Cobra Kai: DP Abraham Martinez on Visual Style

When Abraham Martinez was thirteen years old, his parents left the house for the evening. He flipped through the cable channels and landed on The Killing Fields. He watched a war photographer — played by John Malkovich — load film canisters and develop a passport photo in a makeshift darkroom. Martinez had been working in his school's darkroom for months. He recognised every step.

That evening redirected his life. He decided he wanted to be a war photographer — to travel the world with a camera, witnessing the places most people only see through a lens.

Forty years later, Martinez is one of the busiest cinematographers in American television. His credits include Flight Plan, Spider-Man 3, the Fast and Furious franchise, Ali, Without a Trace, Big Love, The Shield, Cobra Kai's first season, all five seasons of Queen of the South, AMC's 61st Street, Disney+'s National Treasure revival, and Netflix's Obliterated — from the Cobra Kai creative team. He's filmed in roughly 60 countries. He has held steady on a camera inside the White House and inside cartel territory, over a volcano and on the pitch at Aston Villa, across favelas and Saturday-night clubs in Ibiza for twenty-six hours straight.

In an interview with Zebra Home Cinema, Martinez walked through the full arc: the Houston childhood that gave him a global eye, the Texas film-school path that led him to a rental-house apprenticeship, the lineage of John Alonzo that connects his work directly to Scarface, and the philosophy that underpins how he approaches every show he shoots.

A Houston Childhood of Slide Projectors and Multicultural Streets

Martinez's stepfather worked in the oil business, rotating through overseas rigs. When he came home, he ran slide-projector shows for the family — Arabic-labelled Coke bottles, Middle Eastern cityscapes, working sites in countries that, to a seven-year-old in pre-internet Texas, might as well have been other planets.

"It's the first time I saw, you know, a Coke bottle in Arabic. A different font. Growing up, you didn't have the internet where you could be exposed to many cultures at once. You had to really dig — either National Geographic or an encyclopaedia."

The family lived in Houston on a street that was, by accident of real estate, a miniature global sampler. Martinez's neighbours were from Jamaica, the Philippines, Iran, Korea, and Pakistan. He went to their houses for meals. He watched Filipino films, Pakistani films, Korean cinema on their VHS players. By fourteen he had absorbed more global visual culture than most American film-school students encounter before graduation.

Two things happened in 8th grade (roughly age 13):

1. 1.His stepfather gave him an old camera.
2. 2.He saw The Killing Fields on cable, and decided the camera was what he wanted his career to be.

Before either of those, since third grade, he had been drawing his own comic strip — teaching himself, without knowing it, the grammar of telling a story frame by frame.

North Texas Film School and Carrying Schwarzenegger's Sets

Martinez went to the University of North Texas for film school. His junior year, he got the job that felt, in retrospect, like the beginning of his real career — working on a B-movie called Space Marines. The production had acquired the old sets from Running Man and Total Recall — Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1980s action spectaculars — shipped to Dallas in a container. Martinez helped unload them off the truck.

"We made it into spaceships, and we called the movie Space Marines. I felt like I had arrived, pulling these old secondhand action sets off into the loading dock."

After junior year, he took a part-time role at Mobile Production Studios (MPS) — a Dallas-based camera, grip, and lighting rental house. By senior year he was working in the camera department on real features while finishing his degree. His studies pivoted from production-focused classes to world cinema — Hong Kong, Indian, African, and Brazilian film — which he could only access through specialty grocery stores with VHS rentals in obscure subtitles. He credits that period with training him to read films as translations of culture rather than as genre exercises.

His advice to anyone trying to break into cinematography today:

• ▪If you know you want to do camera work: skip the degree and go straight to a camera rental house. The rental house is where you'll learn the equipment, the workflow, and the language of the craft. Self-study history online.
• ▪If you haven't collaborated much yet: go to film school. The real value of college isn't the curriculum — it's learning how to communicate your vision to a team of ten people under time pressure.
• ▪Do both if you can. He did. The combination is unbeatable.

The Lineage of John Alonzo — From Scarface to Queen of the South

Martinez's career traces back to one person he never actually met: John Alonzo ASC — the Texan cinematographer who shot Chinatown, Scarface, and many others. Alonzo was also Mexican-American. Alonzo also started in Dallas, in television camera work, before making his way to Hollywood.

