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

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

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!

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. 

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…

I am just going to make a thread of photos flagged by @tumblr as I go through reporting everything to force Tumblr to spend paid man hours reviewing all my content. Let’s start with the first two. pic.twitter.com/faSzAGLTGE

— Nate Igor Smith (@drivenbyboredom) December 3, 2018

Cyber Monday is complete bullshit but maybe I just think that because I am terrible at capitalism. I feel the same way about consumerism as I do Photoshop, I hate it, but like maybe if I was good at it I would be more on board. I honestly have no idea, but I am here to try to sell you some shit anyway. Not at a discount mind you, because I am so bad at making money that my margins suck anyway so I can’t really give you a discount and I am not making enough money for me to care if you buy more shit. I just want you to buy it because I made it and I want people to have the stuff I made and I want to have less boxes in my living room.

So let’s get to it. Recently I mentioned my new zine Fuck LA and this mysterious project that I had created. Well, that project has officially been released and I have honestly sold most of them already (I only made 35) but it’s a callendar of people brushing their teeth because I have no idea why. 

At the end of 2017 someone emailed me about doing a calendar. Calendars seem silly because people have telephones now and because if you don’t sell them all my January first they are trash, but I had been working on my zine NOT SAFE and I realized I had a bunch of photos of girls brushing their teeth and I thought it would be hilarious to do a teeth brushing calendar and use a bunch of absurd anthropomorphic teeth clip art. So I found a place that does print on demand calendars, pulled and edit and found clip art. The problem was I only had 9 photos and I needed 12.

I immediately hit up all my favorite models that live near me and in two days I had shot Sabby, Lucy Everleigh and Sammy for the calendar. I was ready to go so I reached out to my friend Teddy to design the cover and throw some of the teeth clip art on there but he didn’t quite have time and we really ran out of time before Christmas so I put the project on hold for a year.

Last month I started up again. I had 12 photos ready to go, but one I didn’t really love and I happened to be shooting my friend Ashley and I asked her to let me take some of her brushing her teeth just in case and I ended up getting a really pretty black and white photo of her and the calendar was locked. I printed up 35 copies and bought a bunch of toothbrushes in bulk because I am a crazy person and here we are ready for you guys. 

The calendar features the four models I mentioned above plus musician/model Marz Lovejoy, pornstars Riley Reid, Stoya and Alexis Fawx, plus Anya Amsel, Kirra Hughes, Whit, and this girl Taylor who I don’t think I have seen since I took the photo and couldn’t find out how to contact her so she’s the only model who doesn’t have her birthday listed on the calendar. Half of the photos involve some nudity and 5 out of 12 photos are in black and white. They are all 35mm photos. The clip art is adorable. 

If you order a calendar it comes with a free toothbrush and a appointment reminder card because I am an idiot or brilliant I am not quite sure. Whatever the case it’s better than anything you can get from your dentist aside from healthy teeth and a more attractive face. Whatever. I am 100% sending my dentist one of these calendars too and if you have a calendar you can find out when my next dentist appointment is and then ask me how it goes when I show up for the appointment. 

Oh and I shot some digital test shots of Sabby, Lucy, Sammy and Ashley whilst I was shooting the calendar. I was both trying to figure out the best composition and making sure I had something in case the film didn’t come out, but fortunately it didn’t come to that because the digital shots are pretty bad. But if you do want to see the digital outtakes I uploaded them to Girls of Driven By Boredom so if you sign up for that you can see a bunch more of these photos. Also, you should still buy Fuck LA cause Cyber Monday or something. 

Click here to buy the 2019 Driven By Boredom Dental calendar!

If you are reading this I am in Los Angeles. I am in town for a few reasons but the important one is that on the 18th, that’s this Sunday, I am going to be at the Cultural Traffic Art Fair at That That Gallery. I will be selling my new zine Fuck LA (you should buy it!!) as well as Instaxxx, a bunch of other zines and prints and stuff. I am pretty psyched for it. 

That That Gallery is located at 4405 W Jefferson Blvd in Los Angeles and goes from 11am until 8pm. It’s completely free and there should be a ton of amazing stuff for sale there. I am splitting the table with my friends at Wood Rocket and they will have a bunch of weird things for sale like enamel pins, adult coloring books and new posters from vintage porn classics like Debbie Does Dallas and The Devil In Miss Jones. There are a bunch of great exhibitors as well including my friends at Paperwork NYC and rad publishers like Kill Your Idols and Richardson.

