A blog and community devoted to sharing creative ideas for bringing a camera into your bedroom adventures, hosted by Tony and Peggy Comstock of Comstock Films.
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.
Peggy just submitted a 5-tips bedroom photography article to run in the Yummy Mummy Club later this Summer, and the editor wanted a picture of us, which makes sense. But since the only sexy pictures we have are decidedly not for publication, we had to come up with an idea quick!
The above is a riff on the famous Anne Lebowitz picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I think we look better!
I’ve been a photographer for nearly 25 years. As mentioned on our About page, bringing the camera into my bedroom is something that feels as natural and sexy to me as lighting up a bunch of candles or taking out a bottle of massage oil. Making photographic mementos of my lover and our lovemaking seems as normal as making photos of any other important part of my life.
But photography and sexuality have an uneasy relationship in our society. While being sexy (in varying degrees) is often a public act, sex itself is mostly a very private act. Photography can make the private public, with or without the consent of the subjects, and with or without the consent of the viewers. That one-to-one analogy that makes photography so vivid can also make it tremendously confrontational; and while I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with being confrontational about sex, I do think that we too often see that confrontational effect as being the very essence of sexual photography.
In our “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex” series, Peggy and I have tried to present a view of cinema and sex that is less rooted in confrontation and transgression, while maintaining a sense of erotic urgency. We’ve tried to present sexual joy as a part of a rich, wholesome life. Here at CameraPlayForCouples.com we’d like to continue that exploration by presenting photographing sexual joy as a part of rich, wholesome life as well.
One of the ways that we’re going to do that is by sharing the technical and conceptual knowledge that Peggy and I have acquired in the nearly 40 years we collectively spent exploring sex in a photographic context, but re-shaped for today’s everyday digital image-making tools. The other thing we’re going to do, is highlight people who are making photographs and enjoying photography in their relationships in ways that we think illustrate and expand upon our ideas.
13 Messages is a camera-play blog maintained by the male half of a married couple, mostly photos of him, with occasional photos of his wife or the two of them together (as above.) Photos range from plainly-voiced documents to moody fragments. 13 Messages is an anonymous blog; their faces are never shown. Between images and copy, the overall tone of the blog is grown-up, playful, with just a hint of wistfulness.
I called out 13 Messages in my second post, This is What I’m Talking About! because I love, Love, LOVE the above image. This image gets at the very essence of what we want to celebrate here at CameraPlayForCouples.com. It’s sexy, connected, playful, and thoughtful. It’s artful and spontaneous. It is erotic without being confrontational. It’s defiant and it’s sweet.
After I made that first post, I sent a note asking if they would like to be interviewed for CameraPlayForCouples.com. I’m delighted they said yes!
1) How old are you? Are there any other particulars of your life that you would like CameraPlayForCouples.com readers to know about you?
I’m 39 and she’s 37.
2) When did you start taking pictures of yourself? What prompted you?
I started after I bought my first digital camera in 2002. I didn’t start taking nude or semi-nude pictures of myself, however, until I discovered Half-Nekkid Thursdays at Osbasso’s blog.
3) You wife makes occasional appearance on your blog. Did/does she have any concerns about your self-portraiture? What did you talk about before putting pictures of yourself online?
She has the usual concerns that most folks do. We just hope that we can continue to have the fun that taking and sharing pictures gives us without it affecting our professional or family lives in a negative way.
4) Do you have rules or guidelines for the images you make, or for the images you put online?
So far, we just try to keep our faces unseen. Beyond that, we don’t really put a lot of thought or rules into the process.
5) I love love love the “Mine!’ image. Can you tell us the genesis of that image, both conceptually and practical realities of pulling it together.
We had bought some body paint earlier in the week and found the Wet Paint sign that I thought we’d be able to incorporate some way into a photo shoot. As for her writing “Mine!” on my back, that was a last minute idea that we both got a kick out of.
6) Have you thought about what you would say or do if you were “outed”?
We’d run, we’d hide, we’d probably delete the blog. Of course, it’s fun so we’d probably start back up again soon after.
7) Do you feel like you’ve learned anything or given voice to anything through the process of photographing yourself and your wife? What advice would you give, either technical or philosophical, to someone who wants to turn the camera on themselves?
