My name is Aaron E. Martinez and I'm a photographer from West Texas.
My interest in photography started when I got my first DSLR in the fall of 2014. I was in a college video production class that required us to buy a camera that shot video and I bought a Canon 60D.
It didn't take long for me to get used to the feeling of having a camera hanging around my neck at every possible moment and photography quickly became my favorite hobby.
Over the 3 years that I had my first camera, I shot less than half an hour of video with it, but took several thousand images before I began truly taking photography seriously.
That time was the winter of 2016. Despite a lot of negative events that had happened in such a short time, I was able to find joy in taking photos. One of my earliest night images, called "Cordelia Stars," marks the moment that photography became not just a hobby or a job, but also therapy for me.
Why wouldn't I pursue something that's good for me? (Depending on the day)
My love for photography started in the usual way: buying better lenses, then reselling to buy even better lenses, watching hours of my favorite photographers speaking about their work, reading stacks of books on photography to hone my compositional and technical skills, and, eventually, traveling to places that I hadn't been in years or never had been like White Sands National Monument, or the Grand Canyon.
Only 6 months after deciding to take photography seriously, I had become frustrated and reached the limits of my gear and switched to my full frame Pentax system in the Spring of 2017, which became the largest single investment I had made at one time.
Photo by Alyce Bender
Fast forward to now; I'm currently a staff photographer at the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas and have had work appear in the El PAso Times, Associated Press, USA Today, Dallas Morning News, Sports Illustrated and more.
I'm also a licensed drone pilot.
Thanks for your support and thanks to those that have contributed to my craft through purchasing prints and commercial work.
-Aaron M.
Make sure to follow my social media links to visit to my Instagram or Facebook pages.
Go to my Instagram if you want to get updates from me in the field via my stories or live videos and see new work as I share it.
Go to my Facebook Page to read the detailed stories behind my nature images and see regular new work from my job at one of the largest papers in Texas!
Any questions and inquiries can be sent through my "contact" page!