Brent Doerzman – Portrait of a Photographer

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

I first learned about Brent Doerzman (pronounced Doors Man) in 2010 when I was researching an article I was writing for my old Colorado mountaineering website. I wanted to feature the best Colorado landscape photographers but was very new to photography and needed some advice, so I went looking for it on the now defunct Google Plus site, which was an incredibly active photography platform back then. One of the names that kept getting mentioned repeatedly was Brent Doerzman, so I went to have a look at his website. At first glance, Brent’s website feels a tad outdated; however, once you start digging in you recognise that it contains an absolute gold mine of landscape photography in the form of trip reports.

One thing I quickly learned about Brent when I first started researching his work is that he was at the time strictly using 4”x5” film cameras to produce his work, which was impressive to me at the time, having been so new to photography. Fast forward to 2013 – I was finally ready to start exploring Colorado’s mountains with the sole purpose of photographing fall colour, a rite of passage of sorts for all landscape photographers residing in Colorado.