What a great few days of weather we've been having.  I can't remember an Easter break as sunny or as warm as this for such a long time.  In the past week I've eaten from three BBQ's and as always it's massively appealed to the carnivore inside.

I think especially living in Manchester, we like to make the most when we can see the sun through the rain clouds and this brings out the best in people and those around them.  Even St George's day was lovely and sunny although in fairness I didn't really celebrate it very much this year.

Another happy side effect of having good weather is that you get to out and take pictures of people, especially your kids when they're out playing in the sunshine and completely unaware that they're being stalked by you with your camera.

At my mother in laws BBQ yesterday I managed to grab some nice shots of my daughter, but because the light was quite difficult coming through the trees, I'd have given my right arm for my flash or even a simple reflector to try and even off the light a little bit.

Here's hoping that if the weather carries on being nice that I'll be able to grab more shots of the kids playing and jumping about in various parts of the surrounding countryside, it certainly takes a lot of the pressure off by getting your Project365 shot early in the day and I'm quite happy having my shot of the day being of one or both of the kids as ultimately the intention is to bind them together into a large 12" square format book the same as I did in 2009.

Project365 2009 by Neil Currie | Make Your Own Book

My daughter really enjoys being outside in the sun, I remember when my son was the same age he hated crawling about on grass as he didn't enjoy the sensation on his hands, but my daughter is the complete inverse, she really loves it.

Although as every day passes she's slowly getting more and more confident about giving walking a go, she could probably do it now based on how her balance and strength is, it's now just boiling down to having the right incentive and confidence to let go of her support and make a break for it... we'll not know what's hit us when she does it though!

Even when we're inside the house still, the abundance of brighter days means that the opportunity to grab a few more natural light portraits is still quite high and even though my mother in laws front room is very dark and gloomy I managed to grab a half decent snap of my daughter while she was sat on my knee having a rest from clambering round the garden.

Even the NEX5 managed to grab me a fun shot for my photo of the day the other day with the sun streaming through our back patio window whilst my daughter was playing with my son's sunglasses.

I think I need to start being a little more prepared though and taking at least one flash with me when I'm going out with the proper camera, I took my camera gear with me to a friend's BBQ the other day as she wanted a couple of snaps doing of her kids and with just a couple of simple strobes shot through brollies I managed to get some reasonable snaps even if I had to surgically remove one of his legs in photoshop afterwards though.... :)

Now the more observant of you will notice that there's more photographs of my daughter than there is of my son and there's a very good reason for that, mainly that my daughter is only 1 and thus sits relatively still or moves at a speed that I can track... my son on the other hand is 5 and once the sun is out he won't sit still for man nor beast!

Occasionally though my daughter will grab hold of him and they'll both stand still for a few seconds and I try and grab a picture of them, regardless of how bad the light is or how much shade is being cast over their faces as quite frankly I'm just chuffed to be able to actually grab a photograph of them both!

This is a quick shot of him pretending to be a knight with one of the brooms at my mother in laws yesterday, needless to say the broom was soon taken away from him as I would much prefer to just enjoy the sun and the cremated sausages than be calling on my first aid skills...

But don't let me fool you into thinking that my daughter is all angelic, she's a female and so has a devious side... and every now and again you catch her plotting her next move and the look on her face gives it away that you're about to have your hands full...

Today was the FA Cup semi final between Manchester City and Manchester United, which for some reason required a significant portion of Manchester to be dragged down to London to play the match.  There were multiple crashes on the motorway, with cunning engineering works planned on the tube too just to make life that little bit harder for the visiting fans, so the very fact that a significant number of fans still made it down to watch the match was a major achievement.  

