Archive for 2007

(Image Courtesy of BlueBlood.net)

Do you treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself? If so, do others actually tend to treat you the way you treat them?

Does it bother you when life is not fair?

I know some people start out with better raw materials than others — smarter, healthier, prettier, stronger, etc. — and I accept that.

But I want to believe that actions have consequences and good actions have good consequences and bad actions have bad consequences. I want to believe that what we do makes a difference.

Do you believe in karma? Do you believe in the rule of three? Do you believe the good you do comes back to you? Do you believe the bad you do comes back to you?

Do you wish those things were true but sometimes falter in the faith that they are?

Interview: Los Angeles Peeps, What did you do for Halloween?

There were a number of Halloween events in Los Angeles this year. I’m wondering which ones everyone went to and which were their favorites? So here are my interview questions for one and all:

(1) What did you do for Halloween, either the weekend before or on the day?

(2) Did you go to any clubs or parties? If so, which ones and what did you like best or least?

(3) Did you wear a costume? If so, what were you?

(4) Of the things you did, what did you enjoy the most or the least?

(5) If I quote your interview answers, do you want to be anonymous or named? If named, please specify how you would like to be referred to.

Thanks!
–Amelia

EDIT: I can leave answers screened for those who wish to be anonymous.

Michelle Aston helped me and Forrest Black out a whole lot this Halloween season. I’d say she is heaven-sent, but maybe the orders come from below. Hard to tell. Here are a couple of shots we did of her from a larger erotic series available in its entirety on BlueBlood.com or Michelle-Aston.com.

Really NSFW sample image after the jump.

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Blue Blood Writer TC Celebrates Birthday with Bowling and Pabst
by Amelia G : November 5th, 2007

A few weeks back, my good friend TC, lead singer of Satiate and Blue Blood writer, celebrated her birthday. TC is into her Americana, so the theme of the evening was bowling and Pabst Blue Ribbon (and later tittays, tittays, tittays.) We started off the evening at Lucky Strike Lanes. The bowling alley at the flailing Hollywood and Highland mall advertises itself as upscale and I generally end up there fairly regularly when various porn companies rent out the VIP for parties. The teams were roughly divided along band lines of Satiate versus Dead Girls Corporation. I played on the birthday girl’s team and we were utterly pasted by DGC. In my defense, although I do not do an approach, I am not a terrible bowler, but Lucky Strike Lanes has an awful ball selection on a weekend night and their lanes are non-standard length and a bunch of their machinery seems oddly timed. Not in my defense, the other team also had to contend with the same sucky ball selection and non-standard lane length and oddly timed machinery. I swear all the balls seemed like they were made for giant steroid users with baby hands, like sixteen pound balls only a little kid could get a finger spread in. At one point, I accidentally threw one of the balls our lane was using when the system was actually changing pins and my ball went down the middle of the lane, got stopped by the pin-sweeper, and just kind of hung out there. I finally went up the lane to retrieve it. To my friends’ amusement and the bowling alley personnel’s annoyance. I can’t help it if I’m a DIY problem-solver.

Continuing my beer-related sports . . .

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So Scar did this caning video and the marks on her ass were truly dramatic. She and I felt this really needed to be immortalized. So we shot this series in my favorite local coffeehouse. Oddly enough, it closed a few days later, in an unrelated incident.

Whole series available to members of BlueBlood.com or Scar13.com. NSFW additional shot after the jump.

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This is my slightly belated Day of the Dead post.

(Image Courtesy of BlueBlood.net)

Sometimes something happens and I really want to tell my maternal grandmother about it. Sometimes there is a holiday and I think of how much she would enjoy celebrating it. She never really got into the internet, although I think she would have loved it, if she had given a low res monitor a chance or been healthier when it first started getting well-used. I really miss her.

Do you ever wish you could talk to someone who is dead, even if just for a few minutes?

So I had a conversation in the women’s bathroom at a nightclub with this photographer chick. We talked for fifteen or twenty minutes about how no one ever photographs the photographers. I thought we bonded on the topic. So I had her come over to where Forrest Black and I were shooting and we took her picture and later posted it to BlueBlood.net. She was not the easiest person in the world to take a hot picture of, but I thought we did a good job. This despite the distraction of an obnoxious friend or two of hers who were looking on while we were trying to shoot and yelling how we must want to shoot her private parts. She was mostly naked anyway and we were trying to compose flattering shots. I’ve shot some of the most physically attractive naked people in the world. I get around 300 model submissions a week, every week. Neither Forrest nor I needs to sneak an upskirt shot or whatever you would call the equivilent when someone is wearing just a few strips of cloth.

