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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

We *finally* got a remote control to take pictures of ourselves together. Here are a couple of our first silly attempts, just testing it out:

Trixie is “The Other Sister”

The Pervy Ogre

Last night we shot a “real” (in other words, pornographic) set together taken in vivid color, wearing stockings and corsets. It was challenging and extremely time consuming, but worth the effort and expense of the remote even for poorly composed photos (in fact, some of the ones with pieces of us unintentionally chopped out were the best; it feels more voyeuristic and amateur, I think). We should have done this a long time ago. Anyway, today I’ll work on editing that gallery and maybe the video, too.

Tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday we’ve got webcam shows and a members-only chat scheduled.

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.

We lost power at our house for a couple of seconds today because of the wind; it almost seems freakier when the sun’s out and it’s blowing than if the skies were dark and ominous. Blue skies + windstorms = the pink goth of weather.

Though we live northwest of/near Seattle, the weather is totally different here with a lot less rain. We’re lucky to have big windows facing south so in January and February we can sunbathe naked. Inside, unless you have fur:

I took these pictures in our backyard after going to the store where the power was out. According to the locals I heard talking, part of town was out of electricity because a transformer blew, a tree fell/knocked down lines, AND someone crashed a car into a pole. Our wind is a force to be reckoned with!

Next month we’re planning to spend some time shooting closer to my hometown, in the area where (some of) Twin Peaks was filmed. I really wanted to commission someone to sew a waitress costume to mimic the ones they wore at the diner in the series, but I messed up the specs on the auction I created and didn’t want to pay for something four months in advance of a time that would be too late for the look/time of year I wanted. Maybe next year. For now we’ll try to capture a little of the vibe/local color without being crazily ambitious. Someday I would love to have the resources to get a bunch of our friends and fellow-Peaks-fans together for a couple of weeks to shoot some tribute porn. Someday.

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.

Tonight’s ending on a very positive note that could even be viewed as a metaphor for other things going on in our lives; we finally installed a second hard drive for storage on my main work machine so I’m moving big files off my weighted-down C drive. It feels like a fresh start! Right now I’m filling up some of that space by transferring non-work photos over to this machine so I can enjoy playing with shots we’ve taken for fun/to learn about our camera.

November 20th: a buck Delia spotted in our neighbor’s backyard:

Our “new” camera (Nikon D300) has been therapeutic for me, making me stop and take time out to really LOOK and lose myself in details outside of myself. I’m not the kind of person who tries to capture EVERYTHING with a camera — I definitely appreciate being in the moment with family, friends and on vacation — but when we’re at home (which is the same as being at work unless we make a really concerted effort for it not to be) doing the daily grind it’s a big challenge for me to get out of my head. But now, when something mundane and beautiful captures my attention I feel justified in grabbing the camera, ostensibly to learn to take better photographs, and spending 5-20 minutes to really SEE and try to understand what I’m seeing: the light, the textures, the motion . . . challenging myself over what’s real and not real because it can look so different viewed with my eyes compared to how it’s captured by the camera. Immersing myself in all those different versions of truth and light and darkness and the stories we instantly create and details we insert after pulling them out of our asses when we think we’re looking at our surroundings.

Looking out our window a few hours ago:

We actually bought three 500 GB hard drives months ago for three different machines and up until today, had only installed ONE of them because of little nuisances like not having Dell’s annoying little drive “caddies”, not having serial ATA cables with the 90 to 180 degree corner jobbies so the case will close properly, me despising crawling around on the floor fucking with all the cables and cords tangled around dust bunnies, etc. If you heard me screaming last night it was when I bashed my elbow into the corner of my desk during that process. Anyway, we finally took care of it and I ordered everything we need to install a couple more on other machines.

The past couple of days I had the alarm set for 8:30 in the morning to try to get us back into a groove of semi-normalcy; at least I *thought* I set the alarm for 8:30. Turns out I forgot to adjust the ipod when the time changed so we were actually being woken up at 7:30 which just didn’t feel right. We’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even start my day by going outside with the camera.

November 2nd as the sun took a dive:

And now a couple of random notes:

*Check out Delia’s post about today being the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and way to go Governor Gregoire for signing the proclamation – the most we could have expected Dino Rossi to do would have probably been to wipe his ass with it).

