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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.
When the results of the 2025 Natural Landscape Photography Awards were announced, one image stood out for its bold simplicity: a tangle of roots, exposed and contorted after a hurricane, rendered in earthy tones of red, yellow, and brown. It was not a scene from a distant wilderness, nor a mountain bathed in golden light. Instead, it was an intimate fragment of a familiar Southern landscape, transformed by attentive vision into something extraordinary. The photographer was Patrick Krohn, known online as One-eyed Dog Studios. His work won first place in our “In Your Backyard” category, an award designed to celebrate the power of seeing beauty in the places closest to home.
Roots exposed after a tree we knocked over from Hurricane Helene.
Winner of 'In Your Backyard' Category 2025, Natural Landscape Awards.
Patrick’s relationship with photography stretches back to his youth. Born in New Jersey, his family moved often, and he spent eighteen formative months living in New Zealand. It was there, in high school, that he picked up a 35mm camera for the first time and fell in love with the medium. He studied art in California before transferring to the University of Missouri – Columbia, where he earned a Bachelor of Journalism with the help of a Kodak scholarship. His first career was in photojournalism, working for newspapers in Utah and Montana before taking the role of photo editor at The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia.