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Archive for the ‘beauty standards’ Category

I wish I’d have appreciated my 18-year old body and taken care of it when it was close to perfectible.

That’s what I was ABOUT to tweet, until I realized it’s a lie. I *did* appreciate my eighteen year old body. I’d been appreciating my maturing body for years in front of the mirror, naked. Or in this one awesome pair of yellow string bikini panties, very eighties style, with the tiny triangle and the extreme V sitting up high on the hips. I remember the brand was “Eve” and I got them at Lamont’s. I danced around in those and fondled myself . . . admired myself from all angles.

When I finally got my own room at eighteen I took it to a whole other level. With privacy, I could light candles and make a whole elaborate masturbation ritual out of it. I’d put music on the stereo I bought myself, one component at a time from Crutchfield, and stand in front of my white mirrored dresser (an antique handed down to me from my mom) rifling through my panty drawer and meager selection of “sexy” stuff.

I almost always wound up pulling on a hot little ivory Christian Dior thong: lace in the back and satin in front with, again, a sweet dip down in the front punctuated with a tiny circle of faux-pearls. Then I’d have to choose between my two pairs of elbow-length gloves: white satin or white lace. You have no idea how much gloves turn me on. It’s not so much the wearing them (though I do like that, too), but looking at them on someone else.

So I would look at myself in the mirror but from a vast distance. I so wanted my gloved hands to be like other teenaged girls’ gloved hands: hot, with the satin stretched TIGHT and their soft, fleshy girl hands emanating sweaty uncomfortable heat. The other girls didn’t like to wear gloves, but FUCK I *loved* them and I wanted to be able to squeeze their hands and never let them go and stroke up and down their arms with my own satin gloves, or bare-handed, and have them squeeze me ALL OVER. Hot, fat, filled-out shiny satin arms and fingers over rustling dresses.

Anyway, my hands never looked that sexy in gloves — they looked thin and insubstantial like flat playing cards. But my arms looked delicious with the satin pushed down just enough to make wrinkles. In addition to being extremely turned on by gloves, I’m also extremely turned on by tight, wrinkled fabrics on long, slender girl arms or legs. Or fat girl arms or legs. WHATEVER. Point is, I still got very, very excited putting on my gloves and admiring myself in the candlelight.

I often switched back and forth between the two pairs of gloves. The lace ones reminded me of the Billy Idol White Wedding video and THAT brought to mind long-festering taboo fantasies of someone who looked (to me) just like him, but better . . . and worse. Rebel Yell, Eyes Without a Face, Sweet Sixteen, White Wedding, Dancing with Myself . . . yeah. Billy Idol fetish planted when I was way too little and he was way too recognizable for me to think it was silly or to resist it or analyze it.

Not that I thought about him when I masturbated. Not very much anyway. I mean, it would only have taken a few seconds of thought allowed to stray in that direction. What I would do, though, in the buildup, is I would arrange the candles in such a way that my shadow was projected on the wall. I’d inflate my chest to highlight a profile of my breast, then I’d have my hand come at it from an unnatural direction, like my boob belonged to someone else. I’d reach in and trace the silhouette of my breast. I’d pull away and reach back to touch and fondle it, over and over again, spying on this other person’s boob being teased and stroked. It’s always been WATCHING my breasts being touched that really initially arouses me. Without watching the hands on my boobs, the sensation of having my breasts touched is actually pretty boring a lot of the time.

I’d mount the corner of my mattress then, again with the candles arranged so I could spy on my shadow, and hump the edge of my bed until I came, over and over again. Sometimes I could just drag myself against the flat of my mattress and that would work, too. I’d watch the shadow of my boob hovering there, and dip myself down to make my nipple touch the mattress. It wasn’t part of the position that made me come, but the sight of that woman’s body touching and being touched made me very excited.

At that age I did feel lonely and wish I could do some of these things with a guy (which kind of doesn’t even make sense when I think about it). More than that, though, I felt a sense of loss that I was young and the only person who was admiring my body. I did feel very strongly that it should be worshipped and felt like the time to do that, the ripe teenaged time, would be over before anyone did.