*Last night I enjoyed a conversation with my wanker in which I wasted lots of time raving about this Teddy Thompson fellow and a performance we saw on Later with Jools Holland. Here it is, and it slays me:

I’ve only downloaded one of his songs (a cover of “She Thinks I Still Care”, one of my all-time faves) because there’s no way I can narrow it down so I’m trying to hold out to be able to buy some of his albums, though I will probably download his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine”:

Over the weekend we were blessed by a visit from AmberLily and her husband. It was a working visit, meaning we weren’t getting together *just* to socialize, but mainly to shoot a bunch of pics for her site. Delia and I looked forward to doing this knowing it would feel totally awesome to get a lot of work done without actually having to be in front of the camera ourselves the way we are when we shoot each other. Instead we got to totally devote ourselves to behind-the-camera work which is really so much easier with two people not just to actually TAKE the pictures, but to set up lights, move/clean stuff, etc. It was a good experiment to find out how productive we can be when a bunch of roles/tasks are subtracted from our routine.

I don’t want to ruin the surprise of her cute outfits too much for her members, so here are some samples that won’t reveal all of her sexy and whimsical ensembles:

I totally hogged the camera the whole time which was fun for ME, but by the end of the night a lot of the pics I snapped were totally fucked: poorly framed, blurry, etc. It’s very physical work, both modeling for pictures and taking them; my “muscles” were totally sore the next day, but that didn’t stop me from TRYING to get BigD to pose for me.

I *achingly yearn* for more resources (aka money) to be able to shoot with friends in nicer places for longer periods of time without such a limited schedule and the same boring house we’ve been living in for years. It boggles my mind to think of how much hot porno we could make if we weren’t bound by, you know, huge debt and stuff. Until that day comes, however, we’re doing a pretty good job with the time and other resources we DO have. If we could do all that we did in five hours, I wonder what we could do with a week or two in more inspiring and spacious locations? You can scoff at the necessity of those things when it comes to porn, but if you do then you’ve no idea how hard it is to frame thousands of photos to look reasonably special/different so that you don’t include a mess, carpet stain, wires, light stands, and other distracting crap that your subject (and her hot HOT pussy) is squeezed between.

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?

Our stay in the Victorian bed & breakfast (they call it a hotel so you’ll know they don’t serve breakfast, but for your visualization purposes imagine more of a B&B than a hotel) was productive, but we didn’t manage to completely avoid being “caught” doing our sneaky porno shooting. But first, there was an earthquake!

While I was sitting on the floor against an outside wall shooting Delia on the bed, it felt like a truck drove into the house and made us sway back and forth on the second floor a few times. It excited us but we weren’t sure whether or not it was an earthquake, mostly because we’d just had a conversation the day before about how often we wake up in the middle of the night and IMAGINE there’s an earthquake. It was just too much of a coincidence, having discussed our earthquake paranoia so recently. Plus, it didn’t feel like most little earthquakes in Washington which are usually like rumbling underground tummies. Instead it was like a 3 second excerpt of the middle of the big earthquake we had a few years back with swinging, swaying, flexy building movement. I considered going downstairs to find out who else felt it, but we kept shooting instead. Maybe it felt unusual we because we were only three miles from the epicenter. Anyway, I know it’s “nothing” compared to what Californians frequently experience, but for us it definitely is something else. Little ones are always a reminder of how vulnerable we are up here in the subduction zone to having a really devastating earthquake, or even just another like last time which was pretty fucking exciting and freaky (it made me positively GIDDY!). We also live in a town with buttloads of fresh tsunami warning signs, so we do have frequent reminders to be scared shitless of earthquakes.

The next morning when housekeeping knocked while we were sleeping I loudly dismissed her, firmly informing her “WE DON’T NEED ANYTHING”. Later that afternoon while Delia was at home checking on the dog and I was out at the grocery store picking up snacks, the “innkeeper” must have decided to do some housekeeping himself; I came back to our room only to discover our door wide open and our bed made. The fellow hurried down the hall toward me and noticed the look of consternation on my face, explaining, “I was just emptying your wastebasket; I think everything is all right.”

The way he said “I THINK everything is all right” sounded to me like he noticed our light stands, colorful cheap corsetry & lingerie scattered around, the way I’d moved an obnoxious framed snapshot from one dresser to another, and the conspicuously absent “checkout time is at 11 am blah blah blah” printout that had been taped up on the particularly photogenic doors. He was saying, “I needed to investigate your activities and have noticed many things are suspiciously askew, but I guess since you haven’t pulled the chandelier out of the ceiling I’ll let it slide.”

I was pissed.

