Show Notes for the Billy Newman Photo Podcast

View links at wnp.app

Explore outdoor photography, technical media projects, stories from backcountry expeditions, and insights from the creative process with Billy Newman—photographer, author, and podcast producer. Connect, learn, and follow along.

Quick Links:
Portfolio: billynewmanphoto.com/photographs
Studio: wphoto.co
Posts: billynewmanphoto.com/posts
Photo Books: billynewmanphoto.com/books
Amazon Author: amazon.com/author/billynewman

Podcast Episodes:
Billy Newman Photo Podcast: Listen here
Relax with Rain: Listen here
Night Sky Podcast: Listen here

Connect With Billy Newman:
Email: billy@billynewmanphoto.com
Instagram: @billynewman
LinkedIn: billynewmanphoto
X (Twitter): @billynewman

Recommended Books:
Landscape Portfolio (PDF): Download
Black and White Photography (PDF): Download
Working With Film (PDF): Download
Western Overland Excursion (PDF): Download

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Podcast Forward:
The Billy Newman Photo Podcast blends real-world outdoor adventure, technical insight, and practical photography tips.

[Music] Hello and thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Billy Newman Photo Podcast. I appreciate you guys tuning into these echo audio files that I’m putting out there and it’s kind of interesting putting out some content for the echo devices. I really appreciate it. I like audio editing and rendering stuff and I’ve been doing a lot of that. I’m trying to do more of it on a Mac Pro and the Mac Pro right now is one of the Mac attached computers that has come out years ago. Really, it’s still quite expensive and it’s really servicing what I need out of it quite well and I’m happy about that because the price has gone down a bit. But if you buy it straight from Apple, it’s still really quite expensive. The computer of the Mac Pro, I think came out in 2013 and computer years, 2013 to 2018, is really nearly ancient. But kind of my lucky start is I just got a Mac Pro. I think it’s still priced around $2,000 to purchase even a used one, which originally I guess spec’d out as it was would have been around $4,000 or $5,000. So you’re still getting $2,000 worth of computing out of it. I suppose. I hope, I think maybe in some cases the iMac, when it’s more fully spec’d out, the more modern like 2017 iMac, I think was outspecking some of the things that the Mac Pro was doing. But really with the, I think the Xeon processor and the graphics cards that you’re working with, at least on the Mac and Touch Side, that’s really one of your only options to work with higher level graphics cards and higher level. Well, I think your only option to work with the Xeon processor. But it’s been really interesting trying to do some professional rendering and editing. What I’m trying to go through right now and do is, is I have a ton of .mov files, 10 of .mkvm4vmks files. I don’t know. Also, AVI files, all these different file formats, these MPaG containers that I don’t really understand that came with that with some other version or some raw file from a camera, something like that. But that’s all to say that these are pretty big video files that are maybe sometimes uncompressed or compressed poorly or maybe not compressed to a version of something that is useful for me to use and definitely not 10 years, 20 years down the line. So what I’m going to try and do is work with some program, maybe handbrake, maybe final cut, maybe I’ll go crazy and use a terminal program called ffmpag. We’ll talk more about that later. But I want to try and go through and take all of these video files and convert them over to an MP4, like some more standard high-def MP4 that’s correct for that type of video that it is. And I want to try and get rid of all these 3GP video files from a cell phone. I want to convert all that video out to some more native MPaG format. And so I’m going to try and use one of these programs to do it. But to do that on my laptop, even a pretty modern laptop, it’s quite a bit of rendering to get all those frames out in HD. And so what I’m going to try and do is crunch all of that stuff out by using this Mac Pro. And I hope that I can save a lot of time by trying to render it all out through there. I saved a ton of time rendering out video while I was trying to stitch together my 360 video. Oh my gosh, it was enormously slow on my Mac laptop. And really it blew through it with consuming quite a bit of time. It still took me a week to render out all the video. But I was able to do it on this workhorse Mac Pro. So it was kind of cool. It was interesting. Definitely not breaking any ground with thinking about Mac Pro’s. But I’m thinking about the Pro line of computers. Like they have the iMac Pro, which is the fastest, best system for Mac processing in a pro environment right now. And I kind of think about that. But I also think about where they go in with the desktop interface for the professional iMac. You can see more of my work at billyneumonphoto.com. You can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think you look up billyneumon under the authors section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert on surrealism on camping. Some cool stuff over there. Really trying to do a lot of scouting stuff, which I’ve enjoyed too doing some scouting stuff through the summertime. It’s been pretty cool. Where I’m really trying to go through some of these backroads. I’m trying to like mark spots on the map where there’s good campsites, which I hadn’t really done before. There’s a lot of places I’ve driven, a lot of roads I’ve been on. Especially like backcountry roads, two forest service roads, BLM roads. And I know a lot of good dispersed camping areas. And really I understand the context about 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, would go out to Eastern Oregon, we’d find some spots. And they had known about this spot since 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 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 them and sort of how it operates. I didn’t really understand the difference between national forest land and BLM land or national park land and state park land or wilderness areas, national wildlife refuge areas. Man, there’s just so many different distinctions of different things. And then also just private property. So I didn’t really have a clear recollection of any 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 either maybe hunt in some circumstances, like a like a national park or I think you can’t just try to fire on inside a national park. But for specifically permitted events, maybe probably a national wildlife refuges. I think those hunting opportunities are limited also. Though you can’t still do some things in those areas. I think you have to get permitted and you have to draw a 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 back country. 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 I mean, I’ve had those map books, you know, like that 50 page or 100 page book of Oregon and you know every page is a 25 mile map of that area. It’s always super useful how they 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. But even those roads, this map maker still got things wrong. I remember too, you know, back in like was it 2004? I think we were out in an area in southern Oregon near the Nevada border. Was it Drew’s reservoir? Somewhere south of Geer Heart Mountain. And I remember we were on some some little some little road. I don’t even know if it was a national forest area. I think it was just is in between private and public lands as it kind of jumps back and forth in those pretty remote areas. All of it is just remote desert and forest and sagebrush and juniper.