 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 Riding the Edge. Good morning. Today we're in the Lowlands. We're at a place I've been before, but not this time of year. So I thought we'd come out and take a look around and hear the cars go by. We'll be walking in here a little bit. Thought we'd take a look around and see what it looks like in winter. I'm attracted to the way this grass is being laid down and then we've got the leaves on top decaying, a little decomposition on everything here. It's pretty cool. I love this kind of environment. We need to get in further so we get away from the road. I'm having a hard time moving on because I keep coming across stuff that I might want to photograph. This might be a good time to start talking about the print. That's something I said in earlier videos at 2023. I was going to really focus on getting my prints dialed in, making them available on my website and that kind of thing. So to start out, I have to do some proofs. I got to do a lot of testing and I got to put a lot of thought into how I want to do my prints. In the past, I just put up some cheap prints on my website. I sold a few, but I just was never happy with how I was doing it. So I just, for the last couple of years, I haven't even offered prints. And if I'm considering myself an artist, I should at least offer prints, whether they sell or not. Last week, I put together a couple of photographs to ship off to a lab. It's a lab I think I've used once and I think I signed up to use them a couple of years ago and then I haven't done anything with them since. So I need to decide what print material, what kind of paper, and what kind of process I'm going to do my prints with. Do I want a traditional photographic print or do I want a inkjet or I can't pronounce the fancy word for that. G-I-C-L-E-E, I believe, is how it's spelled. And maybe I will, by the time I get done with this, I'll have figured out how to say it. As far as I can tell, G-I-C-L-E are just fancy inkjet prints or fancy word for inkjet. So I don't know how that's going to look for my black and white. But I thought I should try them out, test them to find out what's going to make the best process for my printing. I don't own a inkjet printer for photography, for photos. I have a printer for documents and that kind of thing. But I've never invested in an inkjet. So let's talk a little bit about the pros and cons. I always hear and I always see on YouTube why you should have a printer. And I don't know if they're just trying to sell printers or... But I think for a lot of people, they may be better off just going through the lab to get their prints done. One of the advantages of doing the printing at home yourself on an inkjet printer is the turnaround. You're always going to be able to do it when it's convenient for you. You don't have to worry about shipping. And that is one thing that I find appealing. That would probably be the biggest reason I would actually invest in a high quality large format printer. I think that's a big plus, but there's also a lot of minuses. What you get from a lab I think is expertise. You get high end equipment. Their business is printing. So they're going to be able to afford way better printers than I ever would. I don't have to keep and maintain a printer. I don't have to buy the ink. As everybody knows, the price of the ink is pretty expensive. So maintaining a printer, keeping the ink in it and that kind of thing is not cheap. I don't want them to try to fix my prints or make them better. I want mine dialed in so they're repeatable, but they do offer correction and that kind of thing for your prints. If that's a service you'd like to have, we'll get that sun going. I'm kind of attracted to this tree behind me. I'm trying to find an angle and I don't know if I want this stuff in the foreground here or not. Well, I've shot some shots further back, kind of taking in the whole tree, and I've finally kind of zoomed in and I've gotten closer and I've focused in on the center section of the tree with the three sections, the three trunks going up. Kind of working with that. I'm not sure which one I'm going to like the best. That's something I'll just have to kind of see when I start editing them, but for some reason this tree really does kind of attract me to it. I'm also pretty much attracted to most trees anyway, but when I find a tree that I like the shape of, I tend to work it pretty hard. I think the variety in size of print and the variety of type of prints that you can get from a lab are a major plus. Even if I was to buy a printer, I probably wouldn't be able to buy a printer big enough to do the really large stuff. I would probably have to buy something to do the mid-sized stuff and then farm out or get the lab to do the big stuff if I was going to invest in a printer. That variety is kind of nice though and you can have prints done on metal, on canvas. You can have them done inkjet or you can have them do the photographic prints. The lab can be very useful and that's probably one reason I haven't gone ahead and bought an inkjet printer. The biggest downside is I just have to wait a few days and my experience so far with shipping with the labs that I've used, they've