Self portraits

I have been following vlogs of some professional portrait photographrs for some time now and I am really amazed at the different techniques they use and the scope of individuality there is in shooting a portrait.
Guys, check out dom bower vlogs on youtube.
However, for an awesome portrait an external flash is absolutely necessary as the worst place for a flash is on top of the camera where the default one is put. But, as I started looking for flashes(or speedlights for Nikon), I came to know that they are insanely expensive.(INR 35K for one and I need 3 of them at least :( ).

Before I spend that kinda money on flashes and stuff, I thought I will first try out some of my ideas and see if they are possible. So, with a Nokia N73 for flash, and my D60 on a tripod I started clicking a series of self portraits. The following snaps were the one which came out pretty good considering the light source and considering that the shutter was a whopping 1 sec(to sync with the cell flash). Please leave comments on what you think.. :)

droplets...

This happened just on a whim of mine... I had just poured milk from the milk bag and was watching the last drops dropping, I got an idea. That is to try and capture the drop as it strikes the surface...
So I set up my tripod, mounted my 50mm reverse(for macro) and sat with a dropper in one hand and the camera remote in another.. After about a zillion tries I got the following two shots which had some action.
Next step is to capture a drop dropping on a surface. The wall of the drop as it splashes is what I want to capture. Meanwhile, the following snaps are all there are.

Photoshop..

For the past few weeks, Ive been busy looking at the snaps ive taken last year and trying to "Photoshop" them. Initially, I always thought of Photoshop as something to create "special" effects in your pictures, or you know trying to make movie poster like images with blending image etc.

I also thought that using photoshop to enhance or edit your snaps so that you shortcomings as a photographer are not highlighed is like cheating he people who admire your snaps. As in if photoshop is all you need for good snaps, then everyone would be a good photographer. So, I used photoshop to just convert my RAW files to jpeg and thats it. No editing whatsoever.

Recently, I realised that I can use photoshop for some "artistic" effects. I have seen grayscale images with maybe a rose in color and that effect is not real. I mean the viewer knows its not real and still it looks so appealing.I realised that photoshop can be used to enhance your images, to create a form of art which is much more than photography.So with this thought and photoshop in hand I dived into the loads of RAW images I had and have the following results.

I still beleive in the picture being original, so if you see motion blur in my pics, its not photoshop blur, its an actual motion blur :)