 Good morning. Welcome to another Riding Ends vlog. Today I'm just out looking around my new neighborhood. 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 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 Bright in the Edge. I think it's important to get to know locations near where you live that you can get to pretty quickly if the conditions are right for photography. This is really my first outing since we've moved to this new community. And I'm trying to find places that are like within 10 minutes, 10, 15 minutes of the house. And I just decided to stop here and take a look around backside of a lake. Probably won't be taking any pictures today. I've got my stuff anyway just in case. This is more of just getting acquainted with neighborhood. If I do find a photograph, I'll make an image, but I'm not really, that's really not my main focus. It's just seeing what's out here. Really the conditions aren't very good today. Blue skies. We've got a prominent lake just at the edge of town and a river running right next to it or probably in the actual city limits, but it's kind of on the edge of town. So those are going to have potential I think for when I just want to grab a bag real quick and see if I can find a photograph. We do have a new addition to the family. I guess I can announce that today. We have a new puppy. She's a sweetheart. Doesn't every landscape photographer need a sidekick? Well I have a new one. I have a sidekick in training. She's 11 weeks old and her name is Nori. Well if there's a mist or fog on the water, there might be potential here for a shot. Right now it's not really anything, but as we all know a little mist, a little fog. This makes a photograph better. This is some place to keep in mind. My goal is to get back to some normalcy, get it back out of my camera, get back to working on some photography projects and sharing some of my thoughts and ideas on photography and photography related topics because that's what a photography YouTube channel is supposed to do, right? And if you haven't noticed, I have a newsletter that you can subscribe to on my website. It's at the bottom of the page. On any page on my website www.ridinganthropotography.com. I'm out of shape. You want to be kept in the loop on what's going on? Send me your email address and when I have something new to show you, I'll send out a newsletter. I haven't had a lot to show you lately. I'm hoping that changes. Well I guess it's called the Nature Preserve, which is a city park owned by the city of Sweet Home. This has potential for something with grasses and that type of thing. It's just at the end of a neighborhood, so it's kind of weird. I saw it on the map and saw this big chunk of green space on the map and thought, well, what is that? Turns out this is a part of the city park system. I think it's like 60 acres of grassland and trees. It's something that probably will be worth exploring a little bit or for different kinds of photography. It doesn't look like a lot of people take advantage of this area. You don't really have any trails. Hopefully I'm not getting into some kind of dicey area here. But it's weird. It's just right at the edge of town and it's got kind of a wild feel to it. Kind of a natural grassland wooded feel to it. This is probably five minutes from my house. You would think I was at some remote location. A little band of mist would go a long ways to making this kind of cool location for photograph. Hopefully there's not too much drug activity out here. You never know what you're getting into when you're not really familiar with an area. It's kind of cool for something that's so close to town, having this kind of open wild space that they've just kind of left that way. It's nice that they haven't developed it. I guess this kind of land would only really appeal to someone maybe like me who wants to take some different kind of photographs or maybe someone wants to walk their dog or something. But it's not a lot to draw. I guess your average person here. It's kind of cool that they've just kind of set it aside for just to let it be kind of wild. That's kind of unique in a park system. A city park system actually. At least it's unique to me. It's not something I've seen before. The tendency is to develop these places, put baseball fields in them. I see some backlit spiderwebs and that kind of thing. It's a time of year if I can find something like that to photograph on that here. Whoops. Sorry about that. I'm finding that where there's a lot more of webs in here than I thought and there are quite a few with spiders in them. Just finding the right one and I'm just shooting handheld right now. It's a little creepy because I don't like spiders. But some of the small stuff here I'm actually starting to see now. Some interesting seed heads and spiderwebs. Wish there was a little bit more due. I'm always complaining about something. So yeah, I have a new sidekick. She's still young to be joining me on these adventures right now but I'm looking forward to having her come with me out here. Out taking pictures. Her job is to protect me from myself. I have a tendency to misjudge places or not think about safety first when I'm out by myself. Years ago I used to take a dog with me for that very reason. There was a time when I was doing a shoot up in the Cascades and I climbed this little peak thing and it was trying to get a good elevation, a good shot on this Mount Washington. When I got back to the car, well just before I got back to the car I looked back to where I'd been and it kind of dawned on me that you know it's probably not the best to be doing that kind of hiking by yourself. And so at this point I started taking dog with me on my photography outings. Because I'm not that worried about myself but I would never put my dog in any kind of harms way if I can help it. There was a time where I did a lot of photography with dogs for that reason just to kind of keep me from doing dumb things. And it's also kind of rewarding. It's kind of nice to have that little companion with you out in the woods. But lately, the last quite a few years I guess, my dogs either have been the wrong breed. They just don't work well off leash or they're just you know a little of it too driven, too prey driven, wrong kind of breed. And then they were getting older as well that I just wasn't going to take them with me on those on my photo outings. But this new puppy, she should be an excellent choice for the photography. She's a colleague, she's a herding dog and she should train pretty easy and her job will be to keep me keep me safe. Well, this is supposed to be exploratory. I'm getting bogged down with my camera. I can't resist trying to make a few images while I'm out here. I'm not really covering much ground. There's a lot here that I think when I have a little more time I can exploit for photographs so I will be back most likely. And this is interesting. This is some interesting land. I think I'm going to end this video here. They work my way out of this thicket. I just really was just out wanting to explore the area where I live or where I live now and see what if there's any potential out here for photographs. I didn't really take any photographs worth mentioning. If I have one I'll throw it up at the end of this video. Just taking along my little scouting trip getting acquainted with my neighborhood. Welcome to the neighborhood. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.