TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘advide to porn hopefuls’ Category

If you make porn these days, you really need a system for storing and backing up your photos and video files, even if you just run “amateur” sites with homemade content. We are going through growing pains ourselves, so I’m taking this opportunity to outline some storage suggestions for my fellow webwhores:

*Maintain copies of all of your raw, unedited, full-size photos IN ADDITION to duplicates that you have edited and resized (but NOT optimized/reduced in quality for the web or stamped with a domain name – those versions will be saved with your site). And have backups of all that (basically four copies of each photo).

*KEEP LOCAL COPIES OF YOUR ENTIRE WEBSITE(S), BLOGS, ETC. ON HARD DRIVE. Yes, your hosting company should have backups, but don’t rely on that. Everything you upload to your blog, website, etc. should also be saved offline with you on your machine or wherever. If you create content online (using wordpress, google docs, etc.) download backups to your hard drive. Guess what this means? You now should have at least six copies of each good photo you’ve taken and published.

*Shoot video on tape NOT digital or cd/dvd. Keep your original tapes safe. Like, IN a firesafe. Capture them as AVI’s and keep those, too (we burn ours to dvd).

*Keep your old emails and make backups of them. You are/should be a business-person and keep copies of all of your communications with customers, colleagues, service people, etc.

*Develop a backup schedule and log for recording each of your backups, what you backed up, where you put it, etc.

*Remember that anything you burn to dvd or cd will degrade with time. Don’t have your only copy of data stored on this type of media. Seriously, google it. Also, remember that hard drives fail. It does no good to make a backup copy of your email, for example, and save that backup on the same exact drive as the originals.

*Rent a safe deposit box to store your backups, your will (including what you want to be done with your website(s) and content when you die), and a small flash drive or something like that with backups of your will and all the login information needed to take carry out your wishes plus software licenses, etc. You might consider making private, clandestine arrangements to have this maintained out of the country if you live in a fucked up nation such as the United States of America where the feds can bust down your door and seize everything because you are guilty of making OBSCENITY. If you want to know what that would feel like, you should watch The Notorious Bettie Page for a dramatic recreation of purging your art-porn to try to save yourself from prison. And then recognize it happens still today. The feds ARE searching and seizing, and indie webwhores ARE madly deleting and trashing their archived homemade porn because someone called Child Protective Services or the local police complaining that someone in the neighborhood is having sex AND TAKING PICTURES OF IT AND SELLING THOSE PICTURES!!

Basically you should get twice as much storage as you need to house all of your most precious data once for your safe deposit box, then switch them out; let’s pretend you have 600 GB of photos you want to keep safe so ideally you’d buy TWO one terrabyte hard drives for your backups. Make your first backup and put it in your safe deposit box. In three months make another backup on your second 1TB backup drive with all your old and NEW pictures you’ve taken since then, take it to the bank (or send it to whoever) to replace the backup that’s already there, and bring that one home to use next quarter.

*Insurance. Insurance is tricky because if you’re working online from home and renting, but need to protect your BUSINESS assets (that are in a house that you rent where you’re not supposed to be operating a business). . . well. Yeah. TRICKY. Anyway, insurance money could never totally compensate you for losing photos/videos/original work, so while it’s good to have insurance to replace your cameras, computers, etc. if there was a fire or break-in, money can’t buy back the DATA on your computer so back that shit up.

Is that expensive and time consuming all to maintain archives you will never need if all goes well? Yes, it is. But this is your business and you don’t want to lose all of the work you’ve done, especially if you care about your work and are proud of it. If you don’t have the money, do the best you can, and save up so you can afford the security of having your work backed up and kept safe.

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Do I take my own advice in all of these matters? No, not yet, but I know that I should. Part of the problem is that I’m extremely reluctant to spend money on external hard drives; when you read the reviews it’s hard not to notice that HALF OF THEM ARE NEGATIVE. They fail, they are poorly designed, they’re loud, they overheat, THEY FAIL, etc.

This has some promise though: the Thermaltake Hard Drive Dock. Instead of buying a bunch of external drives (with their funky, clunky, fucked up designs and tendency to fail), installing a bunch of internal drives (which you don’t have infinite amounts of space to house) or setting up a server, you can hot swap naked hard drives which is cheaper, saves space, saves time and is really convenient for maintaining backups especially if you are putting them in a safe or if you don’t want to buy drives with lots of storage just because you feel like you NEED to since you only have so much room in your case. I haven’t bought one yet, but it’s a huge relief just to know it exists. There are loads of other benefits, like being able to access laptop-sized hard drives (I have one of those packed away with stuff I’d like to get at) and being able to switch out hard drives almost as casually as if they were game cartridges.

Yes, I enjoyed watching the dorky little geek porn video.

Any webwhores with further suggestions or people with special insight on this stuff, feel free to comment; I would love to read more advice from people who take porn and blog backups seriously.

Here’s a great post from Mia:

WHY I DID PORN, AND WHY I’M GLAD I DON’T ANYMORE

And no, I don’t think it’s great JUST because I’m profiled in such a warm, fuzzy way in it; it’s great because she tells you about a lot of the behind-the-scenes unsexy stuff that get in the way of indie porn being fun. Billing stuff, legal stuff, branding stuff, asshole stuff, relationship stuff, gender stuff, multi-tasking stuff, etc.

