 Well, 2020, the worst year of my life. Typically, at the end of the year, I usually do like my favorite photos of the year. And I wasn't going to do one this year, but I've decided I want to start 2021 off on a positive note. So this video isn't going to be about the negative stuff. I'm going to show some of my favorite photos of the year. 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, sharing what I learned through my successes and my failures and hopes to inspire and educate. This is my journey. This is Bright and the Edge. Now it's pretty slim pickings this year. I usually have a little bit more to show for myself at the end of the year. But looking back, I have a few photos that I kind of like. So I thought I'd go ahead and share them in this video. So the first photo from 2020 was a stump and some moss. Back in January, I started the year with taking a walk around the low-water mark of a reservoir near my house. And I was really attracted to the moss and the texture of the moss. It was kind of like a carpet. The light was at a really good angle and the stump added a lot of structure to the image. It's very, very simple, very minimalist. One thing I did do pretty good in 2020 was because I wasn't able to photograph a lot, I made sure that most of the time when I was out making images I had my video camera alone. That's something, right? I'm trying to figure out a composition here. It's fairly cluttered. I'm thinking about using this kind of one tree as kind of the anchor point for the composition. I really like the kind of dusting of snow on these leaves. The second shot came in February. It's probably one of my favorite shots of the year. I really like this scene. The dusting of the snow, just a great atmosphere. It's composed very basic. The tree is pretty much dead center. It's kind of like the tree standing out front with its army of trees behind. This next shot came from first of three backpacking trips I took in 2020. This was to the Oregon Dunes. I was out looking for a good place to shoot dune photos. I was really struggling. I came across this detail shot that I really liked while packing out in a forested area. I really liked this moss or fungus. It was kind of an abstract image that I kind of find appealing. I don't think it's something that most people would actually enjoy. It was my plan in 2020 to backpack more or go out more overnight on more overnight trips. I did manage to put in a few, so I guess it wasn't a complete loss. I had two shots from that backpacking trip from the Oregon coast. The second shot is a shot where I actually found some dunes after I'd backpacked back out to my car and drove to another location to do a little scouting before I headed home. I found an area where the dunes were exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, I didn't find them until later in the trip, but I was still able to make a few images in those dunes that I actually liked quite a bit. This image is one that I really didn't think that much about when I made the video, just a simple wide-angle shot with a nice texture and lines leading back to a dead stump that's mostly buried in the sand. The Oregon Dunes is one of those areas where I went to just before the pandemic hit, and I had planned on going back to do some more photography. I just never got to. I'm hoping in 2021 that the Oregon Dunes and those dunes in particular are going to be on my list of places to visit. So in March, I did a video testing Delta 100 shot at 50, developed for 50, basically overexposing and developing to get finer grain structure. This image came from that experiment, that video. I was very happy with the results I got from this little experiment, so much so that I decided I would go ahead and make Delta 100 my go-to film for the rest of the year. In May, I got out for a quick shoot after being in lockdown quite a while, and this image was the last one I had made while out making that video. It's very simple, but I was really attracted to the simplicity of it. I was attracted to the light tone of the fern against the dark background of the fourth floor. I also was attracted to the contrast between the shape of the defined triangle shape of the fern versus the repeating pattern of the fourth floor underneath the foliage. It's not something you would probably see in a portfolio, but I do like the image. This next shot was from that same shoot in May, and it's just a real simple panel of a creek, a creek scene. I had learned a while back that I could effectively stitch film frames to make panels, just like you can in digital. I really never really did that much, and to a quarter, it made actually a pretty good size, a negative. So every once in a while, if I saw a scene that I liked as a panel, I would shoot it in film with medium format film. I just like the peacefulness of the scene. It's just a nice, peaceful, simple bore scene. I didn't do a lot of panels this year, but it was one of my favorites. So in June, I got out for my second backpacking trip of the year into the Oregon Badlands Wilderness. It was a hard trip. It was no water. I had to carry on my water, so I was carrying my medium format camera gear. It was a lot of weight. I wasn't able to go a long ways in, just far enough to get me back in there to where I could have a base camp and then kind of shoot from around that area. It's probably one of the more productive trips I took this year. Well, I only took three backpacking trips. But I really did like that environment, the rawness of it, the difficulty