 YouTube hates my channel. And I've got proof. 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 ride in the edge. Good morning. Today we're in a forced area I've never been before. We're doing a little scouting. Light's not very good right now. It's pretty harsh. So I thought I'd take a look around a little bit and see if it's areas worth returning when the light's a little bit better. You're probably thinking, oh, not another algorithm video, another disgruntled YouTuber. Well, no. Kind of. Well, maybe. I thought I'd clear up a few things and talk about this little test I've been running. Some of you may know that I have a second channel. It's like a personal channel that I haven't really put a lot on. So I decided to start uploading to my personal channel again in a different way. Just experiment, use it for a way to test things out. If there's something that doesn't fit well in this format, this presentation format, then maybe I'll just take it on my personal channel. Because really the whole idea is just to get more eyeballs on my photography. And I figured, well, I'll cast a wider net. Two small channels might get more people to see my work than just one channel. So I decided to go ahead and do that. And something really interesting happened when I did do that. I just took a few videos from my archive here on Right in the Edge. Videos I got, four or five hundred views. The last one I put up, I didn't really do hardly anything to it. I just said, well, I really like this video. And it's a shame that only four or five hundred people have seen it in the last year and a half. So I'm going to go ahead and remove it from Right in the Edge and stick it up on my Sigma on a Chrome channel. A video that I thought no one was interested in went from four or five hundred views on this channel. And as of this morning, which is about four days, has gone to 5,500 views. That's a lot of difference. So the only thing that I can deduct from this is that YouTube hates my channel. It's not putting my videos out in front of people. And I'm not really sure what I can do about that. So what I'm doing here is just kind of experimenting a little bit. I don't really think this is like a great foreseeing. Although I do like the way the light is reflecting from the lake onto these small trees, young trees. It's not always the big ones that you got to photograph. It's just a kind of a nice shot of the environment. It's a nice vertical element. I'm a sucker for that, you know. It's really more of a sketch. Just I think it's important that you kind of test things out. You play with it a little bit. Kind of gets the brain working a little bit. I kind of like the way this tree branches out. It's in an interesting shape. The problem I'm having is separating it from the background. The background is very busy. Again, it'd be nice to have a little fog back there. I like the moss on this big tree right here. And the bark has got such great texture. I'm going to try to work this shot. Got a little bit of snow. A little dusting of snow this morning. So coming off the trees, it's not going to be on the trees very long. I got my camera. I'm not really carrying that much. I just wanted to keep it in a bag so I don't have to worry about it getting wet. Got a couple prime lenses. I'm a camera body. Maybe we'll see something on today's walk. I think we're just a little bit too warm. The snow is coming out of the trees pretty hard. I was hoping to have it in the trees more. I don't think we're going to have a lot of fresh snow to photograph this morning. Just a little bit too late. And it's not quite cold enough. Pretty wet stuff. Something I've noticed that's really a real challenge right now is isolating something. Because the background, you have these dark and light spots with the snow and there's no snow. It makes a very uneven, unattractive background. So it's really hard to isolate a detail to make it stand out. Because it's not all one tone in the background. There's too much too much highlight. So there's too many light spots with dark spots. Too contrasting. That hill is a perfect example. I could isolate a couple leaves or something. But if behind it is that pattern of dark and light, it's very distracting. That's really what I'm struggling with. I see potential shots and then the background is just not very attractive. I wasn't going to bring my camera on today's walk. I looked out the window. It just kind of looked blah. There was a little bit of frost on the ground. I thought, oh, I don't need any more frost shots. Of course, when I get into the spring or summer, I'm probably going to wish I had some frost. Really need to take what nature gives me. But what I'm attracted to here is the contrast. These dark pillars, these trees, really caught my attention. So I photographed them with a 85 millimeter and I threw a little 50 millimeter into my pocket because it's so small. Why not? You know, it's like hardly carrying anything. But this is a day that I would have probably just left the camera home and I decided, you know what? Take the camera. You're going to regret it if you don't. And I made a photograph. So I don't know what else we'll see on today's walk. It's the same trail I always walk. But if you don't have a camera with you, you're going to miss whatever you see. So I've probably walked past these trees 100 times and today a composition jumped out at me. It's kind of a minimalist photo. It's purely about the light and shadow. So earlier in the week, I mentioned that I've got a second channel. I wanted to kind of clear up some confusion if people have seen me on another channel. And earlier in the week, I had mentioned that I have a video on that channel that is doing really well on a channel that, when I started putting videos on it recently, had a little over 100 subscribers. And on this channel, I mentioned that it had about a year and a half to get 400 or 500 views. That made me kind of sad because it was a video that I was actually really proud of. And as of today, that video is almost to 10,000 views. Now, I don't know what the reason is for this. I was joking that YouTube hates my channel. My channel is where videos go to die. But I don't know what the reason is. Maybe they've tweaked the algorithm to show small channels content differently. Maybe that's what's going on. I'm not early upset or angry that this has happened. In fact, I'm quite grateful that this video actually got to be viewed because it's probably one of my favorite videos that I've created through the years. And I'm glad that somebody actually got a chance to see it. So actually, that's pretty satisfying. I don't know where the subscriber rate's going to fall on this, all this stuff. And if future videos on that channel do well or not, I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I'd revisit the leaf. Things have changed quite a bit since it snowed. It really weighed down the vines that the leaf was resting on. I think this is the leaf still. It looks a lot different here. So I made another photograph. If you're not aware, this is an ongoing project that I've been photographing the same leaf since the fall, since I noticed it here. And I've been going by and if I think about it, I grab a shot. The weight of the snow, I think, has pulled more leaves around it. It looks quite a bit different here now. I hate it when that happens. And that seems to happen quite a bit lately. Sometimes you've got to look really close to see the cool details. This sore fern has been flipped over and these little nodules in the back struck me as really interesting, a really interesting texture. So I'm trying to get as close as I can with my little 50 here. It's not really a macro lens. But I think I can get close enough to bring out that repeating line, that repeating texture. This has got quite a bit of that going on. I have a tendency to not want to show my boring photos. But I've embraced this new format, this journal style video format. And I need to show the good with the bad, the mediocre with the exciting, the boring locations with the cool locations. Hopefully I'll be able to get to some really cool locations more often, a little bit later in the year. But the point of this is I'm trying to take my camera along with me more often, even if it is a pretty ordinary location. It's much more of a challenge to make interesting photographs on areas that you don't really think is all that special. I think it really helps me. So when I do get into something really cool, a really great location, I think I'm already on the, I hit the ground running. I think I'm able to find those compositions a lot quicker. I don't just pull the camera out when I'm going on a special trip. I'm trying to make it part of my daily life. So if you've invested time to follow my journey, I'm going to apologize for the mendacious of it sometimes. But I think you can learn a lot from that. I, I'm learning a lot from it. So hopefully you are too. Well, I thank you for coming along on my photography journey. Hopefully you're getting something out of it. I'm going to make this last shot and I'm going to head home. So we're going to end it right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.