 Good morning. It's January 2nd 2023. This is the first time this year I've been out with my camera out in the woods. I'm gonna have a lot of time this morning. Around my house it was really foggy, so I was hoping I went out in the woods. I'd find some fog and mist. I went to a couple different locations and just before I'd get there the fog would be gone. So I decided that I wasn't going to drive around anymore. I just pick a spot if the fog wasn't there. We just take the camera and just take a little walk. There's really no pressure to make a photograph today. It's fun to get out while it wasn't raining. Just be out in nature. 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 right in the edge. I mean, this isn't like a great section of forest, but maybe the fog will transform it. The trail runs through here. I got the trees on the side. I don't know. It was definitely worth making an attempt at a composition here. I'm gonna work my way back the way I came and see if any of that forest looks different now. It's just so thick in here. I can't really I can't get a nice clean shot into the forest. That's the way it is in the Pacific Northwest. It's just really thick up on this steepest section. It's not nearly thick, but it drops off pretty fast. So this first video of the year, 2023, there's something down my mind that I kind of wanted to address. And something that I think is kind of important, especially since I'm on YouTube. So I'm gonna try to articulate these thoughts in my head. It might take a little while to get it out. I was recently asked the question by someone who's viewed some of my videos. It was a really good question, but it's not the question that really has stuck with me and got me thinking. He started his question saying he's been comparing his photos to mine. Well, that's probably not a good thing to do. We probably shouldn't be comparing our photography with other photographers. We all do it. I'm guilty of it myself, but that really got me thinking. Thinking about my YouTube presence, what I'm projecting on my YouTube channel, what it is that people are seeing, what's the image that I'm projecting. I wanted to address that. It's not really something I thought that much about. I mean, I think about it when it comes to other YouTube channels, but I've never really thought about it that much when it comes to my channel, what I'm doing on YouTube. Let me start by saying do not use me as an example for your photography. The photography you see me doing on my YouTube channel is done for a specific reason. I have reasons to do what I do and to photograph what I photograph. I have a past that I have that carry with me. I'm looking for something specific out of my photography that really most likely doesn't match your past or what you want out of your photography. When I make videos, I'm making videos about things I'm interested in, things that I want to explore, check out, learn, or relearn. I may be revisiting something that I didn't get to do in my past. It's all all my photography shaped by a lot of different things and everybody's is. Everybody has different reasons for doing what they do. I can't say that everything I do on my YouTube channel is genuine. The whole reason I started this channel was to share my photography. I've always tried to keep this channel about photography, about making photos. My introductory trailer, when I say after thousands of assignments and 25 years of experience, that thousands of assignments, that's just not a figurative of speech. It's probably closer to 10,000, maybe maybe more assignments over the years. It's just another way of saying I've done a lot of photography. So what I want out of my photography is going to be completely different than somebody who's just starting out or who's been a casual shooter for most of their lives. There's no value on this. It's not a value judgment. It's just reality. What might seem boring and mundane to me might seem exciting to you. I may have photographed it a ton of times the same thing. I may not feel the need to do it again. I did a lot of color photography when I did it as a job. That's probably one reason why I shoot primarily black and white now. I did a lot of documentary photography when I did it as a job. And that's why I'm spending probably the last years of my life pursuing photography as an art form. But these are all my goals and desires. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't watch my YouTube channel or someone else's YouTube channel and get some ideas on how to approach a scene or you might want to look at nature in a little different way because that's what I mostly shoot is nature. If you take away looking at nature a little differently in one of my videos, it's been a success for me. My videos are less about how to settings, all that kind of stuff. I don't think that's all that useful. I'm struggling to find just that right arrangement of ferns. They're so close. I don't know if this is working or not. And I'm not bothering with the tripod right now because there's so much movement in the and we're getting a breeze off the lake. So there's so much movement in the ferns that I'm just hand holding and trying to use fast enough shutter speed. I want to be clear about my intentions for being on YouTube. I don't want to put forth this idea, this image of that of something I'm not because I'm in a completely different place in my life in photography. And if you're trying or have aspirations of becoming a professional photographer, definitely do not emulate what I do. If you see me shooting film on this channel when I shoot film, I've shot many different formats. I have my reasons. It's not, I wouldn't say that's a professional approach. I don't think that many professionals are using film nowadays. For me, it's another artistic choice because I'm doing this as an art form now. So when I use film, I'm not endorsing it. Or am I saying you shouldn't? That's up to you. That's your choice. Whatever you do in photography and whatever makes you happy, that's what you should be doing. But I'm not trying