While I don’t feel like I’m doing anything at a level where I can give advice to others, I will say that my wife and I feel that our marriage has benefited by our semi-weekly photo shoots. Even though life keeps us busy and exhausted (three kids and two relatively low wage jobs between us), taking pictures of our nude or semi-nude bodies does something to keep the sexual interest alive. Not only does it give us that time to really remind us that we desire one another, but posting the pictures on the blog and getting positive comments reminds us that we are desirable to others. That, of course, keeps the self-esteem at a healthy level.
Last night I was all loaded up and ready to go with this post, but this morning I’m second guessing myself. “Consent, Context, and Clutter” is yet another conceptual post, a post about how to see and think about photography, yet there’s this voice in my head saying “Enough theory, Tony. Give ‘em some practical advice! Give ‘em some tips!” So, before we dive into “Consent, Context, and Clutter” here’s a tip:
Camera Tip
If you don’t know how to do it already, learn how to turn off the Auto-Flash function on your digital camera. Your digital camera’s Auto-Flash is programmed for those “Here’s me and Mindy and Frank and Sally leaning in and saying “Cheers” at the office Christmas party!” photos — a blast of bright white light reaching out about 5-7 feet in an otherwise dimly lit room. Of course now that you’ve turned off the flash, you’re going to have to start thinking about alternate light sources and/or camera support for the slow shutter-speeds needed to capture images in bedroom lighting levels. But more on that later, let’s continue with some more of my conceptual framework.
Consent, Context, and Clutter
Today’s lesson is taught by way of negative example, and with the aid of two websites; LuridDigs.com and GuessHerMuff.Blogspot.com.
LuridDigs.com is a blog devoted to photographs that have been snatched off the internet, of (presumably) gay men in unlikely interiors. Count this one as a guilty pleasure for me. The juxtaposition of everyday men, in all their glory, against their home furnishing choices (or lack their of) is hard not to look at. The commentary is just as snarky as you’d expect, and often as funny as it is cruel.
GuessHerMuff.Blogspot.com is blog devoted to pictures of clothed pictures of everyday women, with a second “reveal” photograph showing how her pubic hair is coiffured. This ought to be heaven for me. Comstock Films was inspired by the idea that people’s real sexuality, their real relationships and real sex play were a lot more interesting and erotic that any of the nonsense that comes out of Chatsworth, and I love the “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover” aspect of the concept.
But like LuridDigs there are troubling questions of consent on GuessHerMuff. LuridDigs covers their ass with some boilerplate legalize:
Whether or not this claim of “Fair Use” would withstand a challenge I don’t know. I do know that parody is a form of humor best aimed at people and institutions in a position of power. Parody aimed at the defenseless usually goes by another name: mockery. Apparently it’s human nature. The doesn’t make it nice. LuridDigs is nothing if not ironic, which gives added “meta-spice” to their all-encompassing copyright notice sitting right next to their assertion of fair use.
GuessHerMuff goes a slightly different route on the consent question:
This site isn’t here to make anybody look bad. If you are the owner of an image show here and would like it to be removed, please leave a message in the comment section of the post in question and it will be removed.
I had something similar happen with one of my films down in Australia. Shortly after the OFLC banned DAMON AND HUNTER from the Sydney International Gay & Lesbian Documentary Film Festival, they sent our Aussie distributor a negative-option notice that if we did not opt out, they would be using our film in their training sessions. I was not amused. And whatever the site owner’s assertions about what he(?) is or isn’t trying to do, the fact is the women on this site are subject to savage, puerile commentary. I can’t imagine that anyone would consent to having their pictures posted in this this context.
So what’s the lesson here?
Well I guess the first lesson is that if your images get away from you, there’s no telling where and in what context they might appear; and that even if you find out that your pictures – pictures that you own and have the legal right to control – are being used in a way that you don’t approve of, it may take more time, effort and money than you can muster to make the fight.
The second is that context matters. I might send my wife a not particularly thought through picture of myself, and in that private context I might seem sweet, charming, and sexy. But drop that photo into another context, and I might look foolish. Thoughtful photography (and I’m not saying that all photography should be thoughtful) creates a lot of its context within the frame, and this context can travel with the photograph, regardless of how the photograph is used or misused.
