About the Photographer & Artist:

Linda Saxon Nix is native Mississippian. She has resided in Biloxi (on the Mississippi Gulf Coast) for 29 years and considers it her home.. She began her interest in painting while living in Colorado, and still paints once in a blue moon. She got her first camera, a Brownie box camera before there was color film) for her eleventh birthday, and has had many different models since then. Although she has enjoyed taking photographs all of her life, her interest in serious photography began when she started taking photos as reference shots for her paintings. It was when those reference shots became more interesting to her than paintings made from them, and when people started asking about purchasing her photographs, that she changed mediums.
Her photographs are in homes and offices in many states as well as Australia, Spain, South America and Denmark.
She garnered the Award of Light at the 2002 Ocean Springs Multimedia Art Show with her magnolia photograph, "Reflections". In 2002, she was accepted into the prestigious George Ohr National Art Challenge by Juror Paul Soldner. Three of her photographs were recently juried into the Photography 2005 exhibit at the Tennessee Valley Art Association. Her photograph, "Solitude" won an award at the 2005 Singing River Art Association Annual Art Show. In 2006, her work was accepted for he "Memories of Point Cadet" exhibit in Biloxi, and in the 2006 Gulf States Ohr Exhibit.
Although her focus is on capturing unusual and alluring photographs of magnolias in all stages from bud to seed pod, she also likes to photograph other flowers, old buildings, pelicans, seascapes and sand dunes, lighthouses, landscapes, unusual thing and "old things".

In addition to her fine art photography, her magnolia photographs have been used in various advertising campaigns, on wedding invitations, for brochures, logos, and web pages, in a book about Mississippi for school libraries, twice by Louisiana Life Magazine, and her premier image, "Magnolia Reflections", was featured as a full-page illustration for a six-page article titled "In Every Southern Garden" for Columbia County Magazin. This particular issue was provided to attendees of the 2005 Master's Gold Tournament in Augusta, GA.

Occasionally Nix works as a part-time photojournalist for a newspaper, enjoying the photography as much as the writing. Her speciality is human interest stories. She also does other free-lance writing.

She is a member of several coastal and one out of state art associations as well as Professional Photographers of Alabama and Mississippi. She exhibits in four or five outdoor art festivals yearly, mostly around the Gulf Coast or in surrounding states. She presently has work in several galleries in the area. From her original paintings and photographs, she creates series of note cards using her art and photography, which she sells at art shows and in galleries.

Nix enjoys working in PhotoShop, mostly to optimize her photographs as photographers do when they develop their photographs in a dark room. She uses her art training to enhance some of her photographs in order to make them more artistic in appearance. She occasionally combines photos to create an effect or cause a result not possible with the camera. Her artistic eye allows her to create backgrounds that enhances the subject. She prefers to print her own archival photographs using am Epson 2200 printer because she prefers to have ultimate control of the results. When she does have larger photographs made at a lab, she has them printed from a CD that she has created in PhotoShop, ensuring a better-controlled image.

Her background as an educator and Media Specialist was the inspriation for her "Evolution of a Magnolia" web page, which is now used by students all over the country from elementary school through university level when doing research, reports and presentations about the magnolia as a state flower or as a botanical unit of study.

Like most photographers, Nix constantly feels the "pull" to take photographs, feeling naked without her camera when outdoors and while traveling. She strives create images that people enjoy, but focuses on what she loves to photograph. She plans to continue with her photography, which is her means of expression, so that she can visually share the beauty of nature and her fascination of life that she sees through her lens with others.