"John Alonzo has been kind of a pattern for me. We had much coming around. When I first moved to Hollywood, I got into the union. They had a VHS tape in our union office where John Alonzo talked about Scarface. I grabbed that tape and watched it every time."

When Queen of the South landed in Martinez's lap decades later, it brought the lineage full circle. Queen of the South is, in Martinez's framing, a pan-Latinx series with Scarface genuinely in its DNA — not as pastiche, but as inheritance. Martinez was explicitly carrying Alonzo's torch forward.

Other formative mentors from Martinez's early career:

• ▪Ralph Boda ASC — who shot Saturday Night Fever and was one of the first DPs Martinez worked with out of college. Martinez later filmed a tribute foot-shot of Martin Garrix walking into Ultra Festival, borrowing Boda's camera angle.
• ▪Scott Duncan — the documentary cinematographer Martinez assisted, who introduced him to East Africa as a working location and shaped his appetite for international documentary work.

A Typical Day as a Television DP

Modern American television shoots on two main templates — post-COVID 10-hour days with an hour lunch break, or 12-hour days with a 30-minute lunch. Martinez has cycled through both across his recent seasons.

His daily rhythm as a DP (in this case not operating the camera himself, as is typical for television DPs):

His core responsibilities as DP:

• ▪The look of the show. Tone, palette, mood.
• ▪Lighting specification. Every scene's lighting concept.
• ▪Camera movement. How the camera physically engages the action.
• ▪Time management. Ensuring the day's work gets shot without compromising late scenes.

The last item — managing time — is the one most outsiders underestimate. A script with seven scenes in a day has to be allocated time per scene such that the director, actors, and camera each get what they need at every moment. Rushing the last scene of the day is a classic failure mode. Martinez's first hour every morning is spent preventing it.

The Physical Job — Why DPs Run

Martinez is explicit about the body being part of the job.

"If you're operating the camera, you have to be healthy, fit, and alert. It's a total mind–body wellness."

He runs four miles most weekday mornings during a shoot. The reason isn't generic fitness. It's alertness — the ability to stay sharp for 12 hours on set when 30 decisions per hour determine whether the show gets shot properly.

For anyone considering a cinematography career, this is the detail that most career-advice pieces skip. The craft is intellectually demanding and emotionally collaborative. But the body has to hold up. Camera work — whether operating or supervising — is physical labour that extends across decades. DPs who don't train stop being DPs.

Sixty Countries — How Global Travel Reshaped the Craft

Martinez has travelled to roughly 60 countries across his career. The work has included advertising, documentaries, features, and television-location scouting. The travel has been both career-defining and, at times, genuinely dangerous.

A partial list of the more remarkable filming situations:

• ▪Gabon — used the president's helicopter team for a week and a half, filming giraffes and gorillas across the country's interior.
• ▪The Amazon — filmed a stretch of water that, after the crew moved on, a local caught an anaconda in their fishing net. The crew had been wading in the same spot hours earlier.
• ▪Colombia — travelled to film the Emberá tribe: eight hours by vehicle, six hours by boat, white flag in the bow through contested territory.
• ▪Ibiza — 26 hours of continuous handheld filming with Paris Hilton for the American Meme Netflix documentary.
• ▪The French Alps — a helicopter he was filming from lost control briefly in wind. The sister helicopter from the same production crashed into France the next day, caught fire, and the crew survived only because the producer ran back in to retrieve the footage before walking hours to the next village.
• ▪South Pacific volcanoes — filming erupting lava from 50 yards as it shot into the air.
• ▪Kenya — where he moved his family to live for a stretch after shooting his first feature in India in 2010. He calls Kenya his "second home" and credits the light, the culture, and the food.
• ▪The White House — roaming with a camera during Bill Clinton's presidency.
• ▪Aston Villa — shooting jumbotron footage for the club's kit launch, covering the pitch and stadium.

His wife, a painter, travels with him. So do his two sons (one a filmmaker, one a musician). The boys have homeschooled through twenty countries. When they were studying the Berlin Wall in school, the family happened to be shooting in Berlin. When they were studying Vikings, the family was in Sweden.

Martinez has converted this travel into a working methodology: each location visit becomes a reference library. When Queen of the South needed to "cheat" Colombia in a New Orleans shoot, Martinez had personal photography from the Emberá expedition to inform the production design. The more geography you've actually stood on, the easier it is to fake it convincingly later.