Many times I felt like someone was standing outside spying on me. I even felt like I could hear them. But I tried to tell myself I was being paranoid and not to worry about it, because every time I tried to catch them, there was no one there.

As it turned out, of course there WAS someone there. Many different people at different times. Everyone from the guy I lost my virginity to, to the village idiot, to the felon who supplied the highest cop with pot (at least, that’s what we figured when we did eventually catch him outside my window and the cop said it was no big deal — he was just standing on cinder blocks he’d stacked up to peer through my blinds “to get high”). It was horribly embarrassing to think about, so I tried not to because there was nothing I could do about it. They’d already seen everything (even more than the masturbating) and knew all of my secrets. Except for the Billy Idol guy that was only in my head. I mean, they knew him too, but not that I thought about him that way.

*****

If I could go back I would nail up a billion blankets over those crappy fucking blinds. I would find a way to make it fair, to make myself paid and worshiped. For me to be the one in control. I know that because of the other things they saw me do, I was like a weird freak show to them, but they were total fucking freaks too and somehow that means I have a weird bond with them for the rest of my life.

I can still remember one of them, the one I had sex with, laughing at me when I was humping his leg without me knowing why he was laughing except that I guessed I was doing everything wrong, even though that was what was going to make me come. It wasn’t until later that I realized he was one of them and all the things he saw. It makes no sense how humiliated I still feel remembering him mocking me when I know now what a dangerously fucked-up individual he was/is. He had such an unfair advantage over me, but he probably thought the same thing of me just by default since he couldn’t last more than twelve pumps. Which of course I actually enjoyed, or WOULD HAVE enjoyed if he’d have gone again. But he never did. Of course, he DID go down on me, but I totally didn’t get that — it was such a foreign sensation that I’d never planned for even though I’d masturbated so often to images of other women’s pussies being licked. I don’t think I understood that I was more interested in going down on chicks than having anyone go down on me.

When I was young, the only true pleasure I experienced on my own terms was by myself. I guess I wish I would have accepted that, made myself more powerful (both physically and . . . spiritually?), and found the confidence and the people to negotiate those terms for myself. I know it’s shallow, but now that I’m older and I can see my body starting to disintegrate and loosen into loose flesh and little balls of fat and poison, I wish I would have ran as fast as I could for miles and taken dance classes and learned how to stretch and spent many many MORE hours in front of not just one mirror, but a fucking roomful of mirrors.

I wish I’d have known about getting paid to stomp on men. I wish I’d have had sex with women sooner. Like that hot Belgian pharmacist with the leather skirt I worked with.

SO MANY MISSED OPPORTUNITIES.

We went to Seattle but my sister didn’t go into labor so we came home again. It was great to see them though, especially my number one nephew, Mr. Squishypants who’s almost three now. We all went to the Japanese Garden at the Arboretum, a place I’ve always wanted to revisit ever since an annoying trip we took there when I was a teenager. I wanted to return and have everything be tranquil. IT WAS!!

One of the things I miss most about living in Tacoma is walking to the Conservatory and just sitting in there soaking in good, moist air and beauty. If we lived in Seattle I would probably hang out at the Japanese Garden for hours and hours every week. It’s fucking therapy, man. It kind of boggles my mind that there are beautiful places — gardens like these or woods like the Hoh rainforest (yes, I should totally do a WebHOH shoot) — and people don’t go, LET’S KEEP/MAKE EVERYTHING THIS LEVEL OF AWESOMELY BEAUTIFUL!!. And I’m not saying everything has to be totally pristine and “natural” to be beautifully awesome; we were impressed by Harborside Park at the Bremerton ferry terminal next to the shipyards (also beautiful, to me).

If I were to cultivate my own garden, it would be a moss and fern garden. I love how primitive they are. They totally feel like home to me.

*****

After taking a bunch of pictures at the garden and looking at them here at home, I realized I’m doing a terrible job of paying attention to my horizon line or just making sure the subject of my photos aren’t accidentally slightly slanted; most of my pictures look a little crooked. I don’t know if other people would notice it, especially when there’s so much stuff in the pictures, but taking non-porn pictures is always a good (and relaxing) learning experience. I wonder if it’s because I’m still not used to our bigger, heavier camera? Using the viewfinder? I don’t know, but I’m going to try to pay better attention to that.