A powerful tool for creating this internal context is what I’ll call Intentionality; which brings us to clutter.
Click through LuridDigs or GuessHerMuff or any of the thousands of amateur websites and you’ll notice a lot of things end up getting caught in the photographs that people who made them didn’t really mean to include: odds and ends on night tables, laundry baskets, electrical outlets overflowing with cords.
The reason is simple: when we “see” in real life, our psycho-perception allows us to focus our mind on whatever it is were looking at, while ignoring all the distractions. Psychologically it’s very similar to our ability to listen to a conversation in a crowded party with loud music, and if we couldn’t do this visually, we couldn’t drive a car, or walk down the street, or cook dinner. When we take snap-shots, we do the same thing when the viewfinder is up to our eye – we focus on the subject to the exclusion of all else, and that’s how we end up with a lamp post coming out some someone’s head and making them look like a unicorn.
But when we want to move from taking Snap-Shots to making Photographs (if you’ll forgive my pretentious nomenclature,) we have to learn to overcome this essential aspect of the way we see. This is especially hard when our beloved is laid out on the bed in all his or her glory. Maybe there’s already a bit of tension because of concerns about making these sorts of photos, plus worry about how they’ll come out, plus “Holy cow! She is gorgeous! I want her right now!” Add to all that, there are some technical aspects of camera-phones and point-and-shoot digital cameras that actually make it harder to make uncluttered photographs than if you were using an digital SLR or film camera.
More on the technical aspects later, and how to overcome the clutter-philic nature of digital photography. For the time being, the next time you are making photographs – of yourself, of your lover, of anything – before you the click the shutter, pause for just a moment and check the corners of the frame. This might feel awkward at first –especially if you’re doing bedroom photography – to have that beat of deliberation and intentionality in an environment we associate with spontaneity. But give it a try. Check the corners. If you see something that doesn’t belong, move it or change the framing; shift up or down, left or right, or move in closer. Being aware of and responsible for everything that’s in the frame is a way to imbue your photographs with intentionality, and to give them some of that internal context that will make them look better, regardless of where they end up being seen.
The other thing is that while spontaneity might be thought of as the ne plus ultra of sexual expression, playing with a camera is an opportunity to explore the eroticism of deliberation and intent. The process of making a photo is like selecting special lingerie, or programing a bedroom playlist. It involves forethought, anticipation and decision making. Those aren’t usually thought of as sexy words, but they can be. It’s all about the context!
A powerful aspect of photography is the tight relationship between image and what was in front of the camera at the moment of exposure. Leaving aside (for now) Photoshop and other “tricks”, when we see a photo, we can more or less extrapolate from the two dimensional image to the three dimensional reality that photo records. And although there is a huge amount of subjectivity in even the most “truthful” photograph, that analogous relationship between event and image has a tremendous impact on how we understand the image we see. As much as we understand that a photo doesn’t tell the whole truth, we understand that it tells a lot of truth.
Twenty-plus years ago, as a student, I looked at the classic tourist shot “Here I am, in front of this place that I’ve travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to see” as painfully unsophisticated. If you want a shot of the Colosseum, or Times Square, or whatever, why not get the professionally rendered image available for 25 cents on a postcard?
Now I get it. Not only do I take those sorts of photos when we travel, when I come across people making these sorts of photos, I’ll always stop and offer to take the picture for them, so that no one in the group ends up being left out. (I also take a secret pleasure in knowing that their “Here we are” photo might be just turn out a little better than average.)
The photo above is of yours truly, taken a little more than a year ago when I was bringing our boat up the Eastern Seaboard. After more than four months of living aboard, I was in the best shape I had been in years; lean, tan, strong. I was also away from my wife Peggy and wanted to maintain an erotic connection with her across the distance. A camera-phone, the full-length mirror; not much concern for lighting, a little concern for odds and ends in the background, a little concern for framing (this image is a cropped version of the one I sent my wife!)
The meaning in this photo doesn’t come from any great finesse with the Art of Photography. The meaning comes from the simple but powerful ability of a photo to serve as evidence, of a time, a place, a feeling, an intention, “Here I am. I’m thinking of you. I miss you. I’ll be home soon.” A few buttons pushed, and the photo, and all that meaning travels almost instantly from a boat off the Carolina coast back to my wife in New York.
