One word turns up again and again in a conversation with photographer Andrew Kornylak: authenticity.

 "Authenticity is something that's really important, no matter how well lighted a photo is or how flashy," says Kornylak, an Atlantan who has made a name for himself as an outdoor sports photographer.

"For me, the way to do that is through participating. I'm into mountain biking, paddling, trail running—pretty much any outdoor sport appeals to me. The cool thing about photography is, on the one hand you have to participate to get something authentic. And on the other hand you get to participate. You know it's going to be a good time."

For Kornylak, authenticity starts in the rock-climbing world.

 "The climbing photography world demands authenticity," he says, "because the audience is generally very knowledgeable about the subject matter. If it looks bogus, you will get called out."

Kornylak has been climbing since 1992 but has been taking pictures even longer. "I was always into photography growing up, as a hobby and an interest. We had a lot of cameras around. I remember sitting through quite a few Kodak Carousel evenings. I think I was always the last one awake. My brother was a newspaper photographer for a bit, and I inherited his camera when he went to law school."

Although he loved photography, Kornylak pursued a career in software development in Atlanta. "Photography was always in the back of my mind, but doing it professionally never seemed very realistic. Software was a good career to be in. You could always get work. It was flexible."

After moving to Tucson for a while in the late 1990s, Kornylak slowly made the transition from amateur to professional photographer. "I decided to try photography as a career, not full time but just trying to sell my photos, licensing my images and trying to get assignments—mainly in the climbing world because that's what I knew best. The climbing photography world is still pretty small, but it was really small back then. You knew everyone who was shooting photos."

In 2000 his first photos were published-a two-page Outside magazine spread. "That got me pretty fired up," he says. "I, of course, quit my day job and decided I was going to be a full-time photographer right then and there. It didn't quite pan out that way, of course. For several years I was still doing software on the side and trying to make my photography career work, learning the ropes about the business end of things, developing more and more time on the photography end and the creative thing, which was cool."

As his career began to develop, so did the art of digital photography, which turned out to be an easy transition for Kornylak, given his background in software. "I was kind of immediately drawn to all this digital photography," he says. "It was a really easy transition for me, and I was excited to try this technology and learn it and just kind of get into it.

"Another thing that was happening was I was really into other sports-action sports photography, like skateboarding and mountain biking. I noticed that the photographers were always pushing the limits of what they could get away with on [certain] types of cameras and lighting.

"You'd open up a skateboarding magazine and you'd see shots that were using off-camera flashes and strobe lighting and artificial lighting and colored light and big fisheye shots, things like that. Creatively I think they were always ahead of the curve."

Kornylak wanted to bring that kind of creativity to climbing photography, which at the time relied mostly on natural light. "I think it was gnarly enough just to get up there and shoot the photos without learning off-camera strobes and all that," he says.

But Kornylak was eager to stretch himself. "I started experimenting with off-camera flash and strobe lighting and almost like studio lighting out on the rocks and in the mountains. That was pretty new at the time. Now if you open up any camera magazine, it is pretty ubiquitous.

"Maybe it was something whose time was coming. But at first when you sent these editors at the climbing magazines lighting shots and artificial lighting, no one was taking them because they just looked too different. After a lot of persistence and sending the shots over and over, they finally relented. At the same time, the craft was increasing on the photographer's end."