 In this episode of Riding the Edge, Nora and I are out in the woods. I'm getting acquainted with Ilford's FP4 Plus, and while I'm out here, let's talk about how I made a new ebook using free software and my iPad. It should be a fun day out in the woods. Why don't you come along for the ride? 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. This is the first time I've used FP4. I've used T-Max 100 and Delta 100, those have been my go-to films in the past, in smaller formats. But I thought since I'm going into a larger format that might be a good time to try a different film. So I'll be curious to see what FP4 does. And in the sheet film, I'm a little annoyed at Kodak, kind of a lot annoyed. Even if this film doesn't do something I don't like, I will probably stay with Elford's Delta 100, just because it's close enough to T-Max 100 and it comes in boxes of 25. I think the Kodak T-Max 100 in 4x5 sheet film only comes in boxes of 10 or 100, something like that. And to me, 10 is just ridiculous, that's a ridiculous amount of film to put in a box. 10 sheets, come on. And it's not cheap, it's pretty expensive anyway. I would much rather have 25 sheets, I mean that's a good starting point. Now it's possible that Kodak still makes 25 count boxes but I haven't seen any, so I'm assuming that they just don't anymore. And like I said, I'm kind of annoyed by that, 25 is the smaller boxes I'm going to buy. So if this FP4 doesn't, you know, if I don't like it, I'll probably stay with Elford's Delta 100, because I do like Delta 100, I like it in medium format, I've not used it in 35mm, but in medium format it's a great film. So right now I'm just trying to find, I'm just going to shoot 4 compositions or 4 sheets of this film just to get an idea of what it looks like. The light is really not good here today, I know I whined about that a lot, but it was the only time I could come out this week and I was hoping for, it was supposed to be overcast, it's not, it's blue sky and sunny and this is the location I wanted to come and I don't like going into wooded areas on these kinds of days and I didn't have a plan B so, but this is more of a test anyway, so I'm not that worried about it. I just want to get a few images recorded, a few images on film and get a process and see if it's something I'm going to want to use. Ann Norrie says it's time to move, she gets bored easy. Well, this is proving to be a little more difficult than I expected. I don't know what I expect, I'm just going to go out and find a photo. Nothing is really jumping out at me, I mean I'm just being too picky, I have too many preconceived ideas, I just need to get some film exposed, but I still want to film, I still want to get something on film that is, you know, something I want to photograph. Wait, Norrie, wait, come, let's go. Ann Norrie's having a good time anyway, she's, she's coming right along, she's only about, why about seven and a half months, seven, maybe eight, she's a kitten, still quite a puppy, but she's, she loves the woods, she loves her daily hikes, her daily walks, she's a pretty good girl, she's a really good girl, good girl, let's go, go, go, wait, wait. She's starting to get the hang of coming back when she gets too far ahead, that's, that's, that's good because I, that was one of my biggest worries is to have her enjoy the outdoor so much that she just keeps going, but she seems to be bonded to us pretty good. Good girl, good girl, good girl, yeah I think you can see she's, she's doing pretty good, she's learning a few commands, but she, when she's excited she doesn't want to listen, but she does pretty good, pretty good, especially for her age, wait, come. She makes it fun to be out here, even if there's no photos, it's a lot of fun to bring her out here on the walk, she loves it too, so it's a win-win for all, for both of us, I didn't have a purpose to be out here today, so I need to find something to photograph, it's a little tight in here, I didn't make a composition of this log with a little moss cap on it, it's like a little mushroom top, it's one frame, it's kind of one of those oddities that it might look interesting on film, or it might not, you know, I've got a vertical composition, I don't shoot a lot of verticals, I probably should shoot more, I feel like there's a shot in here, kind of off the trail, we're kind of bushwhacking, the problem, I'm just not finding a dominant, you know, a dominant subject matter, a, a unique shaped tree or something, I'm, I'm just, it's just kind of a mass of trees, but I love that, that sense of depth you get when you're in a stand of trees, and that might be all this photo is, it might just be about the depth, or uh, we're kind of on this little ridge, there's like a little hole right here, so I'm gonna walk around, it's kind of like a pool, it's like, it looks like it just kind of sunk down inside the mountain, I'm gonna walk around it and see if I can line up, I might make a couple compositions in here, just, just because I think there's something potential here, I might just be the wrong day or the wrong light, but I think this is one of those places where, you know, I kind of, you kind of grab, you just have to stop and say, okay, there's something here, I'm not sure what it is, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and make a composition or two in here, just, and then when I get home, I'll study them a little bit, maybe I'll think of something else, another way to shoot it, or maybe it's just another season to shoot it in, right now there's no, no leaves, light's pretty spotty, it was uh overcast, it might be different, different look, we're gonna find something in here, well I took a couple compositions from that last stand of trees, the first one was the one I was more serious about, the second shot was more of an experiment