 Photography with purpose. 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. Nori and I are out. Looks like just some random nature photography. I'm working on a couple different projects. And I'm trying to do better about optimizing my time on a mount. I've got a list of zine ideas and book ideas. I figure when I'm out doing photography, I might as well be working on something that I'm going to want to use in the future. So basically I just picked an area that I had tagged as something with potential for a project down the road. I found me a shot, my first shot. Tree across the river there. Going to sit on the ledge. I don't know if you can see it. Kind of back right here. But it's got nice light-colored foliage. And we've got some water running through the foreground out of the interest. And I'm shooting this with my 7200. About F11, F13. Just waiting for the the breeze to calm down. Cutter speeds around 15th of a second, 6th of a second. ISO about 100. Kind of experimenting with different shutter speeds. See how much water I want blurred. Yeah, it's kind of a nice minimalist shot. Hopefully it'll work good in black and white. But hold on a second. I need to take the shot. Where was I? It's a nice even light. I want to take advantage of that. So the leaves and the branches on that tree really stand out. At least I think it does. With the wet, darker rock around it. I guess that's how I'm visualizing it. Now doing photography with a puppy adds a whole another level of challenge to photography. I hope you get some amusement out of this. And then someday you can look back and say well I remember when she was in training. When he was too. My what a team they become. It's kind of the hope. The goal. Right now we're tripping over each other and the she just wants to see stuff. And I just want to photograph stuff. So we kind of have to have a balance. I've been talking about zines and working on zines. I actually just finished one up and it's at the printer. Just to try to reach. This will be my third in my sing monochrome series. This one's focusing on details. I've been guilty of overthinking my zines and just wanting to have the perfect zine. How many times can I say zine? Just wanted to have it perfect. But sometimes perfection is the death of art. If you wait forever you're never going to get it. You'll never get it done. There's a couple more excuses not to produce it and move on to something else. So I'm looking forward to getting my first copy back. My proof. So I can see if it's something I can make available on my website. The last thing I really want for my videos is to sound preachy. I'll tell you what you should be doing. I'm telling you what I'm doing for my needs. You may not have a desire to produce a zine or a book or you may just want to take pictures randomly for fun. Which is perfectly acceptable reason to take pictures. And I enjoy doing that myself. I'm just trying to make the best use of my time. So when I am able to get out I can actually keep an eye out for some of the projects that I'm working on. My clouds aren't helping artworking with me. They just need to move in front of the sun. You might have noticed that I'm shooting with a digital camera today. I do that on occasion. And the video that I'm working on from yesterday explains what's going on there. So if you're interested in that by the time this goes up that one should be done enough. You might check that out if you're curious too why I'm not shooting with my typical medium format or film camera. I'm with my digital today and probably for the near future anyway. The extended future that'll change. Yeah, there's lots of cracks. There's some leaves on the ground and stuff like that but seeing that combination that just turns me on you probably hear a lot of that whining. You probably do some of it yourself if you're a photographer. Just not to write conditions. Actually the light's pretty good right now. I'm just not finding a composition that I like at this location in this light. I probably should just head on down to my next location which is a covered bridge especially with this light. This would actually work pretty good over there. I guess that one composition is just going to have to do it here. We'll see what else I can find. As I was heading back to the car I noticed this light-colored tree between these two dark really vertical fir trees. I'm making a nice composition. It might be kind of square and this light-colored tree is framed between the two, the dark on each side. It might be fairly interesting. I like the play of dark and light in here. I'm actually seeing a couple more possibilities. So maybe I'll walk around in here a little bit more. It's kind of open up enough to where you can kind of see if there's a little more potential in here. Maybe this location will be a little more fruitful than I expected it to be. I'm having to use a higher ISO than I'd really like to. I'm at 400 right now. There's so much movement in the foliage on that tree that it is making it a challenge. So I'd rather have the image sharp enough to use and have a little extra grain. I'm not that worried about the grain. Here we go. Yeah. I can wait for it to calm down. Oh, and then the sun pops out. When a cloud comes up I'm trying to take the images so there's not all these hot spots behind the subject. On the little screen it looks alright. I'm not really sure if this is going to be that great. Hold on a second. I don't know. It's going to be one of these real vertical tall shots. I just really like the way the vertical lines are playing together. They're dark. And then they've got the light foliage that's kind of manoring up in front of them. Because you find it looks like an interesting shot. You just got to take them and it looks out. Fantastic. If not, well, you tried, you know. No, he's taking a little break here. I don't think there's anything much cuter than that. Curling up some camera bag. Best dog in the world. Okay, now I did see I was heading to another location to do some more shooting. So, I probably should. Now I've got a couple frames from this location. This video is going to be kind of a bunch of odds and ends. I'll touch on a little bit more of that when we get down to the covered bridge. The other odds and ends I wanted to touch on today is thinking about doing a Q&A. So, if there's any questions regarding just about anything I'll start collecting those and then when I get enough I will answer them. If you're new to this channel my 25 years of my career was in journalism. You can even ask about that. Yeah, just any personal stuff, anything. If it's not too personal I'll answer it. Now, my channel really isn't that big and it's probably not big enough to do one of those, but I like to be transparent and open about all my experiences of photography and life and that kind of thing. So, I'm going to start collecting questions. You can leave them in the comments or you can find me on Instagram right in the edge and leave a question there and I'll keep track of them and when we get enough, I'll do a Q&A video. It might take a while to get that many. Well, I think Nori's had enough and I'm probably getting a little tired of myself. I need some lunch. It's a great spot to end the video. I don't have a whole lot of photos but I'm going to do a little run and get on this bridge with the cars coming through. If you've fun with me this long I appreciate it. I appreciate you coming along. So, until next time, I should come along for the ride.