Call me superficial, but coming home with much-blonder hair meant so much to me – it boosted my mood and ego a billion points. Our hair-chick ratted and teased it to be tall on top because she has a Rock of Love fetish, so to take advantage of it we did a slutty faux-schoolgirl shoot and I was too in love with myself to stop there, so I snagged some webcam shots:

Just the day before this I went to the mall and wandered around by myself while Delia got a laser treatment. I was in my usual comfortable-slob mode wearing a pair of old black sweats that were falling down (the drawstring broke a long time ago so I try to hold it together by wadding the waist up in front and whipping a ponytail-holder around that wad to cinch it up) so it looked like I had shit in my drawers, nerdy silver tennis shoes, and an old-lady baby-blue polar fleece ladies jacket from LL Bean that was a Christmas present from Delia’s mom a few years ago. I looked so old and so tired and so washed out and I felt that way, too. Like I should apologize for looking so shitty.

I had that quintessential “she’s given up on herself” look. Theoretically I HATE that criticism and don’t care what I look like which is part of why I became a webwhore in the first place; since I rarely feel motivated to dress up and be seen, the thought of being paid to do it and have a visual record of the times I did appealed to me. I’d be off the hook and could always point to those pictures as proof that I CAN look good if I WANT to and have already DONE that. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Why do it EVERY DAY? Of course, there’s a slight flaw in my logic since we broadcast spycams and most people paying to see them would like me to look sexy on them all of the time, or at least more often than I do, but whatever. I walked around the mall looking from a respectful distance at clothes and makeup and other ways to improve my appearance, feeling like I wasn’t worthy or capable of asking to touch anything expensive and beautiful enough to make a significant change.

The point is that I looked blah and yucky and didn’t feel good about it at all. No, that’s not the point. The POINT is in the contrast between how I felt that day and the next, when I came home with my hair really blonde and stood in front of the mirror and drew outside of the lines of my lips and filled them in with thick, gooey gloss and frosty highlights and brushed on dark eyeshadow and put on fake lashes.

I felt like magic. Like this is why people want to look like porn stars. Because (sometimes?) it feels a lot better than looking like muted, sloppy shit. And it doesn’t matter if I just applied a boundary of fakeness between the plain foundation of myself and what people see, because it felt best when I was the only one looking at myself there in the bathroom mirror or taking self-absorbed pictures of myself.

Why am I hiding the plain truth under all of this bullshit self-criticism and analysis? All I’m trying to say is that looking in the mirror and seeing yourself looking like a hot fucking slut feels VASTLY SUPERIOR to slouching around feeling like an unattractive slob. It’s inconvenient, but true. No matter how much I wish my protestations that looking good is a waste of my time and money were true, THEY AREN’T.

It’s fucking biology that we want people to want to fuck us on sight, that we want people to be jealous of us, that we want people’s eyes to light up when they see us, that we want to advertise our fantastic genes (or that we want to look better than our average ones). If you’re a woman (who isn’t still shattered by one or more people hurting you because you looked like hot sex and they took it from you) some part of you wants people to look at you with desire and appreciation. Even when it annoys me to be gawked at, it charges my fucking battery. It’s absolutely electric.

You want to look so good that you can control a man into paying for dinner just to get a whiff of your hair and stare at your cleavage, that you can render him insensible to paying for everything you need to keep looking so good — to maintain your value and keep commanding higher and higher prices — shoes that make your feet arch and sparkly jewelry accentuating all your graceful, slender parts and tight pants and shiny hair and fat, pouting lips and pampering spa treatments performed by undemanding female hands that MIGHT just render you pliant enough to be amenable to saying “thank you” with your soft body. It’s an expensive art and time-consuming work to always look like a shiny, animated toy cocksucker and I’ve never mastered it or even kidded myself that I could compete on that level.

