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!
For all of my bluster and enthusiasm for risk-taking, there’s one thing I’m terrified of: not being taken seriously – and part of what this blog is about for me is to make a very deliberate attempt to let my guard down and loosen up a little, and this is part of a larger self-improvement project to force myself out of my comfort zone.
To that end I’ve been reading and commenting at TheAmericanScene.com, a conservative group blog; a place where people who believe in erototoxins get the benefit of the doubt, and people like me, well suffice it to say, I am somewhat of a curiosity.
Reihan also makes a confession about his longing to wear a sarong:
Some years ago, a beautiful woman told me that she thinks more men should wear sarongs, and this left an impression on me. The trouble is that I know my limitations, and I’m pretty sure there’s no way in hell I can pull off a sarong. I might be able to pull off a sarong if I were wrestling multiple grizzly bears at the same time. But that hasn’t happened in weeks. Moreover, the pro-sarong woman — full disclosure — sort of shattered my heart and ate it. And it wasn’t even an entrée: it was a side dish, like sauteed spinach, yo. Only it was my heart. Damn you! Earlier today, another beautiful woman told me that wearing a sarong would represent a serious lapse in judgment, and I guess I’ll defer to her superior wisdom.
I am a long devotee of the living “the sarong lifestyle” and I think Reihan would totally rock a sarong; and I said so in the comments, but so far no images of Reihan wearing one have surfaced on the internet. And despite what I hope will be an ongoing effort to force myself out of my comfort zone, don’t expect any YouTubes of me rapping anytime soon either!
Camera Notes
This was shot on a very foggy afternoon in our front yard with our Canon PowerShot, auto-everything, with the zoom lens on widest angle. Auto everything because the LCD screen is on the fritz and that’s the only damn way to change the setting. Wide angle because that exagerated the perspective an makes the objects in the background much smaller than the subject. Peggy took about 8 shots in about 5 minutes.
I imported them to iPhoto and tweeked the look with the following settings: Exposure +.39 Contrast +100 Highlights 56.5 Shadows 11 Saturation 80 Temperature 17.9 Tint -1.6 Sharpness 1.00 Reduce Noise 14.2.
The light quality on a foggy day actually has a soft, wrap around everything, no harsh shadows quality that can be quite lovely. But it’s also very blue and very low-contrast. I boosted the over-all color level quite a bit and added more contrast, then brought the shadows and highlight back (a little on the shadows, a lot on the highlight.) Then I warmed up the color balance and tipped the tint away from the green side to the purple side. Lastly I added a dose of sharpness and noise reduction to give the photo a slightly painterly look.
This all stuff that years ago I would have have done with additional lights, reflectors and filters, and probably would even today if this were a “professional shoot”. None the less I’m pretty impressed with iPhotos ability to take a pretty dull light and dress it up enough that I’m happy with it.
I also like the way I look in the photo. Yeah, my belly looks bigger than I’d like, but I think my arms and chest look powerful, and the rendering feels “honest”, if that makes any kind of sense. I also like the way the sarong sits on my hips. There’s a certain easy confidence that seems to express how I feel when I’m feeling my best. It’s nice to see the camera can capture that.
Similarly, when I was in school, many of my female photography student colleagues went through self-portrait phases, but I remember this being far less common among male students.