We decided that whilst the weather was nice we'd take a run out for a picnic before the match started and on the way to Quarry Bank Mill I took the opportunity to grab my photograph for the day, which I think captures the rivalry between the two Manchester teams pretty well…  

The banter between the two sets of neighbours was brilliant as they were putting up their flags, with the City household putting up some new flags that they'd bought just that morning so that they had as many as the United household, a whole new way of keeping up with the Jones'… 

When we got to Quarry Bank Mill, the weather was excellent and the mill was really very busy with lots families having the same idea as us and making for the Cheshire countryside.  One family were very organised and even took a portable stove with them so they didn't have to eat cold beans with their picnic… Personally I was happy with my sandwiches and nibbles :)

I didn't take my DLSR with me today, instead I took the little NEX5 as that was the main reason for the purchase of NEX, so that I could head off and use it as a scouting camera to capture ideas that I can then head back and take more detailed panoramic shots another day.  There is quite an impressive weir at the country park and I think this could well be worth another return visit with ND filter to try and get it to turn glass like.

We took a walk around the gardens and there were quite a few good opportunities for panoramas and I even managed to get my son to sit still for 5 seconds whilst I grabbed one of him with the map that we were using to plot our route around the gardens so as to avoid  the steps whilst we had the buggy…

The were plenty of flowers starting to emerge and I can see that in a couple of weeks or so the flower beds will be awash with brilliant colour, but I managed to grab a couple of quick shots of some of the flowers whilst I was there with the NEX, but clearly the macro quality isn't going to be as good as the DSLR with a dedicated macro lens on it, but it's not completely hopeless either.

I've come away with a few ideas for future panoramas at Quarry Bank Mill, the key to it will be getting in there when there is some good light as the light was a little flat this time, but at least I've got a few more ideas in my back pocket of somewhere to go next time I'm struggling with my Project365 shot.

One of the problems I can foresee though is that as the plants begin to grow I can see some of the views becoming obstructed with foliage and not being able to repeat them again by the time I make it back to repeat the shots.

That said, by the time that I make it back then the refurbishment of the greenhouse and the house at the top of the gardens may be complete which I think will lead to see some good panoramic opportunities with the main DSLR where I can take photographs with a much wider (up to 360 degree) field of vision.

We'll just have to wait and see what the summer brings, but one thing is for sure, I need to start getting more value from my National Trust membership, so I can see lots more picnics and visits to various National Trust locations with the family, swiftly followed with a repeat visit with the DSLR and panoramic tripod in tow.

I don't think that will be a bad thing though as my wife makes a great picnic and the kids both enjoyed poddling around exploring, well, the bits my daughter was awake for she seemed to enjoy anyway :D

As I start to get more into my Ph.D. and start to focus deeper on to my chosen topic, it is becoming more apparent that studying for my Ph.D. will be a lot more involved than perhaps I first assumed.

Having had over 15 years as an experienced structural engineer designing temporary, inflatable and deployable structures I perhaps naïvely thought that designing a deployable disaster relief shelter would be fairly straightforward once I'd identified the key criteria to respond to.

What I hadn't anticipated though, was that with the vast number of voluntary groups involved in disaster relief and that no common definable standard actually exists that I can adopt, adapt and respond to. One of the key challenges that I'm coming up against, is identifying a single problem that requires solving by the various agencies.  If such a problem existed, then it would allow me to develop a solution to help respond to the multitude of different disaster scenarios that are currently plaguing the communities all over the world, but the key element that I hadn't appreciated is that no disaster is the same, with each bringing its own unique challenge and there isn't a silver bullet that can solve all their woes.

The more information I read, the more I realise that this magical one size fits all solution will never really exist and instead the best that I could hope to achieve would be a useful palette of solutions.

Ultimately, tropical communities have very different needs to polar communities, mountainous communities have very different needs to coastal communities, etc etc... Every type of disaster has its own special nuance and difficulty that is associated with it, with the common denominator within each of the disaster scenarios that I've been researching being that humanitarian relief is the key thing which is needed urgently, the ability to act swiftly and decisively and to provide immediate temporary shelter is a common factor that can help protect and save lives.

