Seeing Monochrome
Blog
“Somewhere between the heart and the head,
between passion and intellect lies a great photograph” - David Patton
This Seeing Monochrome Blog is where I share my thoughts on black and white photography, how I make my photos, and where I am on my photography journey. If that sounds interesting to you then check back often and come along for the ride!
Another Look at Kodak Tmax Black and White Film
In this Riding The Edge episode I take another look at Kodak’s Tmax 100 black and white film. It has been at least a coupe years since I’ve used any Kodak films, so I thought it was a good time to see if this film has a look I’d like to reach for when out doing fine art nature photography. Is there room in my camera bag for Tmax 100? Based on what I’m seeing with this first roll, I’ll be coming back for more.
Chasing a Dream, the Elusive Black and White Photograph
The Disappearing Lake | This is an image I’ve been trying to recreate since 2016.
There is a lake in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon that drains every summer through holes in the volcanic rock on the lake bottom, then refills when the rains and snow return in the winter. In 2016, I made a unique photo of one of these holes where the water drains. While I do like the image I made in 2016, I would return every year trying to re do that original composition but with better light and better camera gear. The problem with trying to recreate that image is that the window of time for those conditions is usually very short. Every year, I would return and every year I missed that window where the water would drain just right, pouring into the hole from all sides. The shot I was looking for just wasn’t there. Even so, I always made other photos on those annual visits to this little lake, and some I ended up liking a lot, maybe even more than that original photo. It’s been a few years since I’ve been back. On my last visit, it looked like what I was looking for would no longer be possible because of how the lake’s bottom has changed over time. I’ve been thinking it might be time to pay another visit to the little lake. Even if that elusive photo I’ve been chasing for so many years will probably not be a possibility, there may still be other photos waiting to be discovered.
Chasing a Dream is a video I made after my last visit to the lake, a project that I started in 2016. This video was originally published on my Riding The Edge YouTube channel, after only a few hundred views I reposted this video to my smaller Seeing Monochrome Channel and it as done much better there with thousands of views.
Photos I’ve made while chasing a dream
What’s in a Name? Origin Story of Riding The Edge.
When you’ve come across my YouTube channel or website, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought, “What is Riding The Edge and what does that have to do with photography?”
So today I thought I would tell the origin story of Riding The Edge Photo.
This video was made about four years ago but the story is still the same, just note that the website displayed in this video has been shortened a bit but is still Riding The Edge.
My story starts way back in 2007. At the time, I was working as a staff photographer for a daily newspaper, and every summer, myself and editor Steve Lundeberg would put together a series of some sort to run on a section front spread out through much of the summer. I did the photos, and Steve would write the stories and layout the pages. It was always fun to do these projects when things slowed down in the summer months.
Gearing up to go on assignment with an adventurous reporter while working as a staff photographer for the Albany Democrat-Herald in Oregon.
It was about that time when both of us started riding motorcycles to work, and in one of our story idea brainstorming sessions, we came up with the idea to ride our motorcycles around the perimeter of our home state of Oregon. I think we were just looking for an excuse to ride our bikes more. It was a pretty basic plan: take a week, ride the perimeter of the state, tell stories of the people we met and of the places we explored on our adventure. We were calling the series, “On The Edge In Oregon.”To this day, I’m still surprised we got the go-ahead to do the project. I guess budgets weren’t as tight, and papers were more adventurous back then.
The series idea started out to be just the 2 of us, but about that time, my cousin Ed Patton got himself a motorcycle. He had heard of what we were planning and wanted to come along to help record some video for the project. So then there were 3. Well, one of our pressmen, Rick Matson, at the time was also riding a motorcycle to work, and when he got wind of the project, he just had to be a part of the adventure. So our crew was 4, which turned out to be a good number for the tour. The multi-part series chronicling our adventure ended up with a lot of reader interest. We received a lot of compliments on this project. Even many years later, I would get readers approaching me and thanking me for the adventure we took them on.
After On The Edge
The four of us enjoyed the experience of riding the perimeter of Oregon so much that the following year we decided to ride the perimeter of the state of Washington, just for the fun and for another adventure. It was about that time that I started a personal website I named “Riding The Edge.” It was meant to share photos and videos of our motorcycle adventures with friends and family. These motorcycle trips became an annual event; every year we would pick a new destination, making a route that would loop through a region. It became less about a specific state and more of an interesting route that would take a week to complete. We jokingly started calling ourselves the On The Edge Gang, riding to places every year like Death Valley, Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Glacier, Mt. Rushmore. We covered 1000s of miles all over western US. The motorcycle was an amazing way to experience our country, giving me the memories of interesting people and places that I still cherish to this day.
Eventually, the motorcycle trips came to an end. I put almost 100,000 miles on my little Kawasaki motorcycle. I had basically road the wheels off that trusty bike. It served me well. At the time, I couldn’t afford to replace the motorcycle, so that was the end of my motorbike adventures, but that wasn’t the end of Riding The Edge, that was just the beginning of Riding The Edge Photography. I adopted the name for my photography business. All though I kept the name, It was no longer about motorcycles. Riding the Edge had a personal meaning for me, it had become a philosophy to the way I wanted to live my life. It’s about trying to stay out of the mainstream. It’s about not being comfortable and about taking the hard way, which is often the most rewarding way.
I came across an interview of photographer Galen Rowell, his work had influenced me a lot when I was starting my photography journey. In this interview he said “The edges of things in nature are the most beautiful, the edge of a continent next to the sea, the edge of a meadow next to a forest, and the edges of light where light tapers off into dark or different colors of light come together.”- Galen Rowell
I thought yes, that’s where I want to make my images, at the edges, and in a way I’m most passionate!
