 It's a new day. It's a new right in the edge. 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. It's the week of November 13th, 2022. Today we start a new chapter. A new Right in the Edge. Before we get into what all that means, let's talk a little bit about the photography. Today we're out just kind of poking around a lake near where I live. It's a bit of a chilly morning. I'm trying to find some frost leaves on the ground with frost on them. I would like a little more frost, so I'll be back here as the winter goes on. I just thought I'd come out here today and take a look and see how fall is progressing. It's been kind of a weird fall this year. The leaves have been kind of drying up and falling off. There's a few colorful patches, but I'm doing black and white, so that really doesn't matter that much. And what we're doing photography-wise is I'm also testing like I was in the last video. I'm trying to find camera settings on my digital camera that work well for black and white. And last time I shot high ISO, and I'm going to continue with that. But what I did last time was I had shot RAW and JPEG. Well, I forgot that my camera, my Nikon D810 and probably all my Nikon cameras, have a default setting of noise reduction on high ISO, or at least I think it's a default setting. It's possible I actually set that, but I think it's a default setting. And it kind of smeared the JPEG images, and I really didn't want that. I wanted the texture. I wanted to see how much it looked like grain, and I addressed that in the last video. But today we're looking at how the JPEGs look, because what that allows me to do is use the internal filters in this camera. It allows me to take the picture and see it on the back of the screen, which is a nice feature. I've got the camera set up to shoot Monochrome, JPEG, and RAW. But I'm hoping that, and I have a feeling that the JPEGs will probably 80% of the time, suffice or actually be what I'm looking for. And I've done this before. It's been quite a while where I shot JPEG for black and white. But I've not done it in high ISO. I'm not sure what I'll find, but as you'll hear in this video, why it's not that big a deal if I don't find something today because I've got the rest of the week. Well, that's right. We're changing right now to photography. It's actually a pretty big change. We're turning this channel into a time-based presentation. So it's more like a video journal. So the video will be what happens over a period of a week. At least that's what we're starting with right now. Today is Sunday. So I'm hoping to have a video for you by Saturday or her next Sunday. I'll have to work out the kinks. And in this video, that's what the subject is going to be. We're going to talk a little bit about why I'm changing the format and what you can expect to see on this right in this photography channel in the future. I do see a tree off in the distance that stands out against the darker trees. Nice subject for black and white. Maybe we'll see if we can get a photo of that. What I'm going for here is a shot across the lake of this maple tree. Nice bright yellow. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to isolate the tree against the background of the fir trees. There should be an interesting contrast and texture. And I'm hoping that with the yellow filter on in this camera that it lightens the yellow and kind of separates it a little bit from the darker background. Why? Why the big change? Let's get into that. About a month ago, I did a five-year retrospective of this channel. That's right, this channel has been active for five years. It's kind of hard to believe it just flew by. And after putting that video together and looking back at the last five years and all the video clips and photos and footage, I decided it's time to change. It's time to do something a little different. It's time to simplify things. I think this new format will be true to what I had envisioned for this channel in the first place. It's really just sharing my journey to become the best artist I can be. This channel was really meant to be my journey from photojournalism, something I did for 25 years, to becoming an artist. And I think I may have ventured off of that a little bit once you get into YouTube. There's always something that distracts you. Squirrel, you know? And I think I may have ventured off of that a little bit. I think this new format will kind of bring that back. It'll focus more on the art. I'm going to share my thoughts. I'm going to share what I've learned. We're going to weave that into the week's episode. That's what we're doing here today, explaining why we're changing. This episode really is for the subscribers that are my long-time followers of this channel, just to let them know what's coming and why I'm changing it. I'm actually pretty excited about this. What I'll be doing less of is one long day of photography, trying to cram in a bunch of shots, and it'll be more bite-size outings, more bite-size photography outings, something a little bit more to my true everyday life. Taking a camera on a walk, going out on a couple of hours on a morning and seeing if I can find something. I may not go out every day of the week, but the timeframe is what will keep an episode, the boundaries of it, kind of defined. I think this format will work well for my friends and family. They can kind of tune in every once in a while and see what I'm up to, see where I've been that week when I photographed. I think my mom will like this. It may be a little less technical. I'll share how I make the images and that kind of thing. It probably won't look a whole lot different than my regular videos. It's just going to be spread out over a period of time. The light's a little harsh right now. It's the last hour or so of the day. I had a little time. I thought I'd just come out and take a look around. I don't really have high hopes of making an image, but I've got my camera with me. No, he's itching to walk a little bit on this trail. So I think we'll just kind of explore a little bit. I think my style of photography lends itself well to this new format. I don't rely heavily on the iconic locations and that's okay. My photography is about trying to capture the essence of nature in a photograph. And nature's everywhere. Sure, I'd like to go to some of those really cool places around the world. But when it comes down to it, I'm just as happy by a quiet little pond or a creek or a stream or just walking out through the woods. Just seeing what nature has to offer. Each little outing, there's some potential there for some artistic expression. This tree's kind of got my attention here. I don't know if I can make a photo out of this, but it's with the light. But I'm kind of turned on by the way the branches are kind of coming off this thing. Look at this. I don't know if I even have a lens that would work for this. It looks like a detail shot from pretty good distance. Let me see what I can do with this. I'm at an age now where time is my most valuable asset. So I don't really want to waste a lot of time doing things