This initial phase of disaster relief is very short lived and really is only the first step in allowing these communities to rebuild and recover to a point whereby they can become self-sufficient again. Some misconceptions that I've come across include people feeling that perhaps disaster relief is more commonly something that is associated with developing countries and countries with poor economic growth and a low GDP. But as has been seen in recent history, even modern developed communities such as the United States of America with Hurricane Katrina, the UK with the Boscastle Floods and Japan when faced with massive earthquakes and tsunamis require the input of disaster relief agencies and that nature can be the great leveller of even the most economically sound countries.

The more I'm reading about recent disasters and the way in which they were responded to by the voluntary sector and the governments of the world, the more humble I feel whilst at the same time feeling increasingly grateful for just how easy I have it in comparison.

I'm certainly no longer under any illusions that the topic I've chosen to do a Ph.D. on is incredibly challenging and perhaps I have bitten off more than I can chew, but then, if it was easy it wouldn't be worthwhile.

Hopefully over the coming weeks as the various texts and journals I've ordered start to drop through my letterbox I can start to identify common threads that I can then distil into a set of parameters that I can address. Once my research comes back to a design and response problem, I should be on familiar ground and be able to capitalise on my experience as a chartered structural engineer. But to get to that point will require me adapting and developing new skills to allow me to pragmatically and logically assemble all of the information that at the moment I'm currently being overwhelmed by.

I'm discovering that humanitarian relief really is full of truly wonderful people, who are selfless, talented and have more patience than I ever could hope to muster. Even the smallest of contributions makes the biggest of differences and reading the various blogs at shelter project, shelter centre, shelter box and the British Red Cross, is nothing if not eye opening.

2011 is the European year of the volunteer, but with so many disasters blighting the planet it's very difficult to know which charity you can spare your time for.

Dedicating time to contributing to charity is very difficult, especially when you're trying to balance the busy hectic lifestyle that modern-day living presents you with, but the key as with everything really that is being able to strike a balance and you'd be surprised just how much of a difference to someone giving a little of your time can make... so why not give volunteering a try?

I've been neglecting my blog a little the past few weeks as I've not really been able to make the time to write anything of interest.  Which is a shame as whilst my writing style is pretty poor I find that the more write, the easier I find it to put words and ideas into my PhD thesis, even though the topics are completely unrelated.

I wanted to collate some thoughts on my son's eczema now that we've been assigned to Manchester Children's Hospital with him and I've been unsure of the best way to do it.  I try and regularly take pictures of our kids when we're out and about, but over the past couple of years, I've found myself automatically correcting my son's skin in photographs using Lightroom so that his eczema is less obvious.

This is typically done through a combination of slightly desaturing the redness out of his skin and also using a soft skin brush to smooth out the roughness of his skin.  I've never really challenged myself as why I do this though, I'm not embarrassed at all by his condition and I'm no oil painting myself so I don't mind that his skin isn't "perfect" so I can't really think of why I would correct his skin in photographs.  Perhaps by doing this I'm being disingenuous and by not capturing his skin correctly in family photographs I'll be missing a part of his life out of the records should he be lucky enough to grow out of it.  That said, there's nothing in the least bit pleasant having to bandage up your son's hands at a night time to prevent him scratching his wrists whilst he's asleep so that he doesn't smear blood up his bedroom wall and badly damage his skin anymore.  I was taught to bandage as a First Aider with the British Red Cross, but I never thought I would have been doing it so regularly to my own child so that he wouldn't be able to hurt himself whilst he slept so perhaps I correct the photographs more for my own reasons.

This is one of the photographs that I took of his skin for his appeal to get him into the school that we thought could cope best with his skin, at the time he had a minor infection and his skin was quite poor but in fairness since this point he's been hospitalised with skin infections such as impetigo. This is just a close up of his hands, but imagine this over pretty much every square inch of your body, including even the soles of your feet and you won't be far off what his skin looked liked at this point in time.  He's been treated and swabbed for MRSA several times as little boys being little boys he usually has one of his fingers up his nose which is the MRSA bugs favourite place to hang out and this has been the cause of several of his infections as he then scratches his eczema and spreads the infection into his skin.

