 I've got two reasons for today's video. One, to test out the potential for this new vlogging camera. And two, to talk about my new zine. Let's go. 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. In hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Bright in the Edge. So the camera I'm using, really isn't a camera. Well, it's a smartphone. And specifically, this is the LG G7. I recently upgraded my five-year-old smartphone. I was in desperate need of something new. And I thought, well, with this new phone, maybe there's some potential for using it as a vlogging camera. I always look at my gear and evaluate and try to streamline what I'm doing for video. Because really, when I go out with my cameras, the main purpose is for photos. So if I can carry one less camera or a little less gear and use my phone, it would be a big advantage. This is a pretty good test for this smartphone. To see what the dynamic range is like. The lighting is all over the place. The weather is one minute it's pouring down on me. The next minute the sun pops out. So it's probably a good little test for this camera. My settings are 1080p at 30 frames per second. And I have steady shot enabled. So I want to see how well the steady shot works. I really want to carry a gimbal along with my camera gear if this will work to get some steady footage. I'm also using an external audio recorder. I've got an old Zoom H2 with the lav mic plugged in. As a backup to the audio on the phone, I'm most likely going to go with the audio on the recorder or mix them, just depending. It's really audio seems to be the weak link for all my cameras. I'm not really sure what the video quality is going to be. But I'm not really all that happy with the video quality. I'm getting out of my little action cameras and stuff. So we'll see. It might work. It might not. But this whole video is going to be shot with this camera. And I thought, well, while I'm at it, I might as well test out the steel camera on this phone. It's a 16 megapixel shooter and it has a standard camera and it has a wider wide angle. I think it's like 16 millimeter or 18 millimeter, something like that. So I'm going to go ahead and try that. Test it out. See what kind of image quality I can expect from this phone. Because the phone that I upgraded from was terrible at taking photos. I really almost never use it for pictures. And it'll be nice to see what I can do with this in a pinch. The main reason I'm going to shoot this in 1080p instead of 4K is the file sizes. They're quite large in 4K and my computer is kind of old at home. If the image quality isn't good enough in 1080, then I may have to shoot in 4K. I'm not sure there's going to be a big enough difference for vlogging. And for the second topic of this video, I wanted to share a little bit about my new zine. A little bit of the experience I've had with it, printing it, producing it. I thought people might find that sort of interesting if they're contemplating doing something similar. The name of my new zine is Singh Monochrome. And it has the theme of trees. It's like a photo essay or a theme. And we're focusing on trees in black and white. What I'd like to do with these zines is to produce them under the name of Singh Monochrome. Each issue will have a different theme or subject matter. And what I'm planning on doing is, over time, pulling all these together and producing a book in the future based on these themes. And the book will be called Singh Monochrome. The company I decided to go with for this first zine is Blurb. They're fairly large printer online. And I have to say I was really impressed with the print quality that I got back on this first zine. It feels more like a soft cover book than it really does a magazine. Really high quality paper and the printing looked really, really good. I was a little worried that they may not be able to do a good job with the black and white images, but they really did handle them pretty well. The layout of the book was actually not too difficult either. I used the BookWrite app that I downloaded from Blurb. And I found the learning curve to really not be that steep if I can figure it out pretty much anybody can. And I think you can also use product software like InDesign or something. But for me, this app worked out pretty good. Pretty intuitive. And I'll probably, on my future projects, just go ahead and stick with this app. They have a lot of templates for the pages that you can use if you aren't comfortable coming up with your own ideas. I just used blank pages and went ahead and laid out the photos however I wanted them. Place them on the pages. I used to do a fair amount of page layout when I was a photographer for one of the first newspapers I worked at. We used to do double page photo essays. I got to lay out a few of my photo shoots and I really did enjoy that. Kind of get into telling the story. Kind of let the images plough each other. So I found the process to be actually pretty enjoyable. Really, this scene is just a great way to share my photography with a wider audience in print. I don't have a big name. I don't have a name. I probably won't be in a gallery anytime soon. But having your images in print like this kind of gives that same experience. People can open them up and kind of study the images. I wouldn't encourage anybody to print your work, to print your photography. It's a nice way to keep a record of it. You can pass them down to your children, grandchildren. And the magazine is really the most affordable way to go. The magazine that I went with is the Premium magazine. So the paper quality is quite good. The print quality is very good. They do have something that's a little bit cheaper. But I use it as a different paper and I don't think it would represent the photos quite as good. I know that a lot of people have actually used them for zines. I find the price pretty affordable. It's not something you would make a lot of money with. At least I don't expect to make a lot of money with mine. I would like to make enough to cover the cost and maybe put some money towards the book that I want to produce with the content in these zines. But I don't have any ideas of living off of what I make from a zine. But it's worth the satisfaction. You can produce one of these for very little money. You don't have to buy one. If you decide you can buy one, check it out. If it looks good, edit it, whatever, the quality is good. You can buy more or you can just have the one. So how's the video quality on this? Is it good enough to vlog with? Let me know. Also, check out my new zine. You can preview it for free, a digital version. I'll leave a link below. Check it out and let me know what you think. So until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.