that I'm not passionate about. Taking photos of the graphs of stuff I don't really care that much about. I think that's another reason I really wanted to change through this format to really try to keep things photography forward, art forward. Try to make sure that art is what this channel is about. It's so easy to get sucked into the numbers and how many subscribers you have. That ship has sailed on me. I don't concern myself that much anymore about that. But if I did, I wouldn't switch to this format. This is definitely not going to be great for subscribers. Well, that's the tree from underneath. That's that tree I was just shooting. And now I'm right underneath it. Sometimes I forget to look up. But all those branches poking out make kind of a cool abstract. I don't know. This is playing with the camera. This is one of those that I have no idea if this is going to be interesting or not. This is one I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what it looks like on the computer. But it's getting really dark out here. I'm shooting at 6400 ISO. And I shot one with 85mm and I've shot one with a 50mm. I'm not sure if I want the tighter crop or not. It's just a really interesting look from down here. The sky behind it is going to be kind of white. So I don't know if that's going to work or not. But we'll see. Wish the light was better. There's a tree growing out of a stump over here. Maybe I'll have to revisit. The background is kind of light. I'm still going to go take a closer look though. Well, it's a dead tree on a dead tree. I might just take a quick shot of the roots here. The light is really low. I doubt this is going to even work. I'll take a quick photo. Well, the background is pretty bright. I'm shooting really tight. I don't know. It's just more of a detailed shot. It might be kind of cool though. It's an interesting texture. I'm not going to get back to the trail. I'm going to get back to this stuff. Let's see if we can get down here. Here we go. There's the trail. If my channel only got people to look at nature. A little closer in a different way. I think it would be successful. Because really, it's about nature. This is why I'm doing my photography. For the love of nature. The temperature is risen, but in the shadows the frost hasn't melted yet. It's always hard to walk past that and not take a photograph. Today we've got the Nikon D810 with a manual focus. A 55mm macro lens. Very lightweight, very compact. It's really a good lens for this type of photography. It's a nice walk around lens. I've been doing a series called The Daily Walk on my personal channel. Something I started not that long ago. That's something I'm probably going to have to give up. Or at least for my personal channel. I can't continue to do that, but I'm going to do it here. It's going to be kind of wrapped into what I'm doing throughout the week in my photography. The idea on The Daily Walk was take one camera, one lens. And usually it was just one photo. And make a short little short out of that. I don't have to keep that to one photo. My goal isn't to do a whole lot of photography on The Daily Walk. I just bring my camera. If I see something that strikes me as an image, something I want to photograph, that's what I do. So those will be on this channel now. It's just part of my week. And that's where you find Nori and I this morning. We're on The Daily Walk. One lens, one camera. This section we walk, it's something we walk almost every day. And it's just like a mile stretch out in the woods. Just a real, I think it's reclaimed the railroad line. That they've made a trail out of. And we walked it every day, but it's amazing how often we find something that we might want to photograph. I photograph this in the spring. It looks a whole lot different now. If I can find that photo, I'll pop it up. You'll see what I mean. It actually made a pretty cool image in black and white. I think it would look better in spring. Now, I wouldn't say this trail is the most scenic or photogenic. It really isn't probably all that attractive as far as nature goes. But for detail shots, there's a lot to be had here. I feel like I'm trying to make art from the ordinary when I'm out here. Which is kind of a fun challenge. Today, we've got D810 and an 85mm. Nori and I on the daily walk. Before I end this video, I should probably talk a little bit about what I'm seeing in these JPEG files at high ISO. For subjects and scenes in even light, I have no problem going with the JPEG. Actually, I don't really see a compelling reason to even go to the RAW. I'm getting everything I want out of the JPEG files. I'm getting the look I want. When it comes to scenes with a high dynamic range, then you have to be more careful. That's when it does make sense to have a RAW file as a backup. All these images in this video were made on JPEG. I'm using the JPEG file. For this contrasty scene of backlit trees, I thought I would want to go with the RAW file. But I went ahead and edited the JPEG file first. After editing the JPEG files, I was actually liking what I was seeing. I didn't mind that it had some of the highlights kind of pushed to the extreme a little bit. I think it fit the scene really well. I started working on the RAW and I kept going back and forth and looking. I kept thinking, well, I'm trying to make the RAW look like this. Why not just go with this? In this case, I think the JPEG worked just fine. I'm not saying I'm willing to ditch the RAW file just yet. But there's a lot of potential in these JPEGs. When I shoot JPEG, I'm not shooting with the goal of having it completely ready to go out of camera. That's not my goal. It's kind of like when I'm shooting film. My goal is to have a good starting point. It doesn't take me very long to get these JPEGs to be how I like them. There seems to be this misconception that you can't edit JPEG files. You don't have as much latitude to make a lot of edits with the JPEG file. But if your exposure is correct, if your exposure is good, there's a lot you can do with the JPEG file. I'm not trying to copy film. What I'm trying to do is just find a recipe that the image is our film like. In my last video, I said I couldn't really draw any conclusions by what I was seeing just yet. Now that we're getting a couple weeks into this, I'm actually quite intrigued by what I'm getting. I'm liking these images. I'm liking the tonal range. I'm liking the dynamics that I'm getting when I'm shooting at a higher ISO. And I'm seeing that in the JPEG files. And I think it helps because I'm seeing something similar, something close to what I'm going to get on the back of the camera. I have to still tweak them a little bit, do a little editing. But they're really getting close to kind of what I want to see in my files or in my images. If you've made it to the end of this video, thank you very much. Hopefully future videos won't have so much talking. We just had a lot of ground to cover this week. Just wanted to get it all out of the way. I think this is a good time to end this video. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.