Our first visit to the Manchester Children's Hospital resulted in a set of standard cultures being swabbed from his skin which showed that he had another MRSA infection raging on his skin which was one of the key reasons why his skin was so red and angry the past couple of weeks.  The downside of the infections (despite the obvious) is that it makes the skin itchier and makes you want to scratch more.  But people who have quite severe eczema make use of various strengths of steroid creams which slowly thins the skin, meaning that the scratching soon starts to break the skin and cause bleeding and invites yet more infection.

As a result of the positive swab, my son was subjected to a two week course of very potent antibiotics, with all of the bed linen in the house needing to be washed everyday on a hot wash and all of us to have a nasal cream applied twice a day to purge the MRSA bug from the house (including the baby).  After two weeks my son's skin was looking almost normal and we were very pleased, but just this evening we noticed that there are a few spots appearing on his arms again... I hope it's not another infection, but because his dermis is so badly damaged he is unfortunately very susceptible to infections and it's going to be quite likely.

We've found that there are several charities and organisations out there that are very well informed and supportive for people with eczema and they've been a real emotional crutch at times when we've started to despair a little with some of the service we've had with the NHS.  The likes of Eczema Support and the Skin Campaign on Twitter have been a real help, but only time will tell how things work out with the eczema, I'm just hoping that my daughter doesn't have the same condition.

I still need to decide whether to tame his skin down or not in photographs though, I'm still divided if I should or shouldn't and I'm still not really sure why I do it...

Every now and again I get asked to do a wedding or a portrait shoot or something similar and I normally turn them down as I'm not particularly confident in taking pictures for other people.  I'm quite happy taking pictures for me as I know what I like and how I see the image, but taking them to please another pair of eyes is a different matter.

A few weeks ago I was asked by a lady that my wife knows if I would take a photograph of her dog as it's her best friend since her husband passed away and she wants a picture to put on the wall.  The picture above isn't the picture she wanted, but it was my favourite from the few that I took whilst I was at her house and I really like it.

This is the sort of pose that I think she was after where you can see the whole of the dog and I hope the lady is pleased with it and it looks well on her wall.  I took a few more shots, but I struggled to get Holly to sit still for very long as she was quite interested in the camera and she likes a good fussing.

I'll try and get a few of the images over to her this week if I can so she can pick which ones she wants printing off, but I'm hoping that she'll be pleased with them.

It's been interesting though listening to someone describe how they want something portraying, it's almost like understanding how they see the world and what they perceive as being a good photograph through their description and direction. 

I think I need to sit back a little and consider what I like about photography a little more over the next few months too so that I can articulate it and describe to other people how I want certain things presenting, I always have a clear idea what I want the picture to look like before I press the shutter, but I never break it down to its simplest component. 

Perhaps if I can dissect why I want that particular composition and depth of field on an image then it'll help me create a style and a focus to my photography that I've been lacking for the past few years.... who knows, perhaps I'll start to see my photography start to improve again.

Well after a dull and uneventful morning waiting for the Virgin guy to come and fix my broadband, which incidentally all he did was phone the tech support guys and got them to run diagnostics... which in fairness I'm pretty sure I could have done had I made it past the den of ineptitude that is their call centre and managed to talk to an adult capable of self thought, my wife took the kids out and left me with some free time so I decided to take a run up to Lyme Park to try out my ND grad filters.

I've not managed to make it out with the camera for a day just taking pictures for a good few months unfortunately as I always seem to be trying to catch up on more important things at the weekends, so it felt nice just to be able head out with the camera and poddle about taking a few photographs.

I've a few different LEE Neutral Density grad filters, which are basically sunglasses for your camera lens set at different strengths.  The idea is that you can use them to cover a bright part in your image, to prevent it over exposing compared to the duller parts of the image.  This is particularly useful if you like taking pictures of anything including a sky and landscape photographers will use these types of filters a lot.  They come in a wide variety of strengths or darknesses.  A 0.3ND filter will reduce the brightness by one stop, with a 0.6ND filter reducing it by two stops and unsurprisingly a 0.9ND filter reducing the brightness by 3 stops.  I have a full set of soft edge filters, which means that the transition from no filtering to full filtering happens over a larger area, whereas hard edged filters have a short transition and so are more useful for scenes with nice flat transitions, like the sea for example.

