About Me
My name is Steve Martinez and I live in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I’m a weekend shutterbug who has enjoyed this hobby for many years but has lacked the desire to spend lots of money pursuing it on film so the continuing advances in digital photography are a blessing much appreciated. 
My first passion is photographing my family. That’s really where this hobby started. My parents didn’t take a lot of photos of our family as we grew and I wish that they did. I often wish I had more photos of my childhood and the places that I grew up, especially now that I can revisit them as an adult and see how they’ve changed (and stayed the same, in some ways). My family is everything to me. I look at my photographs as documenting our lives together and I find myself looking at them on my computer as the screen saver flashes. I don’t want to be sitting here when my children are all grown up wishing that I had more pictures of them as they were kids. As a result I typically have the camera standing by ready to take pictures as things happen. Some of the best photos are of the kids doing something spontaneously. My daughter, Isa, is the real model of the family. She’s extremely photogenic and she poses for pictures as often as I ask her to. She’s starting to get fascinated by the camera so I may find myself with a photography buddy sometime.
Second on the list is nature. I love photographing nature – I always have. I live in one of the best states ever for photographing nature. Minnesota really is a beautiful place to live (second only to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is really where my heart is). My only gripe with photographing nature is A. I have no time, and B. The hours. Let’s face it, the sun rises REALLY early 
I have also gotten into HDR photography a bit. This is a process that combines shots of multiple-exposures for the purpose of capturing all of the dynamic range of light that a camera cannot capture in one shot. It really does produce some purely stunning shots if it’s done properly. I’m still tinkering with the “done properly” part of that but I enjoy it a lot.
While I do enjoy photographing people I do not have the desire to photograph weddings or to open my own studio. Maybe that will change in the future but personally, I don’t have the desire to undergo the type of training that a photographer of that type would need to endure. I’m not very knowledgeable with Photoshop so all of the photos that you see here (the non-HDR ones) are typically as they were shot, minus a couple of color saturation or contrast tweaks.
If you are interested in giving me a try please contact me, I can always use more practice!
Email: steve@srmartinez.net
-Steve-