Welcome to Camera Obscura

I am Roger Patterson, a former attorney who spent 40 years learning to write like a lawyer. Now that I’m retired, I am on a quest to write unlike a lawyer. The legal writer in me may slip through now and then, but I try to keep it to a minimum.

In Camera Obscura, I write about what I come across in the world and reflect on what it all might mean. I spend a lot of time outdoors, so many of my essays reflect on the natural world, but I range widely so the topics covered here range widely as well.  I also read a lot, and my brief reflections are posted as Brief Book Reviews.

Why subscribe?

There’s no cost to subscribe (at least until I can promise some regularity) but if you subscribe you will receive a notification in your e-mail each time I publish an essay. Plus, it will make me feel good to have lots of subscribers!

And if you’d like to make me feel even better, pledge to upgrade to paid if I ever start charging. (You won’t be charged until I give you a chance to back out.)

A Little More About Me

I am a child of the Midwest.  I was born near Boston, but my family was from Minnesota and we moved back to the Twin Cities when I was six years old.  After undergraduate school at the University of Minnesota and law school at the University of Chicago, I spent a year working for a federal judge in Los Angeles, where I met my wife Toni LeBel. 

We moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1982 and I worked for a large law firm (Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering at the time, now WilmerHale) for 21 years, where I mostly practiced securities law (talk about obscure!).  In 2003, we moved to the Los Angeles area where I was an Associate General Counsel at The Walt Disney Company responsible for financial disclosure and corporate governance matters. 

I retired in 2019 and promptly bicycled across the country from Florence, Oregon to Nantasket Beach outside of Boston, a few miles from where I was born.  Toni accompanied me, driving a small RV that was our home for the two-month journey. 

I have a Diploma from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust and am a Certified California Naturalist. 

Toni and I live in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles; our adult sons and a daughter in law live in the Los Angeles area.

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