I don’t really have much more to mention in this post, but since I might not update again until after Thanksgiving (Gonna try and get some new pictures up this week but no promises) I figured I would give you guys something to hold you off. I took some photos of one of my friends dressed like a topless pigeon for some reason. I am not sure what I just said makes complete sense so let me explain. My friend asked me if I would take photos of her topless wearing a pigeon mask walking around NYC. We went to Times Square but it was raining so we went to Applebee’s like midwestern tourists and then finally took some photos of her topless hanging out with weird people who dress like the Statue of Liberty for money. The photos are real silly but she was happy with them and now you can look at them if you subscribe to Girls of Driven By Boredom. If you don’t then you are out of luck. It’s like $25 a year so I don’t know what you are doing not signing up.

I am gonna go hang out with my girlfriend now because we are celebrating our 1 year anniversary today. That’s pretty adorable right? Maybe you guys could look at the photos we ever took. I posted them right before we started dating officially so that’s extra cute. Sorry.

Okay, that’s enough. Here’s a flyer. See you guys sooner or later. 

I get it, you don’t care about these posts I do related to sports. You didn’t come here for that. Maybe you like football but you don’t care about the Dolphins or the fan club I run. Too bad. My guess is I am only going to post about them one more time this year, but it’s just something you are going to have to deal with. Sorry.

Because they are in different conferences the Dolphins only play the Green Bay Packers once every four years. Every eight years the game is in Green Bay. Green Bay is the smallest market in the NFL by far (only 100k people live there) but they have won the most football championships in the NFL. *Of course that’s because they are one of only three teams to have been around for 100 years and the NFL didn’t exist until 1966 and didn’t exist as it does now until 1970, and they’ve only won two Super Bowls since then but don’t tell them that.) Lambeau is one of the oldest Stadiums in the NFL and is a bucket list item for every NFL fan. Most of the seats are still bleachers and it’s home to the coldest football game in NFL history. The Super Bowl trophy is even named after their legendary coach Vince Lombardi.

Anyway, as soon as the schedule came out a group of us got tickets to the game and that group got bigger and bigger as the season went on. After people heard we were going they started asking us about tailgating options since we throw this huge tailgate whenever the Dolphins play in New Jersey so I kinda felt like I had to do something, but I was so busy I kept putting it off until we were about a week away from the game.

Fortunately a former Miami Dolphins beat writer reached out to me to ask about tailgating. He heard a guy named Ace had a great location about a block away from the stadium so I reached out to Ace to see what his plans were. He is the manager of a store called Extreme Audio in Manitowoc, WI (home to Making a Murder – I actually went to Avery Auto Salvage!) and asked his boss if when the Dolphins played the Packers he could use the Green Bay location to throw a tailgate. Extreme Audio serves as a parking lot during Packers games so his boss said as long as he could still sell the parking spaces Ace could tailgate there. 

It seemed like a perfect solution so I offered to buy 7 parking spaces that we could tailgate in as well as some money to pay for food. I reached out to Sailor Jerry and got them to send us some rum to make spiked hot apple cider. I posted on our social about the parking spaces and sold all of them in advance of the game in 24 hours and got the word out to hundreds of Dolphins fans who had made the trip. Ace did all the hard work and got all the food and booze and we went from a small tailgate into a massive event in just five days!

We asked everyone who showed up to throw in $10 if they wanted to eat food and although we bought a couple cases of beer it was mostly BYOB. In the end we raised over $1000 and donated $800 of that for the local Toys 4 Tots! Dolfans NYC is a non profit so we didn’t take any money back, but we gave the $200 to Ace for his extra expenses. Overall it was a great day (at least until the game started).

Lambeau was an amazing experience (although I wouldn’t want to sit in freezing temperatures on cold metal benches very often) and we even did a tour of the stadium the night before which was a lot of fun. I took a handful of shots from the tour and the rest of the photos here are from the tailgate the next day. If for some reason you made it this far you probably actually want to see the photos so let’s get on with it.

Click here to see all the photos from the Dolfans NYC trip to Green Bay and Lambeau Field.

I recently got invited to be part of the Cultural Traffic art fair on the 18th in LA and it seemed like the perfect excuse to get out to LA for the first time in over a year. It also just so happens that my girlfriend is going to be there right before the fair and today is our one year anniversary so the timing was perfect for me to actually see her this month. My brother lives in LA so my parents are gonna come out too and we are gonna spend Thanksgiving together outside of DC for the first time in my life I think. But the important thing (for the purposes of this post) is that I have some new stuff coming out and you should buy it.

