10 Years Later…

10 years ago today I was laid off from my job at Archive.org. I was digitizing books that were in the public domain so that anyone could read them without having a physical copy. Archive.org is a non-profit and a huge part of their budget came from Microsoft donations. The housing market collapse in 2008 caused a lot of companies to reevaluate their corporate giving and Microsoft massively cut their donation for 2009. 

Two days before we left for the holiday we were told that the late shift was being cut completely and that everyone from both shifts could reapply for their jobs the next day. They would pick the best from both groups for the shift. Unfortunately for me I was working part time as a nightlife photographer and there was no way I could get to a day job at 7am every day when I was getting home at 5am. I took 6 weeks severance, filed for unemployment and took a few weeks to figure out what I was going to do next.

I also ended up benefiting from the market crash because that January I was hired to photograph Sundance for the main liquor sponsor even though I didn’t even have a legit professional camera at the time. I did the job for way less than I should have charged, but it was a ton of money for me and everyone was happy. Right around that same time someone randomly found a photo I took of all my cameras and paid me a few thousand dollars to retake that photo for a poster for a Swiss photo competition.

So suddenly I went from going paycheck to paycheck to having a little money in the bank and enough to buy a better camera and by the time my unemployment ran out I still hadn’t run out of money. 10 years later I have had a lot of ups and downs but I still haven’t had to get a job. Given the state of the industry, I might not make it 11 years, but I made it 10 years as a professional photographer and I am pretty proud of that.

I don’t really have any other new content for you today, but here’s a bunch of links to the best photos I have taken over the last 10 years. I am also uploading a new set exclusive to Girls of Driven By Boredom today so if you want to see some new NSFW photos of Kasey Warner and her friend Damia, go sign up there.

Now here are links to my “Best of” posts from 2009-2017. I will start working on the “Best of 2018” post in January.

Best Of 2009Best Of 2010Best Of 2011 – Best Of 2012

Best Of 2013Best Of 2014Best Of 2015Best Of 2016Best Of 2017

Me In 2009

Me In 2018 

 

 

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Meet Ashley

A few months ago Kimberly Kane told me about her friend Ashley who was moving to New York. She was like “Ashley rules and she needs to meet new people in the city.” KK is one of my favorite humans of all time so I took her word for it and got some food with Ashley. She does in fact rule and a week or two later I went over to her place and we took some photos. 

This shoot is like the perfect example of my strengths and weaknesses as a photographer. On the strengths side, after meeting me once Ashley was comfortable enough to want to do a shoot with me. She had only posed nude once before and apparently I am only the second dude to ever see her naked which is a god damned honor. I think I made her comfortable while we were shooting and we got some photos that she was really psyched about.

On the negative side I don’t use lighting so shooting in a fairly dark room was challenging. A studio photographer would have set up a couple lights and wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But that’s where we get back to one of my strengths. I am pretty good at figuring out ways to make shoots work, be it using a TV to light a shoot or in this case a projector and a lamp.

It was a lot of fun to mess with the projector, using both the light it bounced off the wall and the projector directly. She also had some LED smart bulbs so we played with those a bit too as well as the little bit of natural light that was coming through the window. But on the negative side again, we were using very little light and I missed a bunch of shots because they were just slightly out of focus or the projector hit my lens creating less than compelling lens flares.

On the plus side again, I really like shooting in people’s spaces. It feels very real and natural and I like that. But on the negative I tend to do stuff like not notice that there’s something dark hanging on the wall directly behind dark hair and it’s distracting as fuck or just the little things in the background like plugs or trash cans that lead to a messy composition. 

Whatever the case, I ultimately really enjoy these photos and I hope you guys do too. Also Ashley and I have become friends so not only will you probably get more photos of her in the future but she is also becoming a fan of my hockey team and that is incredibly important.

And now it is time to sell you things. 1) Ashley was the very last person I shot for my absurd Driven By Boredom Dental calendar. There are only a few copies left and if you wanna get one my Christmas order now! 2) There are some photos of Ashley fully naked on Girls of Driven By Boredom and as always all the photos from this set are available there in high resolution. Go sign up! Okay, let’s get to the free photos already.

Click here to see the NSFW photos of Ashley!

Ashley

Ashley

Ashley

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2018 #MetLifeTakeover Video

Don’t worry folks, this is going to be my last Dolphins related post of the season. I mean, I guess there is a tremendously small chance that the incredibly subpar Dolphins could somehow win their next 4 regular season games, make the playoffs and then win several more games after that and I would have no choice but to do a post about my trip to the Super Bowl, but let’s just say that’s unlikely. 

As I mentioned a while ago, I organize this big event when the Dolphins play the Jets in New Jersey. We do a pre-party the night before, we do a huge tailgate party on game day and then we sell tickets to the actual game. I have to imagine we do the largest away game event in the country for any football team, we certainly own the largest several group ticket purchases in MetLifeStadium history (and they have two NFL teams playing there). This year we sold 1100 tickets and raised several thousand dollars for charity since we (DolfansNYC) are a non-profit. 

Anyway, the game was way back in September, but the video is finally out now. Go watch it if you want. I am pretty proud of it.

Oh and don’t worry I promise I will post some nudes or something fun next week. 

