HNT: The Thigh’s the Limit or Ribbed for Your Pleasure?

The Thigh’s the Limit or Ribbed for Your Pleasure?

I flew into a minor rage trying to make this photo. First we tried as a self-portrait, with the camera craddled in my hand and Peggy holding the mirror. But the LCD screen is burned out on the camera and without the instant feedback I couldn’t get the framing or the coverage I wanted. So we switched to Peggy holding the camera, but I could tell that there wasn’t enough light for her to hand-hold, and that the resulting images were going to be a bit blurry.

The very first week I ever assisted on a professional photo shoot, for a photographer named Lou Manna, he warned that if I wanted to enjoy my personal photography, I should avoid making a career of it. There’s a long distance between the little bit of extra effort that can make a snap-shot into a keepsake, and the time, equipment and attention to detail that goes into making professional images, and sometimes my pride falls into the gap.

Anyway that’s not what I wanted this photo to be about. My little outburst aside, what I wanted to talk about this morning is Showing and Not Showing.

In our Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series we’ve explored what happens when you completely ignore the show/don’t show paradox and just treat the sex act and people’s sex organs like it is just another beautiful human experience. In our erotic documentaries we don’t tease, we reveal. Instead of being coy and flirtatious, those movies are candid and frank, and I think that’s what makes them special.

But what is covered or not covered, seen or not seen or half seen is also a very real part of our sexual lives. Flirting is often as much fun as doing, and showing/not showing can be a lot of fun to play with in erotic images. Sheer fabrics are one of my favorites because they flirt with all of those ideas all at once. I think that’s also what I like about stockings and garters – the mix up of what’s covered and what’s exposed.

The wool sweater has been with me since high school, purchased at an army surplus store on the plaza in Ashland, Oregon. The town’s gone considerably up-market since then. The last time I was in Ashland there was a fern-bar in the place where the army surplus store used to be. (You can still get sweaters on the plaza, but now they’re made of plastic and marked “Patagonia”.)

The leg-warmers I got at Penn station after seeing a photo of a friend, and remembering how much I liked seeing them on the legs of the first girl I ever kissed, in junior high school. She was a dancer, and I still remember going to her recital where she danced in a Fossesque “Steam Heat”, with leg warmers and a bowler hat. Yow!

Anyway, I didn’t get them for myself, I got them for Peggy, in the hopes that she’d wear them while we did things that I thought about , but never did with my junior high school girlfriend.

But I took to wearing them myself. The truth is, I don’t much like clothing, I find it clingy and restrictive; and working the way I do allows me to indulge this particular quirk. If I’m cold, I’ll put on a shirt, and if that’s not enough, a sweater, and if that’s not enough, a hat. So one day last Winter, finding that shirt, sweater and hat weren’t enough, and being too cheap to turn up the thermostat, I donned Peggy’s leg-warmers. 

Of course it’s not just about keeping warm, is it? (It’s seventy degrees here today.)

Camera Notes:

Not so trusty Canon PowerShot SD770, auto every except manual override to turn the flash off. Primary light source is a big window to the left of the frame. There is a compact fluorescent overhead, and you can see the difference in the two different color temperatures of the light sources in the very slight wash of color on the background. iPhoto for cropping and little tweaking: saturation boost, contrast boost, sharpness boost, and a bump to the shadow details.

Getting the cropping where I liked it was hard. I knew I wanted the feet just in, but fussed over the top edge for about 10 minutes till trying higher and lower until it seemed “just right”. I like the way the base board hits just at the lower hem of the leggings, but I suspect that’s just one of those happy accidents. There’s no shame in taking advantage of them when they happen.

Happy HNT! Go hit up Osbasso!