The first thing I have coming out has nothing to do with the LA trip. Over a year ago I had a really dumb idea and the timing wasn’t quite right but I held on to this idea until it was finally ready. I just got a box of 35 copies of whatever this dumb idea is. I have already sold about a dozen of them without telling anyone what it is and I only need to sell about 5 or 6 more to break even so I feel like this dumb idea was worth it. Everyone I have shown it to seemed to really enjoy it so maybe you will too. If you order it before I announce what it is (on November 18th), you get a free copy of my new zine as well, plus I will ship it to you before I leave for LA and you will get it and the zine in your hands before anyone else.

Speaking of the zine, this whole post is about the 2nd edition of my zine Fuck LA. 

Fuck LA was a special edition zine that I only made 50 copies of for the LA Art Book Fair a few years ago. It sold out really quickly and was hand numbered and came with a print. I was pretty proud of the zine and when this new book fair came out it seemed like a great reason to republish the zine.

I figured I would maybe remove a few photos and add a few more, but when I looked at it again I realized that a bunch of the photos were reused in my zine NOT SAFE and there were some photos I didn’t love or ones I didn’t really feel like I wanted to republish. Even so, I left in some of the crazier shit that is way more graphic than any of the stuff I post on here. So let’s just say it is very not safe for work.

The new edition ended up being more than 50% new photos and I even added 4 pages. Fuck LA was my largest zine to begin with and now it’s 56 pages! I actually have to charge $12 for it instead of $10 because it’s so long. It has a ton of new work and I added some black and white spreads which weren’t in the original. It’s still all 35mm and it still has some of my favorite photos from all my trips to LA over the years. It’s got a bunch of nude stuff but it also has a bunch of just crazy fucked up LA stuff like the time I saw a bunch of people get arrested at gunpoint while I was eating at a diner. It’s a really fun zine and even people who own the first edition will enjoy the new one. It’s not signed or numbered and it doesn’t come with a print but there’s only 100 copies and I don’t plan on publishing it again. Plus if you pre-order the zine I will sign it anyway.

So if you order Fuck LA now I will sign it and ship it as soon as I get back from LA. If you order the mystery item you will get it and the signed zine BEFORE I leave for LA. Plus I will include some weird shit with it because I love you.

Click here to pre-order the mystery item and the zine.

And click here to pre-order Fuck LA by itself.

Over the weekend I went to the 2018 Exxxotica NJ adult convention. It’s an event I have covered way too many times but it’s always fun to see everyone and I usually get some fun shots in a random hotel room after the convention is over. The last two years I was actually working for Exxxotica because my friend Steve Prue is their house photographer and he needed someone to cover a few things for him. This year they didn’t need me but my friend Veda offered me a ride and the hotels were super cheap so I decided to go even though I was just shooting for myself. 

On Friday I spent most of the time just saying hi to people and introducing Veda and her friend Kitty to people and really just hanging out. I took maybe 20 usable photos on the first day. On day two I knew I wanted to shoot more so I spent most of the day on my own shooting and ended up with a decent gallery even though it was decidedly lazy. I mostly just shot my friends and then some random sniping when I saw good fan/star interaction. So here I am once again apologizing for my photos even though I should probably pretend I am the shit since most people can’t tell good photography from bad photography anyway so it doesn’t really matter.

Outside of the actual convention I think I probably got some fun stuff. The first night we didn’t get into much but I did end up shooting Veda and Kitty in our hotel room. I mostly shot 35mm stuff, but I did shoot a handful of digital shots too. The light just sucked so I focused mostly on shooting with my flash on my 35mm point and shoot and some black and white as well. Since the digital stuff is pretty mediocre, but the girls are fun to look at, I decided I would just make that shoot an exclusive to Girls of Driven By Boredom, so if you want to see them naked in a hotel room go sign up now. 

The second night was fun. I was waiting for a friend to hit me up about shooting in her hotel room, but never heard back so I was ready to give up and head back to the city when Veda got a text from someone telling her we should come by the Inked Angels Awards after party. We figured we would check it out quickly and then head back to Brooklyn. When we got there the after party was over but we ended up hanging out with a bunch of drunk tattooed porn peoples, got a White Castle Crave Case (30 burgers!) and ended up partying in Johnny Gash’s hotel room. That’s a horrifying porn name, but we were pretty much wearing the same outfit so I appreciate him anyway. I hope a bunch of the 35mm stuff comes out because it was a weird fucking night. We probably drove back around 3am or something and missed out on day 3 of the convention because I had to watch football because my life is weird. None of this really matters, but I still have a bunch of convention photos for you to look at below. 

Click here to see all the photos from the 2018 Exxxotica New Jersey convention at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center.