The older I get, the rarer and more exciting it is when I get a taste of what it feels like to BE hot sex. Normally I am the one LOOKING at one of the shiny girls, simply appreciating how they glitter from head to toe, putting so much time and money into tanning, waxing, accessorizing, and accentuating every single morsel of their bodies. Hoping that someone admires and respects it enough to make it worth their while, constantly forgetting that there are intrinsic rewards to looking like honey come to life and taking soft female form and maybe that is enough for them.

My head and body have been so fucked up and bloated and distorted off and on for so many years that now, getting it back on track, I’m at an age where I don’t take it for granted anymore that tomorrow I could be riding some strange boy’s cock and having him looking up at me in complete amazement and disbelief, moaning about how he can’t believe he’s really fucking me. That might never happen again, which is fine, but it would still be nice to know that it’s POSSIBLE even if I don’t want to act on it (it actually feels especially powerful knowing I probably won’t). How many years do I have left where I’ll be ABLE to turn heads in public? You don’t have to be a great beauty to make that happen. Do I really want to waste those opportunities playing the invisible slob?

It’s disgusting to admit, but when I pass a mirrored column in a mall I want to make myself wet looking at myself. When I walk by a shiny window of a restaurant I want to see my own reflection on top of people who are WATCHING me and not be able to resist smiling, knowing that they are delighted and mesmerized by what they see. ANY woman can manage if she has time and the desire to advertise herself using resources like bleached hair and juicy lip stains and clothes that highlight your best bounce, wiggle or stride. Resources she can extract from men. It’s the OTHER circle of life. It might be a totally fucked up stereotype of gender roles, something progressive men and women want to move away from (or better, switch up for fun — I do fantasize about being a sugar mama to young women and sometimes men), but sometimes I can’t help celebrating it and wanting to WIN at it and enjoy the cheap/expensive thrill of it.

Attempting it often feels awkward and unnatural and hardly-worth-it, but when it works the rewards feed some primal need in me that are so close to my core I can’t dismiss them as fake or stupid or unhealthy. There is no pretending we can evolve past this.

Note: originally this entry included more reflection and deeper insight on where my confli
cted feelings about making myself up to look “sexy” (or at least presentable) in public (and in general) might have come from but it turned into a total downer so maybe I’ll save that for another time. I feel like I should apologize for my undying fascination with mulling over these matters and warn you that they don’t end here and I can’t unwaveringly commit to any one perspective on them.

I’m already totally embarrassed by this post even though the whole point of it is not to be.

GROSS.

My response to Oprah’s team dulling down the Real Housewives of Orange County:

A post made by Trixie on her phone:

MP3 File

Note: I didn’t see the show and am only going on the piece I linked to. Also, it’s not that I don’t think men — particularly gay men — are capable of being brilliant stylists and all of that, the part I hate is the whole “Ladies! COVER UP, will ya? Jesus, you fucking skanks — no one wants to see that much of your old-ass bodies, okaaaaaaaaaay?” attitude. And seriously, if someone doesn’t have style that sets them apart from the people they hang out with, do you really think that personal style is something you can THRUST upon them?

I started taking piano lessons when I was about nine years old. My teacher, Joan, didn’t believe in using metronomes and always had long, fancy nails even though pianists aren’t supposed to. At some point during the first year of lessons, she told me that music is really all about MATH.

No math = no music. A huge revelation for me as a kid. It’s a big truth that’s never left me. At first my feelings about it were a little conflicted; it was sort of stressful (”I’m so bad at fractions!”), but realizing that math is the foundation of music (or at least one doorway into building and understanding it) never sucked the romance or beauty out of it. It never made it dry to me. It can be invisible enough that you don’t actually NEED to know it or think about it for it to be in there. That lesson primed me to notice as years went by that math and science are built into nature and art and our insides. That the basics of them are intuitive, like rhythm, but the more you know about the math and science of something, the better your music or art or appreciation of those things can be.

Knowing that art is really science has been a solace to me — art isn’t reserved only for a few people who are divinely inspired. It can be orderly: accessed and created systematically. With simple formulas. With a wide variety of tools mixed with individual perspective, personality and tastes to make it seem unique and magical, disguising the numbers in the craft of it.