That gave my mantra validation, that’s where I want to be, I want to be Riding the Edge!
The last photo of the On The Edge In Oregon Project.
Breaking With Tradition, Multi Image Prints
For quite a while now, I’ve been exploring ways to enhance or expand how I present my photography. I’ve been wanting to get back into making prints available in the future, but before I do, I’d like to consider different options. I’m not sure I’m all that interested in doing traditional matted and framed pictures anymore. With today’s technology in printing, there are a lot of different ways to make a print. Besides inkjet and traditional c-type photographic prints, we also have the choice of metal, canvas, and acrylic prints, which look to add a more modern and possibly a more dynamic way of displaying art. With these alternative materials, you can choose to hang the art with or without a frame. I love the idea of not having to frame a photo to hang it on the wall.
By Natures Design - This set of images was made along a trail where I take my dog Nori on our daily walk. I like to call this “By Nature’s Design.” The images bring attention to the wonderful patterns and shapes we can find in nature if we look close enough.
Getting away from tradition, I’ve been experimenting with putting a black border around my prints or adding a hairline white line around the image, then placed on a black canvas. I like the look this brings to my black and white images. I’ve also been thinking about displaying multiple images on the same canvas, I think it could be interesting to put multiple images that have a theme or just look good together on one canvas. Take that a step farther and make these prints metal or acrylic. I think a three-image panel could be very dynamic, with each image bringing an element to the overall presentation. A side benefit would be when making images from a small negative like 35mm, you wouldn’t need to enlarge them as much and still get an impressive display with more impact than there might be with a single image.
In The Forest - I’m calling this 3-image panel “In the Forest.” These are images that you could possibly find in your local forest. This forest theme could be just the first set; there could be numerous sets displayed in the same fashion. I really like the storytelling aspect to displaying photography this way.
Two Sides Of The Same Image
While I think I prefer a 3-image panel, I think this set of two works well because of the idea it represents. These are basically the same subject from different sides, one dark, one light. If you start in the center and look a little to the right, taking note of the tree, then look left, you may notice this is a mirror image. I wish I could say I planned this ahead of time, but it was only when I opened these photos up and had them on the same screen that I noticed how well they worked displayed together. These images were made a few months apart, and I did purposefully return to photograph these trees in the fog for another interpretation of these trees. I just made the photo from the other side because it looked best in the fog, so it wasn’t just luck; the luck was noticing how well they worked together. This will definitely make it into a book or zine, and who knows, maybe even a piece of wall art someday.
Why Black and White Photography?
In my first blog post, I briefly touched on how I gradually evolved into a black-and-white-only photographer. In this post, I’d like to talk about what it is that keeps me coming back to black and white. The video I am sharing is from a few years ago. In it, I explain why I’m a black-and-white-only photographer as I work on my first zine project that focuses on trees as a black-and-white subject.
I’m sure for a lot of people, it makes absolutely no sense to limit one’s photographic expression to just black and white. And for most people, that probably wouldn’t be a great idea. Everyone is on their own unique photography journey. So much of what we do and how we do it is shaped by our own personal history. My past has brought me to where I am today, seeing monochrome.
An Introduction to Seeing Monochrome
These are a few my color images made in the early years of my photography journey.
Check out my Seeing Monochrome Gallery for my current black and white photography.
For this first blog post in my new Seeing Monochrome Blog, I thought it was probably a good idea to introduce myself and give a brief description of who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’m currently doing in photography.
As you are probably aware of by now, my name is David Patton. As the trailer says on the front page of this website, I started my photography journey more than 30 years ago, taking photos of nature, primarily as a landscape photographer. I wanted to express myself, I wanted to make art, and nature was what inspired me. It wasn’t too far along on this photography journey that I found myself wanting to make photography a career. I was a realist and figured if I wanted to feed myself and my family, I’d have to find a photography job that had a better chance of paying the bills. For some reason, being a starving artist didn’t seem like a good career path. I had taken a couple of photography classes in community college along with a basic photojournalism class, so when a darkroom and photographer position at a weekly newspaper came open in my hometown of Lebanon, Oregon, I jumped on it and applied. At that point, I had been published in a couple of magazines and a front-page photo in a daily newspaper, so although my portfolio wasn’t extensive, it was good enough to get me the job. When I took this staff photography position, it was my intent to do that job for a year. It sounded like fun, but the pay wasn’t good, and I figured I would move on after I had put in a year. A year passed, then another year. After a while, my work was getting noticed by the publisher of a sister newspaper. I was recruited to move to a bigger daily newspaper, so I continued to work as a news and sports photographer. Well… 25 years and thousands of assignments later, I finally left my career in photojournalism. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I left. I just knew it was time to do something else.
So I returned to my roots. I decided it was time to make the images I wanted to make. It was time to make art.
Why black and white?
About ten years ago, while still working in journalism, I did a photography exercise where I would only do black-and-white photography for my personal work for an entire year. At the time, I was starting to post every once in a while to YouTube. I decided to turn this experiment into a video series that I named Seeing Monochrome. I figured it would be fun to share my experiences with friends and family. At the end of the year, I was surprised that the intense focus on black and white affected me profoundly, so much so that when I eventually left my photojournalism job, I gradually evolved into a black-and-white-only photographer. This Seeing Monochrome Blog is my personal journey as I try to become the best black-and-white nature photographer I can be.
Nowadays, I find myself using a lot more black-and-white film to create my images. I have nothing against digital black-and-white; I just find that I like the aesthetics of black-and-white film a little more.
Hopefully, you will join me and follow along on my continuing journey of making art from what I find in nature.