shooting into the sun, now I probably should have blocked the sun from hitting the element of the lens, but I was testing how much flare it's going to give me, I never used that lens for back, backlit subjects, I feel like I had it for a short period of time, it's a 90 millimeter, so I'm gonna be curious to see if the flare blows out the image, or if it's usable or not, right now I've only got a couple shots, and I'm really start struggling to find something in this light, I'd like to find one more, I've got three pieces of film to develop, I'm gonna look around a little bit more, and if I can't find something we'll just go with the three, now as you can see there is quite a bit of flare in this frame, and that's pretty much what I expected, it was just a test, I really wasn't all that in love with any of the compositions I made out there, it's a good reference point, now I know when I'm shooting into the sun that if I don't want any flare on the lens I'm gonna have to make sure I shield the lens from the sun, it almost works, it probably doesn't though, there's more than one flaw with this image, the next flaw actually affects all the images, when I come up with that development time, I look for a source, I'm usually viewing that as a starting point, and because I do use a film developer that isn't that common, it's hard to find a lot of good information about what I should be developing this film at, so basically I underdeveloped all the sheets, and it really did make it difficult to scan and make an image out of them, it's a little bit disheartening, but I really wasn't that in love with any of the images, but I can't really make a really good judgment on if fp4 plus is gonna be a great film for me, because it just was so underdeveloped, I'm gonna need to add another 30% on the time at least to make sure I get enough detail in the shadows, but it's something that's a risky take when you switch films, you've got to dial in the development and the whole process, so I'm not gonna like that get me down too much, that's just the way it goes, that's the game, I would hesitate to show these images because I don't think this is my best work, but that's kind of what this channel is about, you kind of learn through my mistakes, which isn't really a mistake, this is just part of the process, I'm gonna be going out here hopefully in the next few days with a few more sheets to see if I can get the development times dialed in, something I wanted to talk a little bit about today, and that's ebooks, now I've done a few zines and where I have my zines printed, it is an option to have them copied as ebook, and that's just something I've never been interested in doing, it's the whole reason I do the zines is I like to see my my images in print, and I like to share them in print that way, so I've never really been all that all that interested in ebooks in general, but I started thinking well maybe I could do a few ebook projects, maybe I should experiment a little bit with that with that format, you know I'm not going to do a tutorial on ebooks because I'm not an expert on ebooks, but I have one to put together, and I have it available on my website, the noise is a little tired of me trying to talk about the ebook, so I'm going to pass this along to voiceover Dave, and Dave's going to tell you about how I put my ebook together on an iPad, how I designed it and what software I used, take it away Dave, okay I'll take it from here, now I designed this first ebook on my iPad, and the software I used was Pages, it's free, it comes with the operating system, and it actually works pretty good for laying out an ebook, Pages comes with your standard templates for letters and resumes and that kind of thing, it also has a template for laying out books, there's portrait and there's landscape, let's click on the blank template, you can change the background of the pages, in my ebook I went ahead and used a black background, but you can use white or any color you want, to add images you just go to photos and you pick out the image you want and drop it right on the page, you can move it around, you can size it, put wherever you want, it's very very intuitive, especially on iPad it works quite well actually, one of my favorite things about making an ebook in an e-pub format is you can add audio and video clips, it just opens up so much creative possibility, it really does kind of match what I like to do with my website, my videos, it allows the viewer to really connect with what's going on in the head of the photographer or the creator or the artist, so my first ebook mirrors my first scene, that's seeing monochrome trees, I took this theme of trees and I was able to expand that a little bit more since I have more room to work with, now you have the choice of going with two pages or a single page at a time, I chose the single page, I wanted as much room to view the image as possible, so when you look at the ebook you're looking at one page at a time, this project is designed to be viewed with Apple books, anything with a big enough screen, like a computer or an iPad should work well, probably not so good on a phone, I mean there's really no point you can't really see the images that well, I'm sure this limits the audience quite a bit but I found this is just the best way for me to show these images in an ebook format, I think there's a lot of potential here for sharing bodies of work, stories, tutorials in a digital format like an ebook, I don't think this replaces the printed image but I do see that there's a place for this type of delivery, if you're interested in viewing this ebook it's about 56 pages, you can download it free from my website rideandanswerphotography.com, download it and check it out and let me know what you think, I'm going to send this back to David, let him close out this video