 

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The Death Of Tumblr

After Tumblr announced they were banning all adult content from their site I made a Twitter thread of all the absurd images that Tumblr had flagged as adult. After seeing the thread Xeni Jardin asked me if I would like to write a couple hundred words for the site Boing Boing about my experience with Tumblr. I figured I would write something longer for this site and then Boing Boing could just pull from that but they ended really liking the article and running the entire piece. I have been a Boing Boing reader for more than a decade so it means a lot to be published there. Click here to read the copy edited version on Boing Boing or read my unedited draft below.


There was a time when Tumblr was my favorite place to post photos. It was a social network that you could customize in so many ways that you could create a blog or a mood board or hide a secret project behind a password protected gate. It was used by so many people in so many different ways. You could posts .gifs on Tumblr before they worked on Twitter and you could post uncompressed images that looked good on desktop or smartphone without having to know any code. 

I used it as a great place to post images that I could then send to Twitter to get around Twitter’s terrible compression and constantly flowing feed. I used it as a place to organize my images because of Tumblr’s tagging system. I could search for a person or subject or send someone a link to just a specific tag so they could see all my favorite photos of juggalos for example. It was a fantastic tool and my most popular social network until Instagram really exploded.

My career as a photographer took off right around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr and Tumblr really felt like a place where I could post my more personal work alongside my more commercial stuff. I would shoot digitally for my clients and then post my 35mm work to Tumblr’s fantastic film photography community. My road trip photos didn’t feel out of place with my nude work on Tumblr. The band photos I shot for Rolling Stone didn’t feel strange next to the outtakes of work that I shot for Hustler or Playboy. My nightlife work for the Village Voice worked with the snapshots of my friends that I took with a point and shoot camera. The journalism I shot for Vice worked with the terrible Dos and Don’ts I also shot for Vice. 

The photographer Corwin Prescott put it perfectly when he said “I think the saddest part for me is Tumblr was the only place that all my work could be displayed side by side.” His Tweet featured gorgeous photos of a buffalo in the fog and a mountain reflected in an icy pond next to two equally beautiful erotic images. Tumblr was a perfect place for us, photographers who crossed the line between commercial and adult work many times over.

Tumblr had some problems of course; content was constantly posted and reblogged without a source, tags like “#thinspiration” became upsettingly popular and porn was everywhere which was clearly a problem for a social network that had a younger audience. But it was also a place for people to explore their sexuality and gender and find adult materials without blame and find communities of people dealing with issues they were going through. Like Facebook with “Fake News” and Twitter with Nazis Tumblr faced these issues with the grace of a pigeon nubs for feet. 

When Tumblr was sold to Yahoo! for over a billion dollars in 2013 Yahoo! did what they do best, they destroyed the company. I don’t really want to go through the history of Tumblr’s downfall, there’s plenty of stuff you can read about it, but let’s skip to 2017 which is when they lost me.

Last year Tumblr started filtering “adult” blogs. Instead of giving you an option to mark specific content adult or not, they just marked any Tumblr account with nudity as adult and the only way you could view these Tumblrs would be to log into your Tumblr account and turn off “Safe Search”. This meant anyone without a Tumblr account, or without being logged into one, wouldn’t be able to see anything I posted. So that means sharing to Twitter was done and it meant I could no longer send people links to my work via Tumblr. It gutted me. That was the end of Tumblr for me.

A year later I decided that I should maybe go back to Tumblr. I wasn’t going to share that stuff with Twitter anymore, but I had 20,000 people following me on Tumblr and I felt I could post the occasional post for them. I didn’t update a lot after that, but it was actually fun to see feedback from Tumblr because the few people left were actively engaging with my content. I had missed Tumblr.

In March of 2018 a bill called FOSTA-SESTA was passed. The House was called FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and the Senate bill was called SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). They passed with wide bipartisan support and were hailed as some great achievement in stopping sex trafficking. In reality what they did was destroy the Internet as we know it

The bills make websites liable for sex trafficking and child pornography on their platforms. Meaning if someone uploaded child porn to Tumblr, then Tumblr could be responsible for that. (This also had major implications for consensual sex work because a platform like Craigslist is liable for escort ads published on their site. I could write a much longer article about that, but for the moment we are talking about Tumblr.) 

In November Tumblr was kicked off the Apple Store because of child porn reports and less than a month later Tumblr decided that they would shut down all adult content on the site (meanwhile Twitter is still filled with Nazis) including “female presenting nipples”. It’s like killing a fly with a rocket launcher. 

I went to my Tumblr today and I found that the majority of my posts over the last couple years had been flagged. They missed some stuff, but more often the flagged things that weren’t adult. They flagged women in underwear, “male presenting” nipples, and even images of alcohol and smoking. Clearly some of these were a mistake like an image of my friend eating ice cream and Tumblr has created a review process, but if click to “Learn More” about the review process it opens up blank browser window. Impressive. 

This has been a disaster for Tumblr and instead of fixing their platform, it’s just putting the final nail in their coffin. I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but I would be very surprised if Tumblr is as relevant as MySpace a year from now. 

If you have a Tumblr with adult content (or really any content) make sure you download or export your Tumblr before December 17th.

If you want to enjoy some of the incredibly offensive things that Tumblr flagged please enjoy this Twitter thread at least until Twitter blows itself up a few months from now…

 

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