About the Artist

“The art of landscape photography does not attempt to add to God’s creation, that is impossible to do, it merely conveys the sublime majesty of nature all around us”. M.J. Kitzman

Morey Kitzman has mastered the art of large format photography, which employs the same cameras used by Ansel Adams and other renowned landscape photographers.  For those unfamiliar with large format photography, this technique involves shooting with old fashion cameras where the photographer covers his head with a dark cloth and has a long set of bellows. The only part missing is the handheld powder flash.  Even today in the era of rapid advances in the field of digital photography, the large format camera is unrivaled in the quality of prints it produces.  These images are often compared to high definition televisions because the detail and nuance of light this technique extracts gives the viewer the sense of actually being there, as if you were looking through a window into another world.
      Large format photography is a very expensive and laborious process. First, you must carry upwards of forty pounds of equipment, often hiking many miles to find one good shot.  Each shot involves setting the view camera on a tripod, attaching the lens and dark cloth, framing the scene, setting the focus, metering the scene with a handheld light meter, setting the shutter speed and f-stop, inserting the film carrier, and depressing the shutter cable.  There is no guarantee that you have secured the shot until you get home and have the film processed.  Every time the shutter is depressed it costs five dollars per exposure, therefore the photographer must carefully compose the shot and choose the correct settings. Even a slight error in exposure can ruin the shot.   Unlike the new digital cameras, the photographer does not have the luxury of shooting several hundred exposures of one scene, instantly viewing those images and selecting the best shot.  Large format photography is handcrafted in every sense of the word.
      Even though this is a very time consuming process, the experience of viewing the scene on a large plate of glass measuring four inches by five inches under the dark cloth is very satisfying and affords the photographer a level of intimacy with the scene not achieved with any other process.  Incidentally, the image projected on the glass plate is upside down.
      This process cannot be rushed and the photographer enters into a gentle rhythm and a quiet connection with nature.  One can think of it as communing with nature with silent reverence and the end result is the photographer can convey the same sense of peace in his images that were in the original scene. 
       Images attained in this manner can be enlarged to fifty by sixty inches and still retain complete clarity and sharpness.  We invite you to inspect the large images very closely and notice the complete absence of grain or blurriness. The end result is an image that captures every subtlety of light, texture and color of the original scene.
       Morey Kitzman specializes in photographing the American Southwest, Italy (where he grew up) and other faraway places.  He resides in Littleton, Colorado with his wife Sylvia and son Christopher.