Thx everyone - interesting replies I love reading them all :)

Thx Marlene!  the Horst site is very inspirational.

Two wonderful portrait photographers with different styles and using the medium in different ways, there is much to learn and be inspired by looking at their photography.

It is the way to go Marlene - practise, practise, practise - those guys were not born being able to take great photographs, and they are only showing you the best, not all the millions of others they took.  You've got the camera to do it   .

I moved into a house formerly occupied by a photographer from one of the large broadsheets that prides itself on it's artistic content. The house had been left just as it was nothing changed or taken, but thats another story. The darkroom was crammed full of prints you would not believe how many.  It took me years to look at them I still probably didn't see them all.

And every one said, 'If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,---
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!'
Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Edward Lear
http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/jumblies.html