of life hanging on in that harsh environment. I'm most attracted to that. And this first image is just a real basic shot of a tree in really good light. It's smack dabbing center. It's all about the texture. We've got some sagebrush. We've got some plant life underneath. You can see that's kind of an environmental portrait, but the textures of the gnarly bark of this decaying dead tree has probably been dead for many, many years. And just going back into the earth. I just found this extremely appealing image. It's not beautiful by any means, but it is interesting. At least I find it interesting. The second shot from this trip was another fairly close-up shot of another dead tree. But what I found so fascinating about this tree is it still had most of its limbs. And they made such a cool graphic element to the picture. Getting up and get up close, having the limbs all around, going off in all directions. Kind of gives it a real abstract feel. Again, it's a shot I really like that I don't think a lot of people are going to really like. The end of June took me out on my last backpacking trip of the year. And this time I was in the Mount Jefferson wilderness in a burned area. It burned many years ago. And there was just still a lot of skeleton, a lot of remains of trees still standing, kind of like a ghost forest. But what I did notice on this trip was a new forest is coming up amongst the dead trees. That's kind of a nice story. That's kind of a nice juxtaposition, having the new trees and the old trees. In this first shot I have a broken-off stump in the foreground with a bunch of trees that are still standing, dead trees still standing in the background. Their fate will be the same as the one in the foreground at some point. But amongst those trees you see the seedlings of the younger forest coming up. That's kind of cool. This shot is one I really thought much of when I took it at the time and when I made the video. But as I look back on it, all of them, it probably has more of a story showing the process, the cycle of life in the forest with fire and with death and with new life. And this next shot also came from that backpacking trip. It's a panorama. It was one of my favorite panoramas of the year. And this one was also focusing really, it was about the trees, about the ghost forest. I really liked the side light highlighting the edges of the trees against the shadows in the background. So this next shot came in July. A simple wildfire shot in the most unlikely of places for me. This was in an empty lot across the street from the apartment I was living in at the time. It was the shot I had to travel the least for. This shot illustrates that a lot of times you don't have to travel very far for an image. The kind of things I photograph, it's not really about the place. It's more about the essence of nature in black and white. I usually don't have to go that far. I think the farthest I went this year was about 150 miles. But everything else was within probably 60 miles of my house. That's fairly typical for me for photography. I happen to live in an area that I have so much at my fingertips. I have so much here to photograph that I don't have to go a long ways to see. The shot that I made in July, I was out experimenting with trying to stitch two frames together with my medium format camera, my 645 medium format camera, to get a square crop. Just seeing what it would be like to shoot with a square format, not cropping the film, but actually making the negative bigger. I came across this chaotic scene for these trees. And this is another one of those shots that only certain people might like. It's very chaotic. The darkness of the tree trunk is really the only thing that holds your attention. I like that my eye wanders around the frame, around the chaos, around the foliage and the limbs going everywhere. Then I can come back to the center and find a place to rest. It kind of reminds me of a painting. It's a little more abstract. I think I like that painterly feel of the image. That's probably what attracts me to it. So October brings this spider shot. The only thing that's that different about this spider shot is that this highlight in the background, I really worked hard to try to line up the spider with these circular highlights to give it that kind of spotlight effect. November. I'm out looking for some light colored foliage. We've got autumn going on, autumn color. A lot of people are shooting colorful autumn pictures. I'm out looking for light tones against dark subjects like tree trunks. And I thought this was pretty effective with these three darker tree trunks with their pattern, the vertical lines being broke up by the lighter colored foliage going up. So December. We're back to where we started. A similar subject. Shooting a stump. The only thing different now is I'm shooting it with a different format and with a new camera. It's one of the first images I made on this new 4x5 camera I picked up. It's a new format for me. I haven't shot 4x5 for many, many years. So it feels like I'm starting over. This will be the story going forward in 2021. A new format. New adventure. Well, I appreciate you coming along for the little trip down memory lane. Remember some of the positive stuff that happened in 2020? Because there were, even though there was a lot of bad stuff, some of these images make me smile. I had some decent trips and I came back with a few photos that I did like. And that's all you can ask for. So until next time, Thanks for coming along for the ride.