The Windy Pixel » Unique, daily photographs of This American Giant.

I’m very excited about today’s guest post by Brian Matiash, a fellow guest editor at www.hdrspotting.com. One of the really cool things about editing HDR-S is getting the chance to see the world’s best HDR photography day in and day out. I can always tell Brian’s images before I see the byline – I think you’ll agree they have a dark, gritty, graphic-novel quality to them. And he is a man after my own heart with that T/S lens! Happy Saturday and enjoy the wonderful guest post that Brian has put together for you all! If you like what he’s laying down, check out his awesome blog and follow him @brianmatiash on twitter.

- Justin

Thanks to the good folks at The Windy Pixel for asking me to be a guest blogger. I am a huge fan and am proud to have some of my own images displayed beside the amazing work found throughout this site.

I have been taking photographs in one capacity or another for about 10 years. I started off with a Kodak Advantix film camera, eventually moved my way up to a 2 megapixel Olympus digicam, handled a few Digital Rebels and now shoot with a 5D Mark II. Odds are, if I was anywhere other than my bed, I had a camera with me. For someone who is riddled with a freakishly short attention span, photography proves to be my only remedy to achieve focus. And so, this is how it went: I saw something, I photographed it and I processed it. And during that time, I honed my eye to see, compose, and capture what is meaningful to me. I started to develop my own style.

Then, one day, I saw a digital image containing what I could only describe as a supplemental amount of tonal range compared to anything that I had ever seen before, at least digitally. Upon doing some research, I learned that what I was seeing was an HDR digital image. You may now be expecting a statement like, ‘And then everything changed. Life as a photographer as I knew it would be fundamentally different. I was about to embark on journey into a brave, new world.’ But, ultimately, not much had changed and my life as a photographer was still very much the same. And, upon realizing that, I was able to shed the concept and moniker of ‘HDR Photographer’ and return back to what I was and what I strive to better myself as every single day – a photographer.

You see, I feel that we have become so adept at segmenting and labeling and compartmentalizing our photography that we forget the core of what we’re doing, the elemental aspect of taking meaningful pictures. To that point, I’d like to direct you to two blog posts: the first by tWp’s own Justin Kern, from Jan 6th and the second by the great Jack Hollingsworth, titled ‘I Am Community‘. The messages in both resonate deep within me and have shaped how I thought about the content of this article.

With HDR, for instance, I feel, and even worry at times, that we become more consumed with having to get a ‘good HDR photo’ than having to get a meaningful photo, period. The same could be held true for anyone who feels that they have to label themselves or their photography to a specific style or subset. My feeling is that you should spend less time trying to conform to type of photography and spend more time creating your very own brand of photography. One of the greatest compliments that I’ve ever been given (and even more so that it has been given to me by more than one person) is that when they see one of my photos, they just know that it was taken by me. That fills me with such an immense amount of joy because I can tell myself that, in part, I am succeeding in what I am trying to accomplish.

I am also extremely fortunate to have a group of extremely talented friends who happen to be extremely talented photographers. And if there is one thing that I have learned from them, it is to focus on the photo and understand that the most important skill to develop is to identify what is meaningful to yourself. Spend your time developing your eye, your style, your own way of rendering how you see the world onto the photo that you are about to take. Don’t consume yourself with exploiting dynamic range right out of the gate. While I am a firm believer that there is no set formula in photography, I do also know (from lots of hard experience) that it is very easy to put the cart in front of the horse. I’m not saying to forget the HDR, or whatever your flavor happens to be, but rather I am reminding you to remember the photograph.

Cheers!

Brian

Photos by Brian Matiash – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.