Despite having had the filters for quite a while, this is the first time that I've really had chance to use them and even though I'd say that I'm pretty confident on the theory of exposure and balancing exposures, I have to confess to struggling getting the filters lined up fully when I was using them.

I think having read up more on filters, this may be in part to the fact that I was using soft graduated filters which afford you a little more flexibility on where you put the filters, but this is made worse on cropped sensor cameras where they give the appearance of being even softer.  I think next time I go out I'll try the process again but try using the depth of field button to see if this makes it easier to spot where the edge of the grad filter goes.  Generally though I'm quite pleased with the way that the filters worked and I'm sure with my practice I'll be able to get more consistent and encouraging results.

One of the other filters that I wanted to try out was the big stopper neutral density filter that I bought which is basically colour neutral welding glass.  This filter is so dark that the autofocus cannot work and the camera is unable to work out exposure times for you and consequently you have to use the nifty little cribsheet that comes with the filter to calculate how long the shutter needs to stay open.  The beauty of these filters is that they can make things that move appear very smooth and flowing like skies, the sea and water...  This is the reason the sky appears smeared and smooth in the photograph above.

Another good use for the 10 stop ND filter is to turn water smooth and glassy by taking a photograph over a long period of time, the photograph above shows the water flowing over this tiny weir for 30 seconds which is why it looks nice and smooth.  Had I been smart enough to remember my cable release then I could have gone for longer times, but it wasn't to be today unfortunately, but even without the extreme exposure times you can see the effect that the filter is having on the water.

This is another example of a small weir in the gardens of Lyme Park that I was able to set up another 30 second exposure shot on to convert the water into a smooth glassy effect.  The key I've found is to focus and to take an exposure reading with no filter in place, then place the filter in the holder, adjust the shutter speed and then you're good to take the picture.  A couple of times I forgot to lock the focus in place when I took the readings and had to slide the filters out again to get a reading.

I also made a point of taking my new NEX5 on the walk with me as I'm still testing out how it behaves and just how hard I can push it to shoot panorama images and I think I'm slowly working out little tricks to help it stitch images better.  It seemed to handle this macro panorama that I took to show some of the beautiful spring Narcissus that are in flower in the grounds of the hall.

It also seemed to handle the panoramas around the cage quite well, despite the obvious difference in brightness across the sky and the foreground, with no obvious stitching errors that I could spot either.

Having been to Lyme Park quite a few times over the years, I enjoyed having a pootle around a familiar location with my new toys, just experimenting what would happen if I tried different angles and settings.  I think once the good weather comes then hopefully I'll be able to get out with the camera a little more and my son can come along with me for the walk too.

Today has been a very fun day at work as I've been messing about in the laboratory just breaking stuff so that I can get used to how the equipment works for next Thursday when I will be running the laboratory for the plastic analysis structural engineering module.

I've really enjoyed just tinkering about with the staff and the technicians are really helpful and full of brilliant ideas on how to improve the equipment so that the test results will be more reliable, with suggestions like replacing the chains with Kevlar rope that they've got left over.

On the way back to the car this evening I was treated to the most beautiful sky and I was lucky enough to grab a quick photograph as I was putting my bags back in the boot.

The sky was brilliant red and literally on fire and it was a fantastic scene so I decided to give the panosweep function on my new camera a whirl to see how it would fair and the end result isn't too bad considering it was quite a difficult scene to manage the exposure on and stitch as I shot.

Whilst I was making my way back to the car I also decided to try out the panosweep function on a few more buildings to get an idea of what the limitations of the system would be and I've learned some useful things about how the software works.

Firstly it deals with parallax errors pretty badly and creates a serrated edge along straight lines where it tries to stitch the edges together.  This can be seen best in the image below which is the corridor that I work on where the bottom of the poster on the right hand side of the image has a strange serrated effect happening to it.

This is to be expected to be fair and is a function of the focal length and parallax errors this brings.