to put any kind of value judgment on what you shoot, what format you shoot, what camera you shoot, what, you know, you could be shooting glass plates or super high-end digital. That's all up to you. That doesn't matter to me. When I shoot film on this channel, I'm kind of checking some boxes of things that I wanted to do many years ago that I didn't get a chance. But the reality of using film is it's expensive. And if to shoot as much as I want to shoot, I have to shoot digital and shoot film when I can. So my answer now to film photography and the cost of it is I can't shoot it and have a YouTube channel. I can't shoot it on a daily basis. I can't afford it. I wish I could. But there are things coming up in the future that this might not be the best choice. There are limitations to using film and you just have to be, I have to be practical and realistic about it. But I want the option. So I keep this little film camera in my bag now. And when I come across something that I want to photograph with film, I pull it out and I make a shot. It works well with my digital. These same lenses. So why not? And I happen to have a camera that's super light and small that fits into my camera bag for these, for this reason. So in the future, if you see me shooting digital, it doesn't mean I, I'm making some judgment on film thing. It's not good enough for me or I don't use it anymore. It might just be that either the subject I'm shooting, I think digital might work better or it's that I can't afford to shoot film. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to carry this camera with me when I shoot digital. And when I see a shot or a frame that might work well in film as well, I'm going to also make a shot with the film. This way I won't waste a bunch of film because that's what I've been doing in the past. I've been forcing a lot because of my YouTube channel. I've been wasting a lot of film. This allowed me to utilize the film to its potential. Film, film, film. That works going to be a lot in this video. So how that will work in this video format is I won't have probably the shots on this roll when I do shoot it, when you see me use it. I won't have those shots probably in that video. But there'll be some point once this roll is done that I will show you the images. A little incentive to try not to miss to-me episodes. This might take me a month to get through 36 exposures. It might take a couple days. It just depends on- I may end up going out on one day and shooting the whole thing. You just never know. But the reality is if I'm going to have a YouTube channel and I'm going to want to take as many images as I want to take, I'm going to have to do some of that with digital. I don't want to discourage anybody from doing anything, honestly. This is about my photography and when I pick up a specific camera, I usually have a specific reason. But I don't want to portray something that isn't honest and real. I've had my professional life in photography. The reality is I'm too old now to retrain. I did photography as a job for too long. I'm pretty much useless to the job market. I'm at an age now where it just makes no sense for me to try to retrain into a different career. So I still have to make some money. I still have to make some income from my photography. I'm just choosing to do it through the art of photography. I use my channel to promote my art. It's kind of uncomfortable to say that, but that's one of the main reasons to have a YouTube channel is to promote your art or your service or whatever it is you do. If you're a portrait photographer, you might want to use it to help promote that or weddings or whatever you do. YouTube, there is a promotional aspect to YouTube. I don't know if I'm getting my point across. There's just a lot of fake stuff on YouTube. There's just a lot of stuff that's alt image. It's not real. There's not that much about YouTube that's real. There are some really genuinely good photographers on YouTube. So I don't want to say that YouTube photographers are fake photographers. But there's a lot of stuff said and done on YouTube that's just because they need to come up with something to say. A lot of it isn't even important. This is going to sound negative, but there are a lot of channels out there in the photography world that they're just not they're not that good and they're promoting an image that I don't think that I think is really misleading to young photographers coming up. That's not reality. One of the tricks to this shot, one of the difficulties, I don't think you see it from here, but there's a big old white piece of sky that really distracts the image. So I have to kind of move the trees around in the frame to block as much of that as possible. A little bit's okay, but if there's such a really big section of white behind my subject it's going to really pull the eye away. I think I've been able to move enough to where some of these middle trees are blocking that big white section. Well, I switched to the 20 and moved a little closer. It gives a completely different feel to the scene. It takes in a lot more trees. The light's still pretty contrasty. It's kind of coming and going. I was able to get a couple frames with film. We won't see those for I don't know how long, whenever that rolls done. But this video will be done probably this week. I don't know how much more I'm going to be able to get out. So this actually might be my last time out this week. It's going to be kind of a lean one. I really have a few shots to put on this video. But I really wanted to address the perception of YouTubers, YouTube photographers, and how I kind of fit into that. I don't think there are a lot of people trying to emulate what I do. I don't have that many viewers anyway. So I'm going to end this video here just in case I don't get a chance to get back out. We'll go back and take a look for you these photos, see how they turn out. And I'll have these film shots for you to look at when that rolls done. Hopefully not too long. So until next time, this should come along for the ride. Let's go Nori.