I'm a fan of Jered Gruber
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smashred/sets/72157627484288690/
Love his style. Dramatic lighting, sharp contrast. When the images are color they're generally very striking but not overly saturated.

He sold everything and moved to Austria to be with his girl, then married her. Spent last year traveling Europe with the pro cycling tour and shooting for Castelli clothing. He made a shot for them that they then loaned to the Giro D'Italia for whatever reason, and the Giro used it for a poster. At the route announcement for this years race he was there to shoot for, I dunno, Castelli I guess. All of a sudden he sees his image on screen. And then sees that it's being passed out as posters! The girls giving them out wouldn't give him one because he didn't have appropriate credentials but he finally managed to get a poster, of his own shot. Now he's come back, had to sell his bikes to have money, and finally figuring out what mistakes he made and how to rectify that. Someone even jacked one of his images from flickr and entered it into a contest somewhere and won with it. Rough lessons for sure.

edit-for the copyright lawyers, there was something going on where the Giro didn't necessarily have the rights to the image, Castelli gave them the image without understand what it was to be used for, I don't think they have full rights (to pass on the image) either, but I don't remember the whole story. I learned, as did Jered, to be sure to look after your rights if you pass around images or get hired etc etc. Nobody is getting sued, there's some sort of compensation being worked out, but I think it's more of a "we'll hire you to shoot whatever you want in this years race"

edit 2- also Kristoff Ramon. For similar reasons http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristoframon/sets/72157628475312363/

edit 3-fuckin a look at this, this is the shot that another guy poached and entered into a contest and won with http://in-the-saddle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Cancellara.jpg

edit 4- http://gruberimages.zenfolio.com/p699890271/h9dcbe7c#h3ba2a73d jered's print sales site. did some more reading and found out he's only been shooting since xmas 08. he got a d40x, and has progressed from there to a d90, d300, d700 and now a d3s. and he's 28.

edit 5 - kristoff ram�n knocks my socks off http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristoframon/3651387969/in/set-72157616349828254/