pulled up, went up this road here and then swung around and came back a couple minutes later. But even that, you know, it's an innocent trip or just someone looking around. But it's still weird. It's like, who's this guy at nine o'clock at night that's driving by me and a truck happened earlier to I think some of those guys that are down low are they one of them came up and was I think just kind of check out this area up here didn't know I was up here, but came up this road. And then like kind of swung or like, hooked up in the parking lot. Or the the area that I'm in here, where I'm camped where the road is wide and he flipped around and then took off and stuff cuz I'm up here, I guess. But it's just like, Hey, dude, I know you don't mean anything. And I guess this is the only thing that can't happen. But what's going on one other guy out here where I have no cell service. Man, yeah, there's some characters out here to some time. So. So yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's not a park, it's not really well managed. When you're out here in the woods. And man, sometimes people aren't really well managed. So

you just kind of it's, it's cool to have to be sharp on what, what, what's going around what people are around what's going on stuff. So but it's find out here. I've never really had a bad interaction. But it's always just sometimes maybe tense is sort of what you'd say you never communicate really. And maybe sometimes it's just paranoia. I'm sure people are fine and nice and stuff. But there is sort of a code out there. out in Eastern Oregon, I remember when I was a kid, you got to do some camping trips out there. And, and you think a small town of 30,000 people really isn't, isn't a populace. But even in that, you're kind of enculturated to a regular set of systems that are sort of similar to what what a city is or what a suburban area is. And so that's sort of what I grew up in. But once you get out pretty fine to you know, some of that rangeland stuff, or in some some of that area where it's just public land. And there's not many people around, there's sort of an old high desert wave that you get, it's like old Ranger way, but is that when two trucks are driving by each other and opposite directions, you kind of give a little hand up, you don't really move it, you just kind of lifted up off the steering wheel, like a salute. And then you put it back down. And it's just sort of saying like, Hey, I'm a good guy out there. So yeah, I may I guess, I suppose to instill trust that even though that's the only other person that you've seen in a day, they're not after you, you know, you're safe. You're you're on the same team or something. So I don't know what it was really about. But maybe just old high desert politeness, I suppose. So yeah, my plans are I'm going to I'm going to cooped up here and camp out and then cruise out to find some stuff to photograph in the morning. I'm hoping to do hoping to cite some wildlife out here. I brought the binoculars and maybe I'll get get a chance to see some stuff or maybe see some sign if something's out here, but but not too sure. I think I'm not gonna get off the road very far in this circumstance. So best I might see some birds or I don't know, two people. That's my life. But yeah, I'm gonna head down to the lake in the morning early and try and maybe get some photographs down there. I'm trying to do some stuff around water on this trip water and some color and stuff, but really, it's just kind of materializing. However, I wanted to I'm not really trying to hold myself to seriously structured any one specific thing because really ultimately, like any of those limiting or what would be like kind of those confining limitations that you'd set on yourself to do photography. They're just not really in line with any The projects that I'm interested in really working on, you know, so really interested in just trying to make photographs that sort of represent myself the best. And I'm trying to kind of figure that out in a good way to, you know, a lot of people kind of make pictures to what would it be, I don't know, fit, fit the need of work or fit the need of a style that they've seen sort of a thing, you know, trying to like, oh, okay, I need to match the style and kind of work with it. But really what I'm trying to do now, I think, pasts are coming through onto the other side of that the 10 year mark of taking some of the work that I do on photography pretty seriously. And so with that, I'm kind of trying to move into Well, what what is Billy want to do with this, you know, what is the thing that, that my interest is drawn toward, instead of trying to make some kind of

some kind of what I think should work sort of thing, I really want to try and go to just what I am interested in, I think that that position of interest is really going to be where I'm going to make the best work that I can, instead of trying to figure out, you know, what other people think I should do, or, or trying to follow the directions of people that really haven't thought about these things as hard as I have, which is certainly the circumstance that probably any creative person has found themselves in for years now, you know, trying to follow the direction of someone who's, who's your boss, or your director, or your project manager, who really hasn't ever spent any time actually participating in the, the actual process of the art that you do, you know, and I bet that that's the circumstance probably as old as time. But people kind of move through it. And it's sort of a signup process, what would you call it, it's a phase, it's a phase. It's a phase, it's kind of just, you know, how it is for a while, and then and then someday, you're the old guy telling people what to do, and things you don't understand. So I bet it's just kind of the what the lifecycle, you know, part of the lifecycle. So good times, but my fire is now pretty completely out, see the embers burn in there. But I think that's gonna be where I call it for this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I appreciate you guys for listening, SAS, and people tune in to the last one. So that's cool. I want to try and build out a few more of these and having fun recording mobily and recording up in the studio in the loft at home. That's been a lot of fun, too. So hoping to try and get some more of these podcasts out on my website. That's Billy Newman photo calm. And I've done a rebuild on that one looking a bit cleaner. Links are going to actual websites now you know, any of that stuff that was kinda like, Oh, that's a dead link, or Oh, that's not

filled out or

this isn't. This isn't where it should be. Those kinds of things have been sort of rearranged and, you know, kind of edited down and changed some of the text out and stuff. So I'm trying to make it fresh. Got a lot of time for it. You know, man, this COVID stuff. It's like Alright, well, I'll rewrite my website code. How about how about that? So I did that. And then yeah, now I got a jam. I got to go out, taketake some photos and stuff. So I'm happy to be out here. taking some pictures. These are just regular ones. I got to go through a bunch of 360 ones too. That'll be cool. But yeah, good times. I do a photo stuff camping out by myself. Thanks for keeping me company. Have a good one.