Since about June 2007 I've followed on a nearly daily basis the evolution of Strobist, a blog setup by David Hobby, an ex photo journalist working for the Sun in the US. In a friendly and simple way, David Hobby is teaching you how to use small and portable flashguns to the maximum of their possibilities and achieve high quality photographs. The Strobist blog is reinforced by a Strobist Flickr Group where the blog readers could participate in the group discussion threads and posting their work into the group's photo pool and get comments and critics.

I remember going thru several pictures of skateboarders, cyclist... doing high jump with a great sky in the background. This made me want to get some similar photographs. So, with my wife, we started a serie on our trip to the Isle of Wight.

"Flickr labs have been hard at work creating a way to show you some of the most awesome content on Flickr. We like to call it interestingness."

Another of my recent photographs has made its way up to the Flickr Explore Interestingness page. Unfortunately Flickr Explore algorithm is still a mystery, but it looks like that if you submit to too many groups your picture is more likely to be dropped out, but it will get back in if you receive enough comments/faves.

This photograph pictured Frank Williams one of my photographer mates. I went to his place last weekend to practice and test new techniques. We ended up with an outdoor session trying a three speedlights setup in his residential parking. As the sun goes down, the sky was getting dark and dramatic. Playing with the aperture and the shutter speed, I could control the exposure of the ambiance and the one on Frank separately, this is really great as I can decide whether I want the ambiance darker or brighter when maintaining the correct exposure on my subject.

I would then in post-processing fine tune the colors, contrast and lighting and do some editing such as leaves on the face etc..

So you think good studio photography needs an expensive studio and expensive gears? Think again!

The portrait on the left has been taken in a little cottage up in Snowdonia (Wales). I've had a break there with my wife and her mum. On the day we had planned to go out shooting some portraits for them, it was raining cats and dogs! So we had to go back to the cottage and have some tea and biscuit. But I didn't want to end the day without any picture, so we decided to turn the cottage's living room in a budget home photography studio and use what is available as backdrop. So here I was using the doors, kitchen and white wall and my standard strobist kit.