The bigger picture

Peter Dench finds out more

‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’ is the famously over-quoted mantra by Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist Robert Capa. It has since been adopted by many photographers as motivation to keep going forward, over borders, front lines and into living spaces. To get as intimate as possible with what they are photographing while remaining an objective observer.

Jeffrey Martin’s photographs get in close, then closer, then even closer – enough to placate Capa’s doctrine. They are also shot from very, very far away and are very, very big. An entrepreneur and designer of camera systems, Martin is also a Gigapixel guru creating some of the largest panoramic photos in the world. Gigapixel photography is the craft of shooting hundreds or thousands of photos and joining them together into a single, seamless, ultra-high resolution image (a Gigapixel image is a digital image bitmap composed of one billion pixels 1000 times the information captured by a one-million-pixel digital camera). These colossal images are typically shot with