 I have a confession to make. I don't much like grain in my landscape photography. My name is David Patton. When I started photography, I wanted to make art. I wanted to be a landscape photographer. But with a family to feed and bills to pay, 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. It was time to follow my passion. I come along on my journey to become the best black in my photographer I can be, whether it be film or digital. I will be sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is brightening the edge. I'm not a big fan of grain in my film photography. Never have been. We'll get back to that in a little bit. Today, I decided to take the film camera out. I haven't been out with it for quite a while. All my darkroom equipment is packed away as we're getting ready to try to move. But I just decided I'm just going to have to pull it out and develop some film because I really miss it. So today, we're out in the woods, just kind of looking for some compositions. Suns can popping in and out of the clouds. It's a really nice day. Mosquitoes aren't too bad. Right now, I'm just kind of lining up a shot on this trail between these trees here in the background. Might be a nice composition. I know it does sound kind of weird that someone who enjoys using film doesn't really like the look of grain in his images. Mostly landscape images. I know that sounds kind of weird. But even when I didn't have a choice to use film, I always tried to minimize the grain in my photographs. And that just means using slower-speed films. I rarely would shoot a landscape at 400 ISO. It's usually a 100-speed film for me. Now, I can understand the grain in documentary type photography. You just have to use faster shutter speeds. The only thing you can do is use faster film. And that trade-off is more grain. I don't mind it so much for that. But in landscape photography, I do have a choice. I can use slower speeds. And if it's just the conditions aren't right for it, I probably just won't take the picture. Just because I don't like the look of excessive grain or a lot of grain in my landscape photography doesn't mean I don't expect to see grain. I just try to minimize it as much as possible. I do that with slower ISO films. I try to get the correct exposure. And another thing I have done in the past, and today I'm kind of doing it. I'm using a medium format, is I'll use a larger negative. So when I do magnify the image, it takes more magnification before the grain becomes more apparent. Now, that doesn't mean I won't use 35 millimeter for landscape photography. It just means that my expectations for enlargements will be less. So I just won't enlarge the image as much as I would with medium format or large format. But those limitations aren't really that major to me. I mean, most of the stuff I shoot would probably be for magazine book sizes anyway. And really, 35 millimeters is plenty good for that. Especially at slower speed films. You'll probably even get away with medium speed films if you don't crop too much. And cropping is another thing that I don't do a lot of when I'm shooting film to minimize the enlargement of the grain. Now, I am aware that it seems to be kind of cool to embrace grain. As you love it, it's kind of a trendy thing. But it's not for me. Now, then you might say, well, why don't you just shoot digital if you don't like grain? The amount of grain that I get in my workflow is fine. Because I know how to control it, because I know how much grain there's gonna be in my images, I'm not looking for buttery smooth. I just don't want excessive grain. I like the process of shooting film. I like the archivability of it. I like the craftsmanship of it. And the challenge of it. So these are a lot of reasons for me to shoot film. So yes, I can get a much smoother looking image in digital. Smooth isn't what I'm going for. I just don't want excessive grain. Another way I try to minimize grain is in my editing, in my digital workflow. I try not to over sharpen. I do more spot sharpening. If the image has a lot of sky in it, I really don't need to sharpen the sky that much. But if any, I just tend to sharpen the areas that wouldn't have a boost in grain like the foliage, the trees. By shooting a stream, I would sharpen everything properly but the water, the water was kind of smooth. I mean, you really know reason to have that sharp. All that's gonna do is sharpen the grain. So I tend to spot sharpen a lot of my files. But there are scenes that even out here, I could get away with sharpening the whole scene. I tend to not sharpen a whole lot. But the digital process does seem to need a little bit of sharpening. Whether that be for film scans or even my digital cameras tend to use, tend to benefit from a little bit of sharpening. And my efforts to minimize grain has got me thinking, do I need a larger negative? Should I be considering going to a large format, maybe four by five? It's pretty amazing how much quality there is in a four by five negative. I just can't decide if that's the way I wanna go. My two and a quarter are starting to show signs of age. It's starting to glitch a little bit. The mirror is starting to stick up. I'm trying to decide if I should just go ahead and instead of replacing that body, pick up a basic field camera, four by five field camera. I already have film holders. I have actually a lens that would work on a large format camera. I think it's a 135 millimeter, which is kind of close to normal, slightly wide angle. The only thing about going large format is it really slows you down. And it changes your approach to photography just because it takes much longer to set up the shot. The breeze is starting to blow a little bit. I don't know. Something I keep thinking about. If I'm gonna keep shooting film and I want as little grain as possible, maybe I should just be going to larger format. Stay tuned. I'll let you know if I decide to get something like that. So how about you? Do you like grain? Is it something that you enjoy seeing in your images? Do you have tricks that you use to minimize the grain if you're like me and you don't really wanna see a whole lot of it in your final image? Do you just go to a larger piece of film? Or are you just not enlarging the images more than the grain will allow? And that's kind of how I've been dealing with it. Just not, you know, if I have a smaller piece of film I just don't enlarge the image as much as I would a bigger piece of film. It's really not that difficult to minimize the grain. If I can get down there, it's probably still not gonna be a shot. I think positive. Well, I see one or I see a possible path. I'm gonna try it one more time to get to the spot. Looks like there might be some rocks down just to put this little shelf. So I'm hoping that once I get down there there's gonna be a place to set up my tripod. I've been driving by this little water shelf, this little waterfall for years. I never tried to get a camera on it. And today I'm gonna see if I can shoot this and get some film. It's proven to be a little more of a challenge than I expected. Well, I'm gonna have to put all this stuff down and I'm not gonna be filming this probably on the way down. So if I make it down there, you'll know. Wish me luck. Really tight quarters in here. After all that work and get down here, I'm not really sure it was really worth the effort. I think I need a little bit wider angle lens for this location. The only spot I could get on this little rock bed, quite a challenge. I had to bracket quite a few different exposures. The light's been changing pretty fast. When I first started heading down here it was overcast and then the sun popped out when I got down here. I was kind of hoping that the sun would have stayed behind the clouds so I could use a little bit longer exposure. So we'll see. I should have brought an ND filter with me. But when I started down here it was, I was pretty confident that my polarizer and 100 speed film would let me use the slow down shutter speed. Oh well, you can see all that sweat on me. Quite a bit of work getting down here. I think I'm gonna wrap it up here and head on down the road and see if there's something else I can find. Well it looks like my battery's just about dead on this camera and I forgot to bring an extra. So we're gonna end today's video right here. Just finished off a roll of film. Not shot here in the sorrel. I have about two or three compositions that I'm gonna put in this video. So until next time, this was gonna be long for the ride.