John Fielder is a legendary Colorado landscape photographer. We are honored to have collected his shots from Douglas County, Colorado. He died a few years ago but he was an interesting guy to talk to. Fielder’s work spans 50 books and hundreds of thousands of photos and helped promote conservation efforts.
For his masterworks, John Fielder relied on a Linhof Technika Fieldview camera. He explicitly chose this 4×5 large-format system because the massive size of the film transparencies preserved the extreme, crisp detail crucial for landscape photography.The 7 LensesTo capture varying depths and perspectives of the Rocky Mountains, he attached lenses spanning 75 mm to 500 mm. His toolkit included the following focal lengths:75 mm (Ultra-wide angle)115 mm (Wide angle)150 mm (Standard/Normal perspective)210 mm (Slight telephoto)300 mm (Telephoto)360 mm (Long telephoto)500 mm (Super telephoto). In all with tripods, etc., his backpack of photography gear weighed over 65 pounds.
History Colorado is the proud steward of John Fielder’s Colorado Collection, an assortment of more than 6,000 photographs which immortalize the landscapes of nearly every county in the state. This collection represents Fielder’s life work and was distilled from the more than 200,000 photographs taken by Fielder over the last 50 years. Donated by Fielder in January 2023, it is now digitized and cataloged by History Colorado to make it easily accessible and searchable by the public. Please see the links below.
Since he began photographing Colorado in 1973, Fielder has effectively been to each of Colorado’s 104,984 square miles, compiling a record of the Centennial State’s landscape and how it has changed over the past half-century. His photography has been featured in dozens of books, garnered him multiple awards for his service to Colorado and its people, and influenced the passage of laws to protect public lands in Colorado and beyond.
https://www.historycolorado.org/john-fielders-colorado-collection
