Our Story
Who are Andy and Jennifer Martin? Our story is anything but ordinary; we’ve charted our own course and opted for unconventional adventures. We’ve been to over 65 countries, and we love sharing the world that we’ve captured in pixels.
I was born in southern California, Andy grew up in Pennsylvania, and we met in North Carolina. We were married in the Bahamas, and lived in Chicago and Houston before moving to Melbourne, Australia for a work assignment. We’re now Australian citizens (and still American) and live in Sydney. And we recently celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary!
Andy and I have both been “doing photography” as long as we can remember. And we’re not young, so we’re talking film cameras and fragrant darkrooms.
Photography really clicked for us though when we shifted from film to digital. We started planning our holidays around going somewhere to photograph something: landscapes in the southwestern United States, polar bears in Canada, gorillas in Uganda, snow monkeys in Japan, the night sky in Namibia, humpback whales in Tonga, or sea lions in Australia.
We originally had the website whywework.com. It was easy to remember, and we both worked long hours in challenging jobs so traveling was pretty much…why we work. Our website was mainly a way to share our adventures with friends and family.
We changed hosting providers in 2013, and they royally screwed up the transfer so the website was offline for a while. In 2014 someone offered a large amount of money to buy the domain. While that URL was absolutely perfect, selling it funded a heap of travel. So now we’re Andy and Jennifer (.com). And they did nothing with the whywework domain.
What do you do with your images?
Over the years, we’ve met many interesting people and are frequently asked if we sell or exhibit our images. Photography has always been something that we did for ourselves. The stress of “getting the shot” or focussing on scenes and subjects that people would buy did not appeal to us. We also love many genres of photography and didn’t want to limit ourselves to one specialty.
Covid hit us pretty hard emotionally. While we were fortunate to be able to work from home, our travel wings were completely clipped. We spent a lot of lockdown buried in our Lightroom catalog, processing images we’d overlooked and reliving past experiences. And that’s when it hit us.
We love the process of creating, and create entirely for ourselves. Photography isn’t our primary profession, but we’re definitely photographers.
We started creating more and sharing more and that completely reinvigorated our creativity. Some of our work is available for sale, and if you don’t see the image you are looking for, please contact us.
We also have some images available as NFTs, which align with our minimalist lifestyle and blends our passion for photography and emerging technology. We’re building our blockchain legacy; a multi-genre collection collection of our top .01% – images from 20+ years of photography. This extremely intentional collection of grail images will evolve over time to tell our story and will not be done until we are.
How many countries have you been to?
And for those of you who are counters – we’re at 69 countries. There may be a territory or two in this list, and Antarctica isn’t a country, but it’s our list so we can count how we want.
- Anguilla
- Antarctica
- Antigua
- Argentina
- Aruba
- Australia
- Bahamas
- Barbados
- Botswana
- Brazil
- British Virgin Islands
- Cambodia
- Canada
- Cayman Islands
- Chile
- China
- Cook Islands
- Costa Rica
- Dominica
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Ecuador
- Egypt
- Fiji
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Honduras
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Italy
- Jamaica
- Japan
- Kenya
- Madagascar
- Malaysia
- Maldives
- Martinique
- Mexico
- Micronesia (Chuuk and Yap)
- Myanmar
- Namibia
- Netherlands
- Nevis
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Palau
- Philippines
- Russia
- Rwanda
- Singapore
- Spain
- St. Kitts
- St. Lucia
- St. Martin/St. Maarten
- St. Vincent and the Grenadines
- South Africa
- South Korea
- Switzerland
- Tanzania
- Thailand
- Tonga
- Uganda
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Uruguay
- Vietnam
- Zambia