 My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. But with bills to pay and a family to feed, I decided it would be better to be a working photographer than a starving artist. So I took a job as a photojournalist. 25 years and thousands of assignments later, it was time to go back to my first love. Come along as I follow my passion trying to create art that shows the essence of nature in a photograph. I'll be sharing my successes and my failures in hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Ride in the Edge. Springtime on the daily walk. Nori and I are out on our usual pathway looking for something to photograph. It's springtime. I initially started this video to be a video talking about a project. How this walking this pathway through the last year has actually started becoming a project. I'm starting to see this as a zine. And I started making this video for my other channel for seeing monochrome. That's where I do a lot of my project type videos. But I'm seeing so many fun things to photograph this morning that I think I'm going to do today as a standalone video. And I'm on seeing monochrome. I'm going to do a little bit of looking back over the last year. See if I actually have a project's worth of photographs. They're all mostly details and close-ups. The theme is art from the ordinary. This is stuff I see every day. It's been a really good exercise in looking for compositions in areas that I'm walking past on a daily basis. And what started out to be an exercise has become really a project. I'm realizing that what I think is ordinary stuff I see every day can actually be a piece of art. It's right out your door. You don't have to travel halfway across the world to try to make some art. I usually photograph ferns from the top down trying to keep the focus plane parallel to the fern. So I can use a shallow depth field and blur out the background. When I'm attracted to this angle, it's an angle I don't often shoot. But it's the layered effect. It's the lines that are going this way. It's making a totally different composition than I normally would approach on a fern. I'm attracted to this kind of wall of fern from almost underneath or from the side. Like I said, it's not an angle I would typically shoot fern. I don't know if it's working or not. But it's fun to try to make something from a perspective that I don't normally try to use on this subject matter. It's the stuff I really love to experiment with. When you find something like this, you're seeing something for the first time. I've walked past this probably a hundred times. But today I'm seeing it for the first time. It's really cool. I think I'm finally figuring out how to use both of my YouTube channels. Seeing monochrome has become my project channel. It's more image forward. It's more focused on the image. And this Rhydenia's photography channel has become more about the journey. This is my journal. This is more behind the scenes. I think it's really advantageous for me to have the two channels because I can really simplify my videos and keep them very focused. I think that's one reason my seeing monochrome channel has grown a lot faster than this channel because it's really focused. It doesn't have a lot of variety. Where this channel, I tend to cover a lot of different things. And I think the algorithm likes it when you narrow your scope, when you're very focused. It knows who to put your content in front of. I know it's a bit of a pain in the butt to have to subscribe to two channels if you want to see all my content. But I think for a little channel like myself, a small-time artist, I think it's advantageous to spread out my photography. I'm actually getting my work in front of more eyes than I was in the past. Well, I need to find some more photos if I'm going to make a video today. Spring is just going off. It really is in full swing now. The new growth from these Blackberry Vines, they have a little bit different tone to them. And then they've got this interesting shine in the sky. Just taking an image of a section of it makes for an interesting study and texture. Repeating patterns. These Blackberry Vines in winter look completely different. Spring is bringing on a whole other possibility. We hate Blackberries here in the Pacific Northwest. Well, at least I do, because they're everywhere. They're an invasive species. But I can't ignore them. They're something that I might want to photograph. If you like coming along on my photography journey, and would like to help keep me out making photos and videos, consider picking up one of my zines. Or visit my PayPal donation page at my website, rideknitsphotography.com. And most of all, don't forget to like and subscribe. And why not leave a comment introducing yourself. I'm always interested in who stopped by my channel to say hello. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.