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Matt Payne

Matt Payne is a landscape photographer and mountain climber from Durango, Colorado. He’s the host of the weekly landscape photography podcast, “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen,” co-founder of the Nature First Photography Alliance, and co-founder of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. He lives with his wife, Angela, his son Quinn, and his four cats, Juju, Chara, Arrow, and Vestal.

mattpaynephotography.com

For the third iteration of this column, I really wanted to feature the work of Anna Morgan, a landscape photographer from the United Kingdom living in British Columbia, Canada. I admire Anna’s photography because of how it can evoke powerful emotion in such quiet presentations of colour and subject. Like most photographer’s work that I find myself admiring, I adore how her photography does not depend upon location nor conditions to portray interest, emotion, and mood. While Anna’s work does occasionally focus on locations that have been photographed a great deal by other photographers, she does so in a way that feels unique to her vision and way of seeing the world. In much of her photography, I get the sense that the subject is much deeper than a collection of simple objects in nature, rather, each image asks the viewer to reflect deeper within oneself to find something more.

Take, for example, her images of the desert, especially those taken in Death Valley National Park – for me they convey a sense of solitude, longing, peace, and silence – all things I greatly crave in my own daily life. Viewing these images instantly relaxes me and forces me to take pause and consider the actual weight of things going on in my life. These images help me put things in perspective and provide solace through photography. This is an example of something that I think that a great landscape photographer can do through their images – produce an emotional reaction beyond the obvious and ordinary postcard photo “oohs and ahhs.”

Another aspect of Anna’s photography that I really enjoy is

seeing how she is able to photograph smaller details of larger scenes and use colour, lines, shapes, and careful composition to portray simplicity and order in a world filled with complexity and chaos. As someone who enjoys trying to take photographs like this myself, I find it incredibly difficult to find and arrange elements in a smaller scene in these ways and so I am always in admiration of those like Anna who can do it with such ease and success. Each image seems masterfully composed to include and exclude just the right things in order to tell a story or convey an emotional connection to a place or natural scene.