At any rate, as soon as Forrest and I were done taking this photographer’s picture, she just walked away. I just stood there stunned for a moment that she could have talked to me for that long about how incredibly awful it is that no one ever takes the photog’s pic and then just walked away after we took her picture. She had to pick up her camera off the seats by our shooting area and all she would have had to do was point it at us and click the shutter. She was doing roving club snapshots and already had her camera settings for doing so locked in. It would have required no setup or anything for her to treat me with remotely similar kindness to the kindness I had just shown her. This is what Forrest Black and I were wearing at the time, so it is not like the pictures of us would have looked totally unfestive:

(Image Courtesy of BlueBlood.net)

(Image Courtesy of BlueBlood.net)

Even if we were wearing burlap sacks, I think it would have been polite for her to shoot a few quick shots of us, after we had done the same for her. But whatever. I posted the pictures and forgot about it.

Fast forward to this year at the same event. The same photographer chick comes up to Forrest and asks him to shoot her and like two dozen of her friends in a group shot because their costumes were supposed to be along a coordinated theme. Forrest explained that even three people is generally too many for us to shoot in that kind of setup and we just couldn’t do it. When we are set up at an event, it might be a big deal location for the event, but the space is very small for a studio and we bring lighting to do artistic portraits of one or two people at a time, not to shoot some gang of 24. In point of fact, almost every time I let myself be talked into shooting three people, something of ours gets broken.

So, Forrest pointed out that there was no way we were set up to shoot something like that and suggested that she had a camera and could certainly shoot what she wanted. He hadn’t realized that her outfit was intended to be a costume on the same theme. In context, you could sort of figure out what character she was trying to pull off, but it was not obvious. Not that he did not process what she was wearing, but her outfit just was not very close to the movie character it was apparently based on. And honestly her outfit was also just not the kind of thing we generally photograph.

So, refusing to take Forrest’s no for an answer, she came over and asked me to take a picture of her giant group of friends. I don’t know whether it was her intention to try to knock down our setup, but I can’t think what her intention was in pursuing something undoable after the situation had been explained to her. I basically told her exactly what Forrest told her. Then she asked me over and over again, even though I kept saying no. She made me say no 8 or 9 times to a favor I literally could not do.

Then she came back later by herself and is sort of pressing to get her picture taken. I politely tell her no thanks. Then she makes me say no 3 or 4 times. Finally, she angrily raises her voice to me and snarls that I could just tell her if I didn’t want to take her picture. I kind of thought I’d been telling her all night, but okay.

I reminded her that she and I had had a long conversation at the same event the previous year about how awful it was that photographers never got their pictures taken. I had thought we had bonded on it. Only then I was kind of bummed that afterwards I took her picture and she did not take my picture.

Seems really simple, right? Just the Golden Rule of treating others how you would like to be treated yourself.

So she is dead silent for a moment. Then she asks me indignantly if I was wearing a costume. I think a good photographer needs to notice the people around them, but I tell her that, yes, I was. Then she thanks me profusely for telling her what was up. She tells me how much she loves Forrest Black’s and my work and how she really loved the pictures we took of her and posted them to her MySpace. I just poked over to her MySpace now and she does indeed have one of the shots we shot of her up there and it has all positive comments on it and it has more comments than any other image on her profile, with the sole exception of her default. She tells me that she really likes me as a person. I’m not sure that she knows me super well as a person, but I appreciate the sentiment. I tell her it is not like I am holding a grudge after a year and hug her. She reiterates how happy she is that I told her what the issue is.

At this point, I expect her to say something along the lines of, “let’s fix that right now, just let me go grab my camera.” But she says nothing. The silence stretches out and becomes extremely awkward. I’m just standing there like, is she really still not going to include me or Forrest in her snapshot gallery? Finally, the silence becomes too awkward and I tell her, “maybe we will rectify the situation at the next event.” She sort of huffs off and I’m totally baffled that she still made no attempt to make things right, other than saying a bunch of suckdick stuff about how much she loves my photography and how sorry she was. The apology felt pretty damn insincere, given that her actions showed she was thoroughly capable of doing the exact same thing again. I still expected that maybe she would come back with her camera, but she didn’t.

