“My name is Eike Maschewski. On the internet, however, most people know me under my pseudonym Braesikalla.

I started taking pictures in 2001 when I bought my first camera ever – a Sony DSC-V1. I never had much interest in photography before. But a bug has bitten me since then and now most of my spare time is spent taking pictures and developing them with modern digital tools like Capture One, Photoshop and Photomatix – just to name a few.

I have a vast interest in urbanity and so you won’t be surprised that my main focus is upon dramatic cityscapes and portraits of bizarre and strange looking people. These are always captured candidly, I never ask for permission, and I rarely get noticed because a great deal of them are shot from the hip without using the viewfinder.

In my work I don’t strive to be “realistic” – so I don’t have a photojournalistic approach. Instead I rely heavily on postprocessing to alter a scene in a way that it is becoming visually more appealing. Most of the time this means restoring and revealing the dynamic range of a picture – or put in another way I’m a bit like an archaelogist who uncovers all the data about light that is captured in a raw file. Sometimes I use a program like Photomatix to do so, on another occasion I produce multiple exposures from a single raw file and blend them together with complex masks.”