He's had his fair share of different brands!

http://shutterfinger.typepad.com/shutterfinger/2013/06/why.html

I like 'Messy Art', and the look on the guy's face in 'Pirelli Girls' is brilliant! Hehe.

I think a little play with curves to boost the contrast and levels would improve some of these - just a little tweak.

Thanks everyone. Shaun - this one's just for you:

Beautiful shots, all of them. That Broad Bodied Chaser shot is the perfect illustration of what the DA35 Macro is all about!

Fabulous shot, Ben.

Thanks Brian! I knew this place from when I was a kid - we used come to collect sweet chestnuts in the woods behind. I couldn't believe you could actually still access the buildings. Some require a bit of work to get into, but others you can just walk right in.

Some interesting graffiti in there:




(That shot was available light, but on the K10D that time.)

I've been playing with flashes for a while now, and have been buying bits and bobs from ebay. The kit I have so far includes three Minolta AF4000 flashes (costing about 15 each), generic radio controllers from China (brand name - 'Nice'! - again about 15), and a flash stand (I ended up spending more than I would have liked on this as I needed one quickly for a proposed shoot - which ended up being cancelled).




I also have a couple of white umbrellas and a honeycomb grid, again cheapies from ebay.

I had put out an advert for a model simply to help me get used to using this kit, and after a while with no response, I was contacted on Thursday night by a model/actor called Tomasz looking for a shoot the following day. He lives in Nottingham and I was struggling to think of a location, but he said he was interested in shooting in some sort of derelict industrial place.

As luck would have it, I had found just such a place a matter of hours before he contacted me! On Thursday evening I had taken these shots at an old wireworks:







I showed them to Tomasz and he loved the location, and agreed to meet me there the following day.

It turned out he needed to get underwear shots to send out to an agency. Luckily I was so involved in setting up the lights and shot set ups, that I didn't have time to get embarrassed.

I shot with my K10D and Tamron 17-50, and Pentax F 35-105mm. Generally I used two stobes either side, one above and slightly to the front, one a tad lower and slightly to the back. I used a Sony NEX and lens turbo adapter and Pentax K 135/2.5 for available light shots.

I'm very pleased with the shots! A selection are already up on my Smugmug account (see here) & I'll no doubt post some here for C&C from our seasoned studio / flash photographers. But I'll end on one of my favourite shots from the day.

If you post in the gallery you are putting your work out there into the interwebs. People are therefore allowed to discuss it - nowt you can do about that!

There's nothing stopping us discussing any of the images already posted. If people don't want their images viewed, discussed, or linked to by admirers, they should not be posting to a public gallery! Most people post to the gallery to share their work, and most I presume would appreciate their work being recognised.

If the idea was to crit people's work from the gallery, at random, then I could understand the hesitancy, as some people simply cannot take criticism and do not want it.

But this is a thread where people would just say that, after their normal gallery browsing, NOT a scientific examination of all the week's pictures, they thought picture X was particularly strong, and thereby draw other people's attention to it. My gallery browsing is sporadic, so I'd certainly appreciate being guided to the excellent stuff I've missed.

No way John!

I still think an informal thread is the way to go! It would work better if we could show the images within the thread. Would that be OK though? Should be obvious we are not passing the work off as our own. If that's not OK we could post the links instead.

That's why I think it should just be an informal thread to discuss and share the weeks stand out shots, and see how it goes. If a mod would chair the thread and crown winners among those that seem to have the most buzz, it could work.