 Welcome to the first installment of making a zine. This is a new series where I take you from the shoot all the way to the finished product. This is meant to be an introduction to the series. So I thought we'd go over the why. Why the series, why the zine? Well, I like making zines. That's one good reason why. I really don't enjoy landscape photography or nature photography that much in the summer. It's usually hot and dry around here. The light's usually not what I'd like, especially in the wooded areas. And so I'm rarely very productive in the summer when it comes to photography. And I thought, let's try to change that. Let's do a project. Let's focus on something. And by the end of the summer, I'll have something I can show for myself. And another reason for the project is fuel costs. You all know that it's very expensive to drive. I can't go too far. If I'm gonna work on a project, it's gonna have to be fairly close to home. So this project and this zine, the subject to the zine, is within 10 miles of my house. Luckily, it happens to be one of my favorite places to take photographs. I'll be focusing on the ecosystem of this little park. It has a creek running through it. It's got nice wooded areas. And it's got a few waterfalls. It should make a very good subject for a zine. So this project can be taking most of my time. And most of my photography is gonna be focused on this zine project. So how does that affect my YouTube channel? And I started thinking, well, that might actually make a nice series. I've always been big on doing series even when I was in journalism. When I worked for the newspaper, the summer was often a slow time of year. So a section editor myself would get together and we just come up with a series that we could run all summer long that we thought the viewers might like to see, might like to follow. And I think that that's kind of what I'm looking at for this YouTube channel. This series might be a nice way to follow along on this project. The parameters are, it's a summer project. So it started a couple of weeks ago. I'm getting a slow start on it. June 21st is the first day of summer and it will run through to September 22nd, which is the last day of summer. So I need to have all my photography done in that timeframe. And I've decided to make this project on film. It'll be 35 millimeter black and white film. This will be the first project I've done completely on film, at least in many years. And I'm kind of excited about that. So it's gonna have a nice uniform look and 35 millimeter also allows me to take a lot of photographs and not really worry too much about being conservative with my photographs. If I see something that catches my attention, I'm just gonna take a picture. And I'm gonna show some pretty mediocre stuff I would imagine as the series goes on because I'll be taking photos that at the time look like they might be something. But they may not be the greatest. But it's a good thing to show. It gives you an idea of how the project's going. This project's probably gonna be quite a challenge. And that's another thing that attracts me to it. The light in the summer is often not ideal in the wooded areas. So I'm gonna have to go very early to make images often on these blue sky days. And I may only have a two hour window to make a photograph or a couple of photographs or shoot a roll of film before the sun gets too high and it gets too harsh. If I get lucky, I'll get some days with some clouds that I can work longer. I'm getting a fairly slow start on this project because I just wrapped up putting together my last zine and that was on covered bridges. So the two kind of overlapped. Now I can focus all my attention on this new zine. Some of the elements in this series that I'd like to make sure I hit is some of the editing of the photographs. Some of the picking, the sorting, the picking of the pictures. And I'm hoping that maybe the viewers can participate some in what photos that actually end up in the zine. That might be kind of fun. So basically we're hitting every step. We're gonna be doing the photography, which is for the next couple of months, that's gonna be what we're focused on most. I hope you don't get too bored with me out taking pictures of the same area. But it's a nice area, so it could be worse. And then we'll start mixing in some of the editing as I'm making some of the photos. And then once we've got all the images, we'll start trying to put together a narrative for this zine. What is it we wanna show? And then finally, we're gonna lay it out and have it printed. I think this could make an interesting series. So now that we've got this introduction out of the way, let's take a look at this first photo shoot at McDell Creek. After a couple hours of walking around and making photographs, I didn't really have a lot to show for myself today. It was really just the first outing, just to kind of start getting myself tuned into the location. Sometimes that takes a little time. I knew it was going to be bad light, and the light was really becoming pretty harsh. So it was time to pack up and call it a day. I finished a roll of film. I felt like that was a productive start. And I got a few photos that I think are a good start to the project. I used to kind of joke that I was at my office when I was out at this park because I would do quite a few things out there in the past. It truly will be my office this summer. I'm looking forward to revisiting every inch of this park this summer. And I hope that I can find something that I haven't seen there before. One of the dangers of a project like this on a location that I've been a lot is it's gonna look kind of ordinary or mundane to me. And I'm hoping that doesn't happen. I'm hoping I can still appreciate the beauty of this location and not feel like I'm rehashing something. Even though I'm shooting the same waterfalls, the water levels are different. The light's different. It's amazing how you can return to the same location over and over again and find something different. If this looks like it's gonna be something that you're interested in, if you haven't subscribed, make sure you don't forget to do that and hit the like button. That really helps us get more people to see what we're doing. If you wanna take that a step further, as I always say, I do have a Patreon page. If you wanna help with future projects, you can be a Patreon team member. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.