packaged them well and the shipping has been pretty quick. I should have some test prints here pretty soon. They'll be here this week, so they'll probably be in this video. Then my next decision is the size that I want to print and offer on my website. We'll go into that in future videos. For now, we're doing the testing and seeing what I can get from my lab. Yeah, I'm seeing stuff. I'm just, it's so close. I wish I had a little more time. I'll come back. I love those weeds right over there. My camera gear's over there. I might just take a quick look. I definitely can try to make a photo in this. Kind of experiment with some backlit shots, kind of focused in, kind of tight on some of this sections. The problem is the sky's just a little too low where I kind of have to shoot kind of more mid crop in here. I would, where most of the seas are up higher, but the bright sky behind is kind of messing things up. I think I'm going to try to move further back a little bit and use a longer lens to see if I can get some of these upper seed heads, these, what's this, this'll get some of those in. Well, after yesterday's photo outing, when I got home, I had my prints waiting for me. So I've been pouring over them ever since trying to decide which one will meet my needs the best for black and white prints. So I had eight test images printed at the lab from two different photos. One photo was more blacks, more dark tones, and the other image was white, more whites. It was a snow scene to get a good idea of what I can expect from my prints. One of the images was printed on traditional black and white paper, traditional process. It's still digital, but they use silver in the paper and it's exposed to light. And then I had three different jucle prints done each on a different paper. The papers I tested were deep matte, fine art, and metallic. Let's start with fine art paper. Most positive thing I can say about that paper, it was a thicker paper, it was stiffer, which was kind of nice. But it kind of has that texture of like a watercolor paper. It's more textured. It seems to be a little softer in contrast. Comparing it to the traditional print really didn't have the contrast I like. And I looked at these prints under a varied light, and that's kind of what got me going one, leading one way or the other. It was how the image looked in different light. The deep matte print was probably the closest to the traditional print. Again, the black values weren't as appealing to me. The weight of the paper on the deep matte print was very similar to the photographic print. So there really was no edge there. And the last jucle print I did was a metallic print. Now I have to say this is an interesting looking print. It has a nice pop, contrast wise, but you got to hold it just right. If you tilt the print any, it has a real weird look to it. Probably not ideal for my photography. I could see it in some circumstances where that might be appealing. It does have a nice pop to it. It might look pretty cool in color, but when you change the light, it really affects the photograph. I can't have prints where the light changes the image so much. So that one's off the table completely, even though it's probably the most interesting looking of all the printing I did. At first glance, I really didn't see a whole lot of difference. I was thinking, huh, well, maybe these jucle prints will, maybe that's the way to go. Everybody seems to think that's the way to go. But I started looking at them in very light and it started becoming clear to me that they didn't have the same black value that I like to see. The traditional print really had a nice balance in contrast. I know this is kind of boring. And if you're going to do printing, I think it's worth considering if you're going to invest in a printer, inkjet printer, or if you're going to go for the lab. I think that's a really important question. For me, I have a conclusion. I poured over those images for quite a few hours, and all of their subtle, but when you start moving them around different light, the traditional photographic print process still seems to print my work the best. If I had my own inkjet printer and I could try out a lot of different papers, maybe I could get it dialed in. But to me, there's still something special about a silver base paper. I think my only gripe about the paper stock of the traditional, the true black and white prints is it's just a little thin, a little thinner. I wouldn't mind it being a little thicker. That would make it feel more premium. But I think they look premium. And I think that's important. And they feel like they're durable. They feel like they'd last a long time. Some of the inkjet paper didn't feel nearly as durable as the photographic paper to me. I know it wouldn't do a lot of good to show these side-by-side comparisons in a video. They're very subtle. I mean, we're talking very, very subtle differences. You're just going to have to trust that I saw enough difference to help make my decision, but it was very, very minor. I'm kind of relieved that I found the photographic print to be my favorite. That means I don't have to go out and buy an inkjet printer. I can just rely on the lab to do my praying for me.