 In this episode of Riding the Edge, I'm headed to the William L. Family Wildlife Refuge in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. I'm on my annual wintertime visit with a few seats of T-Max 100, a 4x5 camera and a new lens. I'm not looking for wildlife, I'm looking for habitat. I'm looking for landscape photo possibilities. Why don't you come along for the ride? 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. Come along on my journey to become the best black on 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 Brighton Yash. It's getting a little too crowded. I think I'll head to another part of the wildlife refuge. I've been gone for a while, so I thought we'd do a little catch-up. There's quite a few people out here today. I got a shot on the boardwalk, just one frame. Once I get to a better location, we'll have a little chat about what I've been up to and what I've got here today. Me coming back to this piece of public land, it's the diversity. There's so much here. It's a pretty small area, but you've got wetland marshes, oak savannah, stands evergreen trees. It's just a great place to do landscape photography. There's so much potential here. It's also a great location to break in a new lens. Now, the light's not great. The sky lacks texture and it's kind of bright. But I think that can help bring out the subject, which is this beautiful old oak. It'll help bring out the darker twisted branches, kind of put emphasis on the shape. I really like photographing this oak. I've come here and photographed it a number of times. It's probably not the best light for photographing this oak. But it's another look. It's another season. I'll be back again. I'll be back to photograph this oak again at some point. So what I've been up to for the last month. It's been probably about a month since I put up a video. So over the last month, I sold my backup digital camera, my D750, and got enough money to buy a 90mm, which is wide angle and 4x5. A very clean, very good shape lens. I really wanted something that was going to last me a while. I didn't want anything beat up. This lens looks new. It doesn't look like it's been hardly used. Not a mark on it, so I was very happy to get this lens. My goal was to either get a 75mm or a 90mm, whatever came along first, and was in the best shape, and the 90mm came along, so that's what I went with. And that's what I used to use, so it's pretty familiar to me. It's probably one of my most used 4x5 lenses. Not super wide, but wide enough to feel like a wide angle lens. Over this period, I started thinking about what have I done to get me to this point? Why now do I feel like 4x5 is something I want to use? It has taken me quite a while. A good two or three years since I left journalism to be at this point where I'm okay. I'm okay with not taking tons of gear. I'm okay with not taking tons of photographs and running around like a chicken with his head cut off. I'm really finding my way back to why I started photography in the first place. That interaction with nature in a more contemplative way. Journalism, after doing it for 25 years, it pretty much stomped out my love for photography. I was just seeing it as a job. The passion wasn't really all there. It was just, you know, get a photograph to tell the story. I liked doing photography for a living, but after you've done thousands of assignments, it's just work, you know, it's just a job. It's taken me quite a while to get the point where I kind of have that love for it again. That passion, I can see it as an art form now. I wasn't seeing that before. Shooting in large format is such a different approach. I think my videos are going to end up being quite a bit different here on out when I'm shooting 4x5. Probably a lot less compositions. Well, I can guarantee there will be a lot less compositions. Each shot takes quite a bit longer to set up. I may not do a lot of talking while I'm setting up my camera. You may hear more from me after I've made the photo, at least for a while, until I get a little more comfortable with the regiment setting up the camera and all that stuff. Plus, if the light's changing quick, I'm going to want to work fast, and that's a bit more challenging when you're using large format. This is another example of an area that many may not find all that beautiful or have impact for a photograph. But to me, it's an ecosystem that I find has so much potential for landscape photography. Sure, it's bit messy. Often that's just nature. That's what nature is. It just means you have to work a little harder to make something that works as a photograph. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes the hard work pays off. Well, I just made a shot of this little stream running through the stand of trees. It's pretty mucky in here. I think this is kind of like overflow from Nearby Creek. I kind of like how it kind of snakes through the trees. Well, I've got three compositions. We're turning it up right now. I don't want to be a content creator. I want to be a photographer that makes videos while he's out making photos. The story of how those photos came about, the story of what I did to get those images. I think that you can learn just as much from that as you can having somebody tell you what their settings are. Well, I'm only going to have a few compositions today. Two or three maybe. And I'm okay with that. Maybe it's not about the quantity. Maybe it's about the quality of the experience. I think that's what I'm wanting out of my photography right now. Just one more shot before I go. When nature seems cluttered and hard to make order out of chaos, then it's time to just get a little bit closer. I came across this moss-covered tree in a densely wooded area, and I really was attracted to the texture and the moss. But the only way to really photograph it was just to get close. I think it works. I really do like the shot. As I grow as a photographer over the years, I'm coming to the realization that it's okay to just get one composition. It's okay to miss a shot because I wasn't carrying right lens or the right film. It's okay to go out and not make any photos. It's okay to fail. It's okay to not take hundreds of shots, just settling on a few. It's okay to make your own way. It's okay not to shoot color. For me, for you, it may be okay not to shoot black and white or digital or film. It's okay to keep it simple. It's okay to carry one, two, or three prime lenses. As long as you're doing photography the way you want to do it, it's okay. It's taken me a long time to come to the realization and get myself permission just to say it's okay. Nowadays, cameras are just too easy to use. I don't want to work for my art. Crazy fool.