For a long time I've had an aversion to portraits in which the subject is looking at the camera. Why? Perhaps because it's become an orthodoxy against which I felt compelled to rebel or perhaps because (to me at least) it conveyed a false sense of "honesty". In all the time I've been posting pictures on various FM threads, I can't recall one in which I'd used flash. But long before I joined FM there was a five year period during which I never took a picture without flash. I recently started to wonder what flash-lit Leica Monochrom pictures might look like so, after some research, I purchased a Nikon SB-30, a tiny flash that has similar enough hot shoe pins that Nikon flash units work on Leica M cameras—not in TTL mode but the SB-30 has an Auto mode that works fine. I took this picture of a friend and very much like the look one gets when the flash is seated directly above the lens, almost eliminating the shadow it throws. I understand that using flash with Leica M cameras is frowned on by some but I think I'll be posting a lot more M with flash photos in the future.