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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.
If you ask 100 photographers why they make photographs, you’ll probably get 100 different answers to the question. Conversely, if you ask 100 photographers whether or not the effort required to make a photograph factors into its artistic qualities or if these variables matter in terms of the final result, most will say no. Understandably, as the creators of our artistic creations, we are quite attached to our images, especially those that require a great deal of effort, either physical, mental, or financial. While I agree that this does not necessarily make the images “better,” I think that it can lead to higher quality connections with experience, place, and subject.
These connections then can lead to us making more personally-meaningful images that result in higher artistic value, made with higher technical precision, which are imbued with more of “us.” The subject of this article, Brian Pollock, is a perfect example of this phenomenon. His work from the Scottish Highlands is superb and drips with a personal flair that can only come from the deep connections made through care, effort, and passion.