The only consolation was seeing Delia’s cum-streaked black stockings on top of the bed; he’d moved them to make the bed, then put them back on top of the covers where I’d left them. If someone wants to go poking around in our stuff they deserve to encounter some unexpected bodily fluids; normally I would pick up/put away stuff like that if I’d indicated we needed maid service, but I had no reason to think someone would be inserting himself into our room and fondling our underwear.

None of this would be such a big deal if we didn’t live in such a small town where word can spread like wildfire amongst the “innkeepers” or if we didn’t want to have the option of returning to certain places to shoot again. I don’t actually blame people for being concerned that someone’s up to no good in their homes/mansions/hotels, it’s just not very convenient for us. I would like to be up-front and honest about what we’re doing, but it’s just not an option; I only know one person who tells vacation rental owners what she’s doing when she goes to shoot, and her stuff is more politically correct than what we do. Everyone else we know shoots overtly pornographic stuff, and none of them inform people what they’re doing when they rent places or pop into hotels to shoot. People who genuinely aim to shoot “fine art nudes” (or at least exude the pretension of artistry) probably have an easier time of it, in part because it seems quieter and less scandalous AND because people don’t assume artists are rich enough to pay extra for locations whereas everyone assumes pornographers are rich because SEX SELLS, not art. I’m not just worried about being blacklisted, I’m worried about people charging us more to shoot in their places.

Apparently there are often regulations, local ordinances, etc. and fine print stipulations in rental agreements forbidding doing commercial shooting without permits and/or permission; I think most of it is written with film in mind, but it’s something few people realize, but could become more and more (or less, maybe) of a visible legal issue with so many people making photo and video content that then appears online. I don’t know all of the ins and outs about it and would like to think when the “innkeeper” invited us to wander around and take pictures, his words could be taken at face value, but honestly I would prefer not to broach the issue at all. I’m sure everything’s fine, but it does worry me a little. On the other hand, I feel very much that HE did something wrong by going into our room after I’d said, rather clearly I thought, we didn’t want any housekeeping. I feel that if someone discovers we’re moving furniture around or doing slightly kinky things with cameras BECAUSE THEY INTRUDED ON US (and fail to have “do not disturb” signs the way most places called “hotels” do) rather than because we broke something or made a bunch of noise, then they are more in the wrong.

I know some of you are reading this thinking I’m being totally paranoid, but I’m going to bet you either a) live in a city, and/or b) are more resourceful than I and/or have more resources at your disposal so you aren’t worried about finding alternatives, and/or c) your job is not the same as mine.

In spite of the intrusion (and maybe because of the earthquake) we had a grand time. We weren’t at all tempted to run away home to sleep this time. I *loved* our two nights in a strange bed, even with the walls being paper thin (this should be a hint to you that we didn’t shoot any noisy couples action, or even any quiet couples action). It was all very softcore except for a couple of Delia’s cumshots, and if I were the innkeeper I’d be happy to have us as patrons because the other guests? They were way louder than we were!

We’re leaving in an hour or two to spend a couple of nights at a local bed and breakfast so we can do some shooting in a pretty(ier than our house) location. I’m super excited because the walls are PURPLE! Over the past five years of hunting for locations to shoot pretty, sexy photos the lack of color in people’s lives has dismayed me. Why would you own a house and keep the walls white? Why would you try to rent rooms to people and think it will be any sort of a vacation for them with the same uninspired absence of color? I don’t get it, seriously, except that it’s cheaper/easier to maintain white walls.

Anyway, we’re really looking forward to it; it’s been many months since we tried to shoot anything semi-fancy with nylons and stuff. Delia’s been saving a really slinky, beautiful ensemble one of her members sent her waiting for a nice setting to do it justice.

As usual I’m a little nervous about lugging all of our suitcases and light bags into the place. I hate stirring up suspicion amongst the locals; it’s already weird enough to them when people IN TOWN want to rent rooms, but probably looks even more sketchy when we bring many giant pieces of luggage for a one or two night stay.

We’ll be in and out of home to take care of the dog, download pics, fetch things we’ve forgotten, etc. In fact, the explanation I give the nosy people is that we are “getting away while staying close enough to home to check up on our pet.” One of the suck things is that we’ve grown to not even want to actually spend the night at these places; we just want to come home and get into OUR bed after we’ve done our shooting, but not staying the night would *definitely* set off alarms with these people so we’ll be imprisoned in boutiquey Victoriana until we’re back home full time on Friday. Maybe next time I’ll say that we’ve got construction going on at our house during the day that we want to get away from. It could happen, right?