The Queen of the South Philosophy — Women, Power, and the Human Condition

Queen of the South ran five seasons on USA Network and Netflix. Martinez shot it across all five, treating the show as a cinematographer's canvas for the kind of personal, pan-Latinx storytelling he'd been absorbing since childhood.

His framing of what the show was really about:

"It's about the human condition. How women navigate with power. You have Camila and the gifts she has to manipulate situations with power. I became fascinated with someone who came from the streets to becoming a boss. That template goes across many businesses as a woman — the struggles, the biases, the situations that are set up in the world structurally, whether cartel or not in real life."

Inside the cartel-drama packaging, the show touched on:

• ▪Human trafficking (from season three onwards)
• ▪Governmental corruption
• ▪Machismo and how men use power
• ▪Mixed marriages and displaced identity
• ▪Loyalty, ride-or-die relationships
• ▪Teresa Mendoza's journey from displacement to authority

Martinez's underlying view: poverty is the enemy, not the person. Drug dealers in the show, like the villains in most of his TV work, are people with gifts whose gifts have been misdirected. Martinez treats character as an extension of gift — the cinematography has to serve the character's interior life, not decorate it.

The show was also deliberately pan-Latinx in casting — Afro-Latina, Cuban, Dominican, Bolivian, Colombian actors all represented. For Martinez, that casting diversity unlocked a practical cinematographic range: different skin tones need different lighting, and working with the full range of Latin American ethnicities taught him lighting approaches he still uses.

Obliterated — Everything-in-the-Kitchen Action on Netflix

Martinez's current Netflix project, Obliterated, came from the Cobra Kai creative team. It's an action dramedy about a combat team sent to save Las Vegas — eight episodes, built to throw every tool in the modern production arsenal at a streaming audience.

"It's like taking everything I've ever worked on in my life and pouring it on this show. Helicopters, shooting digitally, shooting plates, gimbals, on-stage video walls like The Mandalorian. Everything I learned technically from the 80s action genre to the modern way of a new series — we're throwing everything in the kitchen and having loads of fun."

The production uses:

• ▪Helicopter aerial photography
• ▪Gimbal rigs for high-speed and handheld combat work
• ▪On-stage LED video walls (the Mandalorian-era virtual-production technology now scaling out to episodic TV)
• ▪Plate photography for compositing against the LED backdrops
• ▪Combat choreography with choreographer Brad Martin (the Cobra Kai lineage bringing its martial-arts discipline)

For Martinez, Obliterated represents the convergence of every discipline he's practiced across thirty years — feature action, documentary, commercial, travel, episodic TV. It is, he says, the project he's been training for without knowing it.

What's Next — Choreography, Indigenous Storytelling, a Possible Musical

Martinez described himself as being in the "choreography season" of his career. For years, his focus was lighting and colour. The season before that was composition. Now he's interested in the camera as a physical performer — moving with the actors, dancing with them, shot-designing as choreography.

"I'm really leaning toward choreography with the camera and positioning. It's either dance or action — elite-squad style. I think the two worlds blend together. I really want to do a musical. Latino, New York, or Cuba, something with some choreography with the camera."

Alongside the choreography focus, his other active interests:

• ▪Latin American indigenous art and history. Martinez did his Ancestry DNA and confirmed significant indigenous Mexican and Mayan heritage. He's interested in stories about Latin American indigenous culture pre-colonisation and the 500 years of shame layered over it since. Wants to do something about the Alamo, the Tejano experience, and the Conquistador-era tension.
• ▪A serious overseas feature. He's been "cheating America for everywhere else" — shooting New Orleans for Colombia, Dallas for Mexico. He'd like to actually shoot a feature abroad. He came close to moving to Hyderabad to become a local DP in India for a season.
• ▪A superhero film. Likely, in his words, on the horizon.
• ▪A refugee or displacement story. One of the throughlines of his career — from The Killing Fields onwards — has been displacement. He wants to make the film about it he's been preparing for since he was thirteen.

He also continues to shoot his own street photography on Fuji cameras between jobs, and is trying to get back to sketching — the comic-strip habit of his third-grade self.