*****

I shot a set of pictures of Delia wearing some hot Hello Kitty shorts on Friday night and the photos are all jacked up. I’m a long way from understanding the science of photography; I *like* numbers, but they don’t stick in my head very well so even though I’ve read about how cameras work and how OUR camera works I still don’t have it committed to memory or know how to manipulate light and settings quickly to achieve what I want. I have to just walk around and fiddle with things until I mostly-accidentally happen onto something lovely. Most of the good pictures I take are the product of luck and shooting A LOT without fully comprehending what I’m doing. I recognize what looks good and beautiful and erotic to me (or at least halfway decent) and what looks bad to me and have a few basic practices for making the former (especially in the “halfway decent” category) and avoiding the latter, but my technical skills are pretty basic.

All of the pics looked dark to me so I bumped the ISO up to 1000 or 2500, I forget now (hence the graininess) and the speed down to 25 or 30 — they still looked dark for some reason; I was letting the camera auto-focus (selecting the area to focus on myself with these little movable box thingies; I forget what Nikon calls that function but it didn’t seem to be working well on this particular night) and adjust the aperture itself until I decided to do a closeup and switched everything to manual (because it balks when we ask it to autofocus macros); suddenly everything was WAY TOO BRIGHT and I had to change the shutter speed. The only thing I can think of is that the camera wasn’t doing a good job of automatically adjusting the aperture and when I switched to manual and adjusted it myself then everything changed. It sucked because we wanted these pics to be bright.

The older I get, the more I see that MOST working artists — writers, photographers, graphic designers, sculptors, painters, musicians, etc. — are just people who’ve chosen to do that kind of work. That the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of us is the amount of time they put into their art and confidence they have in devoting themselves to it without worrying whether or not a jury of peers think they deserve to make money on it. Very few artists are people who actually possess something innate that the rest of us don’t have; most of it is taking the time to learn and apply information that’s available to everyone (or anyone with the resources to do a little research) and then investing money in the right tools and lots of time in practicing. Sometimes I think the most successful artists are the ones who are actually LESS gifted and too stupid/overconfident to recognize that there are other people (usually making zero dollars on their art) who are WAY more talented. Maybe the only way to be a successful “artist” is to NOT be great — to not complicate shit with too much vision, originality, or diverse techniques and just work from simple formulas to make things that are easily recognizable and accessible to the masses. See also Adaptation. If your work brings other people pleasure does it really NEED to be super duper excellent?

The older I get, the happier I am with shooting for mediocrity. Even mediocrity requires a lot of hard work (for me, at least). Mediocrity is attainable without being a given; you can stand out and make a decent living in a field simply by being one of the relative few to 1) choose that field, 2) commit to it for a number of years, and 3) make yourself known. All the better if you’re willing to take emotional and financial risks and make sacrifices for your work/”art”. The happier you are with mediocrity the wider your success. I’ve slowly shifted my focus of “pride” away from “talent” and pinned it on “work”; you can’t be proud of having good taste or being born with certain attributes making you better suited than most to doing one job or another. Those are only things you can be THANKFUL for. The things you can actually be PROUD of are hard work, dedication and defying convention to choose happiness. To call yourself an artist as soon as you choose to be one — to make it your job — rather than waiting until you imagine other people think you are good enough to deserve that label. Those are the people I admire more and more, the ones who are brave & devoted enough to create some form of art (even if it’s just fair to middlin’) and are savvy enough to make it a business.

I used to think having to work hard at something or take a lot of time to make something acceptable was something to be ashamed and embarrassed of. If it wasn’t easy it meant I wasn’t good at it. Now I realize that’s total bullshit (even if I still FEEL that way sometimes). The strategic choices and commitments you make to invest work in things that make you happy, better, more skilled, or even just capable of seeing you should make a different choice (I’ve always believed that quitting is something to be proud of; that whole “quitters never win” line is such a crock of shit). The time you spend allowing yourself to suck ass — IMMERSING yourself in sucking ass and slowly filling in the void of your ignorance with knowledge — just so you can become mediocre at something you love and then keep working to try to improve upon that. Beyond mediocrity there are so few people who are actually able to recognize the difference between mediocrity and greatness, there’s no reason to beat yourself up if you’re not capable of becoming that elite.