I decided to run another test while I was walking back and thought I would try a panorama of the library building as this seemed like a fair test but another interesting element came up in that panoramas introduce an element of curvature to straight lines when they're being shot because of the different distances to the camera as you shoot the sweep.  Hugin usually does a pretty good job of smoothing out these curves to leave you with a decent image, but because the panosweep stitches as it shoots, it really struggled with this curved edge of the building and you can see again a serrated edge along the top of the brown section of the cladding.

Finally I decided to give one last try to the students union building as I was walking past and this time because I wasn't shooting the building square on, but instead coming at it from an angle the effects of the curvature are much less pronounced and similarly the serrated effect is not present at all.

I'm starting to understand the limitations of the panorama function in my new camera and I don't regret my purchase as I'll be using the panosweep function in the SONY NEX 5 as a scouting camera before going back with my full panorama head and DSLR plus ND grads to shoot the scenes properly.

Well I've had two whole weeks in my new job and it's a real culture shock to say the least, but in a completely good way.  There are so many things that are going to take some time to get used to as they're just so very different to what I've been used to for the past 15 years.

I've always worked in an office which is open plan, so to suddenly have an office of my own with nobody to just turn around to and ask a question or bounce an idea of is quite alien.  That said it's also quite a positive thing when you want to put your thinking cap on without any distractions.  There are lots of positive things that I've found as well, the administration staff are super helpful, whether this is because they know I'm totally new to this world or if it's just how they treat everyone I don't know, but either way it's making my transition a lot easier.

I've bumped into quite a few of the students that I taught on a part time basis last year as well and they seem quite positive about my coming onboard full time, which is really encouraging for me, especially as I will be running a series of labs experiments with them over the coming month on plastic analysis methods.  I'm quite looking forward to working in the labs, the University of Salford seem to make the labs a strong part of the students course which I think is a really important part of their learning experience.  Especially seeing as structural engineers labs generally means testing things to failure (or sometimes destruction) which is always good fun and appeals to the inner child.  I find myself being fascinated by the strange little details that I'm not used to seeing in institutional buildings, with everything sign posted, student design posters adorning the walls and I'm thinking that quite a few of these will become my Project365 shots over the coming months.  One thing I'm dead set on getting a picture of is the acoustics lab, for no other reason that they have oscilloscopes kitted out on every work bench and it'll make the ultimate nerdy photograph for the da.

One of the best things about my new job is the enormous library that is across the road from my office, combined with the fact that I get plenty of thinking time to read at the moment as I don't actually start teaching until October.  I've been quite self indulgent this week, reading through various texts and journals on topics that I've always wanted to know about but never quite found the time to read through, or simply refreshing myself on topics that I've not touched for a decade and a half, but that I know I'll be called upon to teach again.

Since my last entry to my blog, I've been busy with the British Red Cross running annual re-qualifications for our volunteers with the other trainers, which has been quite funny and eye opening watching the casualty union guys prepare their wounds before each session. 

They really help make the scenarios we set feel so much more real and whilst they can be a little daunting the first time you see them, it does genuinely help prepare you for when you're faced with the real thing.

I'm hoping that next week will see the end of the annual re-qualifications and we can then move onto a few more topics that are of general interest and that will help broaden the skill set that our volunteers have. 

My son has spent most of the week dressed up as one form of super hero or another, which whilst probably isn't ideal for his eczema as the outfits are made from manmade materials like polyester, does help to keep him clothed as he normally strips off as soon as he gets in from school.

He's made a point of eating his dinner as Batman this week which made for one of my weekly photographs for my Project365 blog... complete with cheesy (sandwich) smile

He also decided to pull a muscle pose for me whilst I was trying to take my daughters monthly portrait with her teddy bear.

I think this photograph is a very strong contender for the first photograph I'll show his first girlfriend he brings home or to put in the local paper when he turns 18!  It's almost the perfect child tribute to the "only fools and horses" Christmas special that came out a few years ago.

