Articles from Gary Winchester Martin

Dixie Dixon is a Dallas based badass and one of the sixteen "celebrated contemporary photographers" of the Nikon ambassador program. Dixie specializes in commercial fashion photography and is a prime example of how hard work, apprenticeship, and relentless dedication pays off in commercial photography. I recently chatted with her and stole all of her secrets of success for you, the reader. Because that's how much I love you, reader.

I don't even know where to begin with Erik Almas. His imagery simply stops you in your tracks and makes you wonder how something can be so perfectly imaginative. For photographers, or me at least, he makes we want to cry in the fetal position. Not because his stuff is so awesome that I get verklempt, but because it will take decades to come even close to where he was ten years ago.

Imagine one day you let a photographer, maybe even a friend, take some photos of you. Then imagine that a few years later your friends and colleagues alert you that you are the poster child of an HIV positive ad in a free AM New York Newspaper. This appears to be the situation for a Brooklyn woman now suing Getty Images for the infraction. 

The short film "Pictures" made by Gioacchino Petronicce is a prime example of how patience is a main ingredient in creating captivating cinema from still photos. Gioacchino spent over three years traveling multiple continents to capture perfect moments, and the images that led up to that perfect moment using a DLSR. I absolutely loved the tempo he created in this film with the acceleration up to the actual moment he froze in time.

In my first rickety little studio I called a place to take portraits, I had nowhere but a corner to store my rolls of seamless paper. In my little budget corner I found a million ways to ruin whole rolls, or ruin parts of seamless paper on an hourly basis. The ends would get damaged, the rolls would become wavy, and I would typically end up cussing and throwing away seamless that should not have been destroyed. It was money being thrown away. I want to prevent this from ever happening to you.

Sam Hon takes fighting to an entirely new level with his campaign for Optical Panecea. Sam's creative vision in this campaign was to make each fighter fight themselves while drawing creativity from each fighters raw character to make each image unique.

Once upon a time at brunch in Santa Monica, I created the biggest, most complex cheeseburger anyone had ever even attempted to ask a chef to make. I basically picked my top 10 things off the menu and asked the chef to put it between ciabatta bread. Then I ate the entire thing. It gave me severe meat sweats and rendered me unconscious afterwards, but it was the most delicious thing I had ever created. It's my single greatest achievement in life. I learned a lot about myself that day and will tell the Epic Burger story to my great great great great grandkids.  

It's always a great day when a massive leopard seal decides not to eat you whole. It's an even weirder day when that same leopard seal decides to feed you a fresh penguin. In this video, National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen was on assignment in Antartica to capture leopard seals in the wild when he was approached by a massive female with jaws twice as big as a grizzly bear. What happened next is nothing short of epic.

Online storage through "the cloud" is one of the best ways to ensure your files are safe and secure from failure, fire, and theft. "The cloud" has also typically been a super expensive place to store a ton of content until now. I stumbled upon a way to store the bulk of my photos online through a website service called Zenfolio, which you've probably heard of.

Yesterday a colleague Pratik Naik posted a gif of an interesting phenomenon, which coincidently illustrates an issue I have been having (at least it appears to be). When you shoot a job with thousands of images it’s sometimes paramount to quickly view and flag or pick the good ones. Some people even start with quickly rejecting the bad ones. This .gif is a good reason why you shouldn’t start with deleting the bad ones.

Transitioning into commercial photography is no easy task. For some it’s the holy grail, end game, and ultimate dream job to have in the industry. For others it couldn’t be further from what they want- and that's fine! However, for those of you planning a transition from event/portrait based photography into the commercial advertising world, there is a long list of connections, lingo, and experience based knowledge you need to have in addition to being at the top of your game visually. 

The biggest mistake I see when reading a photographer’s blog is the choice of words used in blog page titles. The words you choose may be keeping your blog invisible to the world forever. It's not necessarily a "mistake" but typically not the optimal choice of words for search engines.

I’ve been waiting for someone to do an HDR stop motion flick and here it is described as an "HDR hyperlapse postcard that will take you to a journey through Georgia - probably the most friendly country in the world." This motion piece shows us a side of Georgia that differs from what most mainstream media portrays the country as, all with the hate it or love it HDR effect. 

Carbon Copy Cloner is one of my all time favorite programs that takes the stress out of ensuring data security and redundancy. It’s a simple program that copies data from one place to another exactly when you want, and exactly how often you need it to. It completely takes the guess work out of dragging and dropping blocks of data from one volume to another; it’s perfect for photographers.