Ready for Adventure Photograph - Limited Edition of 30

“The photographer has the immense privilege of being constantly in search of the beautiful”. This sentence is mine. At least, I think so: I made it up, and I've never read it anywhere else yet. In reality, the phrase is false. Looking for (and finding) beauty is within the reach of absolutely everyone: no particular skill is required. Our planet is full of them, in inexhaustible quantities. My name is Armand Patoir. I was born in the French Alps 35 years ago from a Polish mother and a French father. For a decade now, I've been systematically, almost obsessively, capturing everything my eyes and brain find beautiful, using a machine known as a “camera”. There are many reasons why I do this: the need to share with as many people as possible all the beauty that surrounds us and the positive effects that observing it has had on me; the desire to immortalize a moment that, by its ephemeral nature, will be doomed to become nothing more than a memory the very next moment; the desire to create shimmering, pleasing images whose simple viewing makes you want to smile and feel good, just like sugar for the brain. My “camera” has evolved over time. It consists of a body, lenses and sometimes filters. Today, my camera body is a Fujifilm medium-format camera. My lenses are all (except two) fixed focal lengths, i.e. they have no zoom ring, so you either have to move around to zoom in, or change lenses. This constraint forces me to be meticulous in my choice of viewpoint and photographic composition. The advantage of such lenses is that their image quality is excellent, and their large aperture produces wonderful background blur. Most of my lenses are between 20 and 50 years old. They each have their own charm, their own signature, their own qualities that make them unique. The oldest was built in 1966; the heaviest weighs almost 6 kg. For each shot, the focus, aperture, exposure time and ISO sensitivity are set manually. From my point of view, this apparent constraint is actually a benefit, as it allows me to explore unsuspected ways of photographing. I am self-taught when it comes to photography. I graduated from one of France's top ten engineering schools and my career path led me to become logistics coordinator in the Kerguelen Islands and then technical director of the Concordia Antarctic scientific research station. My dearest wish is that these images will make you feel as much emotion as when I experienced them.