One thing that's really frightened both my wife and I this week is that suddenly our daughter is quite happy whizzing around with her baby walker and walking along various bits of furniture, she's even had a bash at walking along using the dog for stability which he wasn't particularly impressed about, but he's good natured and just takes himself off to a quiet corner somewhere.

My project365 is ticking along quite nicely now, I'm still highly disorganised when it comes to taking my photograph for the day, but I've not struggled massively so far to take a photograph that I'm reasonably comfortable with. 

One thing I really need to do though is to head out with the camera into them thar hills and get some mileage out of the graduated neutral density filters that I bought ages ago.  I've come across a great group on Flickr where photographers are encouraged to share their filter combinations and this has been a real source of inspiration for me and I intend on trying to plan a couple of walks over the coming month, especially as the nights are getting lighter.

I've also decided that it might be a good idea to start buying my wife more flowers, as they are a great resource when you're on a Project365 and you remember at the eleventh hour that you've still got to take a picture. This may sounds highly unromantic as motivation for buying your wife flowers, but if I turned up with flowers with no specific reason like me wanting to take photographs of them, then I'd be spending the whole night being subjected to the Spanish inquisition, demanding what I've done! ;)

I've really enjoyed reading through my b3ta newsletter today, some parts of it are just plain wrong but other bits are just pure genius, including this link where people are encouraged to re-create photographs from their childhood now that they are adults.  Some of the images are hilarious to say the least.

Today has been a pretty relaxed day for my Project365 as my brother in law asked me if I would sort out some images for him for his new website as he's really getting into his singing and wants an online presence.  With him having quite a firm idea of the sorts of shots that he wanted to include within the draft website design, made my life even easier and so I went round to his house today with my camera and a couple of strobes.

My photograph for the day is not one that he asked for, but I've always been fascinated with the mesh around the tops of microphones and how they are structures, there's a cool kind of geometrical pattern going on there that appeals to the geometry geek inside me.  It's probably one of the reasons I enjoy gridshell structures and similar structural forms.

The set up that I used for the shots, was pretty simple, with all of the black background shots simply using a black fleece that I bought specifically for portraits from IKEA clipped to the curtains, then twin strobes set at 1/8 power and 24mm fired through umbrellas. 

The even light from the two strobes lets me position them equally either side of the camera and doesn't create too much of a contrast across the face and it's a look that I quite like within my portraits.  It also makes the processing relatively straightforward within Light Room with just a little bit of dodging and burning to make the blacks pure black around the edges for easy embedment into website designs and the tones kept in the skin and black objects can still be retained if you're careful although at the resolutions that are shown here, it's hard to make out the subtle shades and tones around the edge of the suit.

As I only own two strobes, I have to be a little bit more inventive when shooting against a white background as the ideal setup for this kind of shot is to use three lights, two for the person and one placed behind them to bleach out the pure white background. 

I choose to use one of my strobes behind the subject and usually have it set to full power and maximum throw to illuminate the background, sometimes if I remember I'll tie a piece of cardboard on to it to make a "gobbo" so that all of the light gets thrown onto the background.  The second strobe I fire through an umbrella positioned to the right hand side of the camera and placed high but pointing down on the subject, it's placed so that my camera lens is tight under the corner of the umbrella when I'm shooting.  It's not ideal, but I generally get the shot I had in mind and it helps keep the post processing down in Lightroom.

Sometimes placing the light here can create problems with people wearing glasses, but I've found if the light is at the top of my 6 foot lighting stands (probably 7 foot all in with the bracket) then any reflections are angled downwards so I don't get reflections in the lenses, but still get a decent catchlight in the eyes.

I'm quite pleased with the images that I've managed to get, the pure black and white backgrounds should work well with the website design draft that I've seen and also the beauty of being asked to take a certain type of photograph is that I don't have to think at all about what my picture for the day will be as it's been dictated to me which is brilliant when I start a new job tomorrow and have a million and one things to do before I head to my bed.

I hope someone finds this post useful, although had I thought about it, I could have grabbed a few setup shots to illustrate the point a wee bit better...