How about you? Have you ever used a photo in a similar way? If so, I’d love to hear about it; on your blog, in the comments here, or by e-mail [tony at camera play for couples dot com].
I am still working out in my head how we’re going to be handling other peoples images here at CameraPlayForCouple.com. When you decide to give yourself to someone physically, you make that decision right there and then, for that person, for that time. Photos are different. Making a photograph carries with it a potential loss of control over whom you share yourself with and in what context.
So with that in mind, I am not posting a very very wonderful photograph from 13 Messages. Instead, and for now, I am posting a link:
There are so many things I like about this photo, so very many. But I’m going to save getting into that until we’ve worked out to my satisfaction a policy for posting other people’s photos that is consensual, non-transactional, preserves (as much as possible) peoples’ control over context, while hoping to also preserve the structural integrity of this blog.
So for the time being, click the link and enjoy this very wonderful photo. I defy you to look at it without being hit with a million and one ideas for photos of your own!
Hello and welcome. I am Tony Comstock, and I am a filmmaker and photographer. I want to tell you about two very important things that happened when I first started went “online” about 15 years ago.
The first was that I met my wife Peggy. This was back before the World Wide Web, so when I say I “met” her, what I really mean is I noticed a post she made on a BBS, and I sent her a note, and from there we began to chat using an old unix program called nTalk. There was no exchanging pictures back then, let alone video chatting. The first time I saw her was after months and months of chatting, when I met her for lunch. I liked what I saw, and I guess she did too. We were married two years later.
The other thing that happened around this same time is that the internet went from being a text-only environment to a graphical environment. The first graphical browser, Mosaic, came out, then Netscape, and then the whole internet explosion. And somewhere inside of that explosion, people started posting sexy pictures of themselves, sometimes privately, sometimes in semipublic places, and sometimes out for the whole world to see.
I was fascinated, captivated and turned on by this sudden access to DIY erotic images. In the wake of the Meese Commission, and the unwholesome alliance of social conservatism and the radical anti-sex wing of feminism professional erotic image making had died a slow, ugly death. But these homemade expressions of sexuality, these mementos of sexual joy seemed to offer a way forward.
I thought, “What if I could capture the enthusiasm and authenticity of these pictures, but bring my skills as professional filmmaker to the process?” 15 years later and with 6 well-loved erotic documentary films to our credit I’m pleased with how we answered that question. We’ve proved that sexual imagery doesn’t have to be lurid or phony or tacky, but neither does it have be arid or sterile or joyless.
I’m coming back to do-it-yourself erotic image making for a few reasons. The first is simply that I get a lot of requests from magazines to offer my expertise on this subject. But bad advice is worse than no advice, and they always screw it up, so we’ve stopped saying yes. This blog is a way to go around the gatekeepers (aka magazine editors) and put my ideas about how people can have fun with cameras into the world directly.
Secondly, really amazing things have happened with the technology. I bought a little digital camera last year and was flabbergasted to find out it would also shoot up to 3 hours of full-screen video. This laptop I’m typing on right now came with a suite of software for image editing and video editing that I would have killed for 20 years ago. The tools that ordinary people have in their hands are really impressive, and with just a dash of technical knowledge, a little insight into the “Art of Seeing,” and a sense of play, it’s possible to use these very ordinary tools to make images you’ll treasure; mementos you’ll be glad to have 5, or 10, or 20 years from now.
The last thing is that once again I feel like commercial erotic image making is at a dead end, and once again I feel like the DIY approach offers a way forward; a way to see the collision of sex and image-making as joyful and consensual, and most of all playful. A way to show that making love is as much a part of our life as children’s birthday parties, or weddings, or company softball games, and every bit as worthy of being memorialized with images.
So if you’re nodding your head and saying “Yes, Tony’s right.” please add this blog to your RSS feed, or your blog roll, or tell a friend. If being an independent filmmaker means anything, it means being inventive, and I have 20+ years of inventive ideas that can make memorializing your erotic life easier, more satisfying, and more fun!
I’d also like to invite you to share your ideas and experiences with me, either just privately, or for publication. You can reach me in comments here, or tony at camera play for couples dot com.
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you’ll keep reading!
