Update: This giveaway has ended, and the randomly selected winners were posted here. Thanks to everyone who participated! Stay tuned for more awesome giveaways!

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is really interesting, and is mentioned a lot these days. Some people love it, while other hate it. Whatever camp you’re in, I would still recommend that you at least try it out, since I believe you actually learn the most in photography from experimentation.

Here’s an HDR photograph I took in 2008 of the Campanile on the UC Berkeley campus:

It’s composed of two photographs that I took without a tripod, and was created using Photomatix by HDRsoft. It seems like everyone these days is using Photomatix for their HDR work, and if you’ve heard of HDR, you’ve probably also heard of Photomatix.

Well today, I’m giving away two (2) copies of Photomatix Pro Plus, each worth $119. This bundle includes not only the standalone program, but also plugins for Photoshop, Lighroom, and Aperture. Of course, feel free to downgrade to one of the individual packages if this much software is overwhelming.

Entering this contest is simple. All you need to do is answer the following question:

Who is your favorite photographer?

Any photographer is okay, though try not to say it’s yourself. Links are definitely encouraged if the photographer is modern enough to have a website!

There are two ways you can send your answer to me, and feel free to use both methods for double the chance to win! You can…

1. Leave a comment on this post
2. Tweet your answer to @petapixel on Twitter

Winners will be randomly picked and announced in a week on the evening of July 18th, 2009.

Good luck!

If you’d like to view more examples of what you can do with Photomatix, check out the Photomatix group on Flickr, and to learn how to actually do HDR photography, try reading this tutorial by Trey Ratcliff on Stuck in Customs.

Another tip: If you include a link in your tweet back to this post, your tweet will automatically show up below the comments section, allowing you to share your answer not only with me, but with PetaPixel readers as well!