Being a “jack of all trades, master of none” ROCKS. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and I don’t love any one thing enough to give up all the other stuff. So I really have to be satisfied with mediocrity, slow progress, and making balanced choices to devoting little bits of time here and there to different things I love. Like making flash cards to learn photography stuff. You’re never too old for flash cards. I’m not, anyway.

I am mediocre at so many things, and have managed to balance (with great mediocrity) such a gigantic shitload of different kinds of work that I deserve to be quite proud of myself and my extrao
rdinary mediocrity. I feel so blessed to be in a position to dabble so widely. Lucky lucky lucky, and proud of myself for creating a notable percentage that luck by my choices. For recognizing my luck and exploiting it to the best of my limited ability.

Some of us are able to do our work just because we’re lucky enough to have the resources to buy tools, to live in an environment filled with inspiration and/or to be close to people who make beautiful subjects and do most of the art/work for you.

*****

I love arranging forkfuls of food. Ones where I have the perfect ratio of one thing to the other(s). Mashed potatoes to gravy to meat. Raisins to flakes. Heavens to Betsy. It doesn’t have to be fancy, the formula just has to be right. Everything pleasingly arranged in relation to each other. I will never be a good cook because I don’t want to practice how to be; that’s Delia’s thing. It’s my job just to love eating, every day, tasting and swallowing over and over and saying thank you, honey.. And to figure out how to arrange camera settings like food on a fork, adjusting hole-sizes, timing mechanisms, and digitally tweaking things in perfect relation to the kind of light shining on my girlfriend.

After taking swimming lessons as a kid, I haven’t spent much time in pools, but I want to get in the water more often so I dusted off my old rubber swim cap (barely used), bought a new one (the purple one below) and replaced the old broken rubber strap on my goggles. I tried everything on during one of my webcam chats last week and was extremely pleased with the results:

I can’t tell you how much I love wearing my swim caps — it has all the pleasure of a corset without the hassle and expense. A corset for your BRAINS! They’re snappy, squeaky, thick and delicious and wearing them reminds me how glamorous I thought women were who wore do-rags and turbans when I was very young. LOVE! I am INCHES away from shaving off my hair and wearing swim caps full time (and paired with earplugs it would be delicious deprivation of auditory perception). Except without the hair I don’t know if it would be as pleasurable to remove the swim cap after thirty minutes or more of wear; there would be less hair-pulling, but too much cold to enjoy the slow expansion of the head and hair-floof back to maximum size.

And don’t even get me started on goggles . . . this is my LOOK! I think it’s totally cool when there’s a reflection on just one lens.

*****

Swimming was fun, but I went alone and was actually nervous about doing something new: would they have lockers and if so, would they provide locks and keys and something to hold onto the key while I’m swimming? Would I have to pay for each scheduled event I stayed for or only the first thing I showed up for? Would I be horribly slow and block faster, fitter people from enjoying their laps?

I managed to go despite these nagging anxieties and enjoyed myself, even if I can’t seem to swim in a straight line and kept kicking the wall during my sidestroke and wound up with a scraped foot. I love being immersed in the water. I love the colors and sounds of an indoor pool. I love everything being muffled and wet and full of vapor. I love floating and turning and being thick and mobile.

I felt calm and heavy afterwards. It’s good stuff. In fact, I went back for more and posted a confession/fantasy today for members that I had about myself and the nerdy lifeguard.

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?

I’m totally confused (and possibly deeply offended) by this post a Seattle guy made on Twitter so here I am, befuddled, bothered and bewildered:

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What does this picture have to do with losing one’s lunch?

Seriously — I don’t get it. I mean, I *hope* I don’t get it. BECAUSE I HATE ASSHOLES! If you’re following over a thousand people to get exposure for your site, try not to be a dick (or try to be clear).

I suppose I haven’t got any room to talk about how whorey tweeters should represent themselves since I frequently post about pooping. But pooping doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Though maybe it could make someone lose his lunch. Still, I don’t think I want to follow people who have such weak stomachs.

FYI: I may have misrepresented the guy’s site in my phone post. And everything else about him. Because I don’t know him or what he was trying to communicate. Obviously.