Key Takeaways

• ▪Abraham Martinez is one of the most prolific cinematographers in contemporary American television — with credits across Flight Plan, Spider-Man 3, Fast and Furious, Ali, Queen of the South, Cobra Kai, AMC's 61st Street, National Treasure (Disney+), and Netflix's Obliterated.
• ▪His career was redirected at age 13 by watching The Killing Fields on cable television — specifically the scene of John Malkovich developing film in a makeshift darkroom. From that moment, he wanted to be a camera person travelling the world.
• ▪His lineage traces through John Alonzo — the Texan, Mexican-American DP who shot Scarface and Chinatown. Martinez calls Alonzo "kind of a pattern" for his career and treats Queen of the South as carrying Alonzo's torch forward.
• ▪He has travelled to roughly 60 countries for work, using travel as a reference library that allows him to "cheat" one country convincingly in another years later. Kenya, Colombia, Gabon, the Amazon, and the French Alps are all specific career waypoints.
• ▪A typical television DP day is 12 hours of shooting plus an hour's morning prep, with an early-morning coffee ritual, a thorough review of the day's scenes, and a 45-minute run four times a week to maintain the physical alertness the job demands.
• ▪Queen of the South, which he shot across five seasons, was for Martinez an exercise in pan-Latinx storytelling — women in power, multicultural marriage, displacement, loyalty, and the human condition. Cartel was the setting; the themes were universal.
• ▪Obliterated (Netflix, from the Cobra Kai creative team) is Martinez's current work — an action dramedy using every production tool of the modern era, from LED video walls to helicopter aerial work to choreographed combat.
• ▪His next creative interests: camera choreography (possibly a musical), Latin American indigenous storytelling, an overseas feature, a superhero film, and a displaced-person story that closes the circle back to The Killing Fields.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the cinematographer on Queen of the South and Cobra Kai?

Abraham Martinez is the director of photography who shot all five seasons of Queen of the South and the first season of Cobra Kai. He is currently shooting Obliterated for Netflix, from the Cobra Kai creative team. He has also shot features including Flight Plan, Spider-Man 3, Fast and Furious, and Ali, and television including 61st Street (AMC) and National Treasure for Disney+.

How did Abraham Martinez get into cinematography?

Via The Killing Fields. At age 13, he watched the film on cable television — specifically the darkroom scene with John Malkovich's war-photographer character — and decided he wanted a career with a camera. His stepfather's slide-projector shows from oil-rig travels had already seeded a global visual curiosity. He studied film at the University of North Texas, worked through the Dallas-based Mobile Production Studios camera rental house, and moved up through the camera department from rental technician to DP.

How many countries has Abraham Martinez filmed in?

Approximately 60. His travel work has included commercial, documentary, and feature projects, with significant time in Kenya, Gabon, Colombia, the Amazon, India, Chile, Spain, Madrid, Berlin, Sweden, and many others. He lived in Kenya for a stretch after shooting his first feature in India in 2010.

What is the lineage between Abraham Martinez and John Alonzo?

John Alonzo ASC — the Texan, Mexican-American cinematographer who shot Chinatown, Scarface, Norma Rae, and many others — was Martinez's career model. Both came up through Dallas camera work before making it to Hollywood. Martinez has talked about watching a VHS tape of Alonzo discussing Scarface repeatedly when he first joined the union in Los Angeles, and treats his own work on Queen of the South as a continuation of the Scarface–era Latino storytelling Alonzo pioneered.

What is Obliterated on Netflix?

Obliterated is an action-dramedy Netflix series from the creative team behind Cobra Kai, following an elite combat team sent to save Las Vegas. The show uses an unusually wide range of production tools — LED video-wall virtual production, aerial helicopter photography, gimbal-based combat choreography, and plate photography. Abraham Martinez is the cinematographer. Eight episodes are planned for the initial season.

What's Abraham Martinez's next project focus?

Camera choreography — he wants to work on a musical or a heavily-choreographed feature. He is also interested in Latin American indigenous storytelling, a foreign-location feature, a superhero picture, and a refugee or displacement story. In parallel he runs an active street-photography practice on Fuji cameras between assignments.

How does a television DP actually structure their day?

For Martinez, the day begins at around 15 minutes of quiet coffee, followed by 45 minutes to an hour reviewing the script pages and planning scene-by-scene time allocation. He arrives on set roughly an hour before crew call, briefs with the AD and director on the day's shape, and then manages the shoot across rehearsal, setup, and shooting. He also trains 45 minutes (roughly 4 miles running) four times a week during shoots to maintain the physical alertness a 12-hour shoot demands.