I've been shooting for about four months now. My real interest is location fashion - mostly with natural light for now - but it's been a miserable winter in the UK and a lot of the time the brave model's I've worked with have had to wrap themselves to survive, so I've tended to concentrate on head shots and learning to use natural light for these and then to retouch skin as unobtrusively as I can. I've had... five(?) shoots to work on these problems and I think there are images in my port from all of them. The only flash shot is the model in the open yellow check shirt.

I'm trying to make a style out of shooting with minimum gear on location - I want to develop a style that lets me shoot in normal street scenes. I'm using carefully chosen positions with open shade for soft light and then post processing to fix any problems resulting from the lack of fill-in flash and reflectors. And I'm experimenting with hard light, where the key so far seems to be finding locations with good "natural" reflectors for fill (and post processing like crazy.)

I'm looking for comments on how well I'm doing with this and how I can do better before standing back and shooting interestingly dressed whole people. Later on I'll add flash and a reflector back in as needed, but I want to force myself to do as much as possible without them first.

(Photo-tech geek alert: some of these images were taken with a Sigma Foveon sensor and others with a Fuji X-Trans, and two sensors can *not* behave more differently with human skin - the Foveon is a retouching nightmare, while the Fuji seems to have a retouching demon hidden in the sensor.)

I don't know about fashion shoots, but you definitely know how to take interesting portraits. There are two photographers on the net, Brendon Stanton (Humans of NY) and The Sartorialist, who do street portraits. The Sartorialist is into fashion. Looks like all they carry is a DSLR with an 85mm lens. Keep up the good work!

I think the planets are in a phase. I had 4 shoots planned this week, not one worked out - weather, wrong phone numbers wrong dates, no replies. That's just getting a model to stand there!

I am stunned to find that I have a fan here, if in fact that is true. I am not as tall as David Letterman but I do have a weight problem. It doesn't fluctuate. It also doesn't go down. When meeting a model, I usually carry a small hairbrush, just in case. One of these days, I'll see a model again. Who knows?

Did you remove your online catalogue? Many good shots there.

It's May. I hear the weather over there clears up once in a while. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this side of the pond.

All the best and keep shooting!