Here’s a little insight into part of our work for those of you interested in how we get our photos from the camera to our porn site members and blogs:

Every time I post a tweet letting members/voyeurs know they’re watching me at the computer “editing pics”, I wonder if people are thinking, “what does that entail, anyway?” So here’s the process (Delia does hers a little differently than I do, so I’m just saying what I do):

1) We transfer the image files from our camera to a computer where we store all of our full size, unedited image files. We use a usb cable rather than removing the card every time and using a card reader, which seems to be the more popular way that most people do it. Not us, though. I’ve always used the cable because a) it came with our cameras, but card readers did not, and b) I prefer to avoid handling our memory cards that often; I think it’s better not to touch them and expose them to dust, etc. so the only time we remove our memory cards is if we’re shooting away from home, fill up a card, and need to put in a new card to take pictures. Estimated time: 5-30 minutes depending on how many pics we took (usually 75-200 per set, and we often shoot multiple sets on one card); it definitely takes longer with our new camera since each pic is 4288×2848 pixels and around five to nine megabytes.

2) At this point we often take a look through the pictures to assess how we did and talk about why the look good or don’t. You’ll see us doing this with our heads tilting back and forth since pics we took as portraits are laying on their sides in landscape. Estimated time: varies between 2 and 30 minutes

3) We make COPIES of the original files and put them on our working machines. Estimated time: virtually none as long as we aren’t having annoying network problems

4) I go through the photos and delete duplicates, ugly pics, pics with bad lighting, etc. Because our sites are homemade with an amateur appeal, I leave in a lot of “bad” pics because even the blurry ones and ones I think are unflattering usually have some redeeming quality (ex. my face looks bad, but my butt looks great, or the light is not technically excellent and the picture’s not print-ready, but it still evokes a mood and helps tie the images together so there’s some movement from one image to the next). Sometimes I do leave in poses that are nearly identical; the standards for porn sites are very different from artistic photography sites because we aren’t trying to exhibit our very best PHOTOGRAPHY, we’re trying to give people pictures to arouse them AND meet the quantity expectations porn review sites look for.

Very subtle differences in two like photos can make one jack-worthy to one person while the other is not. Let’s say there’s an image where I have an enticing expression on my face, but my feet are cut out of the frame. Then there’s another nearly identical picture where I my double chin is highlighted, but my feet are all there and looking great. One guy who loves feet will be happy I included the ugly-face, feet-included pic, while another who doesn’t care about feet will only be interested in my come-hither look in the other photo. That’s why I leave in a lot of less-than-perfect and repetitious images. Still, I sometimes take a lot of time deciding whether or not to keep or toss pictures. Estimated time: 5-20 minutes

5) I open three photos at a time in Photoshop. I use a hotkey I’ve set up to rotate the image (if necessary) and another hotkey to resize the photo to my specifications. I look at each image more closely than before, adjusting levels to brighten them up if necessary, add more contrast, and adjust the color balance as needed; because we don’t use a flash or tons of lights and we often rely on natural light or a combination, there’s often a lot of variation in our photos even when we’ve taken all of them in one location. We might move in and out of different colors and levels of light so it does NOT work to apply a process on a whole batch of photos, I have to look at and edit each image individually.

I also use the bandaid tool to cover up zits or ingrown hairs sometimes. Sometimes I crop and size pictures more creatively if I need more close-ups or really need to get rid of some distraction in the picture to salvage something good about it. Very rarely I will apply filters (soft blur, etc.) to images or just fuck around seeing what those look like without committing to them. We *do not* change color photos into black and white using Photoshop, Well, hardly ever. Almost all of the black and white pictures on our sites were SHOT in black and white.

6) I save each picture WITHOUT optimizing them (making the file size smaller for web suitability) because I want to keep a copies of high quality edited versions of each photo since one picture might be used in a number of places in a number of ways. Sometimes I save duplicates of images I especially like in a “promo” folder at a different size with a border added that I use for posting in our blogs. I have a promo folder inside each edited gallery folder. Estimated time for steps five and six: 30-120 minutes

7) I go through the pictures again to see if there are more I want to delete.

Sometimes I rename files so that they will be presented in an order that makes better sense (move pictures we took in the middle to the beginning, etc.). Estimated time for steps seven and eight: 0-10 minutes

After all of that, I build the gallery which is another process entirely.

ESTIMATED TOTAL TIME SPENT ON THIS PROCESS FOR EACH GALLERY: 45 minutes to three and a half hours

I enjoy this process quite a bit (especially if I look halfway decent in the pictures) and appreciate taking the time to really SEE what were making. It’s pleasurable, meditative, hot and it makes me feel productive. I also think it’s important we do this work (and do it ourselves) because it teaches us what does and doesn’t work with posing, lighting, camera settings, framing, etc.

Want to know more behind-the-scenes info regarding our pics? Check out this entry on how much one shoot cost: ARE OUR SHOOTS WORTH IT?

People, especially women, often write to me asking how they can run a site like mine, etc. Answering those questions is always on my back burner; in the meantime, here’s one woman’s advice.

I love how her guide makes it clear in a raw, funny way that the path most people take to become pornographers is very personal; you can’t mapquest what is/should be a personal journey directed by individual experience (and some of those experiences aren’t ones you’d choose or that you can get from reading a tutorial). Most of us who wound up in the sex industry didn’t stop to get advice on anything except specific technicalities; we propelled ourselves into it by compulsion, circumstance, therapeutic need, entrepreneurial vision, and because it’s the perfect creative medium for our diverse skills and talents.

I believe all indie pornographers and webwhores who’ve had lasting power and found satisfaction and long-term profit from it never stopped to ask anyone in a general way HOW to do it. You recognize it’s for you, you do it, and ask questions later.

One of my favorite pieces of advice is her “find god” directive. It’s not about religion or belief in “GOD” necessarily, she’s describing something anyone who commits to an extraordinary life has to believe: that you’re capable of more and that you’re meant for what you choose. You don’t have to explain how magic happens or intellectualize it, you just suspend disbelief and experience it. Having some kind of a belief system, whether it’s delusional or not, that affirms your own goodness and the rightness of what you do is especially important, I think, when you’re doing work that is NOT publicly affirmed by society.