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.