So I woke up today, feeling wrung out and irritated. I’m sure we shot some great stuff, but it was a really grueling night. The late night afterparty we went to afterwards, at an unrelated location, was really fun and I wish we could have stayed at it longer, but I had to get up to work this morning, so my crew left at 4am when our parking space became a street cleaning zone. I gave a bunch of Blue Blood’s remote and on-site workers Halloween off because, if you can’t take Halloween off working for a gothic company, when can you take it off? But, between vacation time and Halloween work, Blue Blood has a looooooooooot of work to do in November.

Today, while trying to catch up on regular work which fell a bit behind during all the Halloween-oriented work and whatnot, I kept thinking that I really wanted to make a journal post about the various things which really troubled me last night. This one incident was just one of them. But I decided that I was going to try to just not focus on bad energy.

So now I hear the photographer chick is up on some forum saying how I am a “bitch” and inciting people to be as unpleasant to me as possible up to and including physical violence.

So she is totally reasonable for never having taken my picture, despite my asking. But I am a bitch for taking her picture one time and not taking her picture another time?

It is not just that I disagree. I absolutely do not see how someone can hold those two thoughts in their head at the same time.

I have photographed a significant percentage of the scenester photographers in Los Angeles over the years. Want to know how many have photographed me, even in a snapshot? I’m going to spoil the surprise. The answer is one: Tim Sinn is really cool. This is just a journal entry, but I’ll probably do an article at some point about what is wrong, in a general cultural sense, with this mentality about photographers and photography in the community.

Anybody have any insight on why photographers, or anybody really, would behave like this?

Happy Halloween everyone!

A bunch of ForrestBlack‘s and my photography for Blue Blood’s Halloween celebrations is on the entirely free SpookyLinks blog right now. The whole sets are on BlueBlood.com of course, but the SpookyLinks blog has naughtier sample images than the BlueBlood.net free gallery can show you.

Please note that the SpookyLinks link is NSFW

WTF time is it?

My cable and computers think it is 5:45pm Pacific and my cell phone thinks it is 6:45pm Pacific. My car thought it was 6:45, but I changed it. Ditto for my alarm clock. Which appliance is correct?

Hex Hollywood Halloween with Blue Blood
by Forrest Black : October 29th, 2007

For everyone searching for one of the most spectacular Halloween events Southern California has to offer, we’ve always had a great time at HEX Hollywood, and this year is even bigger than ever. Blue Blood is proud to once again sponsor this epic Halloween holiday party and we will be in attendance, shooting more beautiful pictures and generally having a blast.

This year, Hex Halloween is taking over the spacious historic Avalon theater, located directly across the street from the world famous Capitol Records building. This theater was the first venue on the West Coast ever played by The Beatles back in 1964 and is even rumored to be haunted by quite a collection of interesting ghosts and spirits, so I know a spooky good time is in store for us. There has even been one regularly spotted on the balcony where Amelia G and I will be taking pictures.

The list of performers, activities, and attractions brought together by promoter Xian and her dedicated staff is truly impressive. There will be five DJ’s accross several dance floors, a full program of individual talented performers including Zombie Girl, Inure, the debut of Hex/Rx, Monastic, and even a full Butoh-a-Go-Go show by the Corpus Delecti Butoh Performance Lab. I’m also personally looking forward to seeing the collaborative performance Aesthetic Meat Front (AMF) and Constructs of Ritual Evolution (CoRE), all of whom have been our friends for a long time and always put on unforgettable shows.

Upstairs, in the Avalon’s Spider Club, there will be magicians, contortionists, hypnotic hoop twirling performances, and much more, all to the sounds of Gothic Darkwave Synthpop from some of the best spooky DJ’s the West has to offer. And, it wouldn’t be Halloween without . . .

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Every Day is Sexy Halloween
by Amelia G : October 28th, 2007

The following are the top three definitions of Halloween, as voted on by the users of Urban Dictionary:

”(1) An annual excuse for girls to dress like sluts and get away with it.

Girl 1: I’m going to be a ______ for Halloween.
Girl 2: What’s your costume look like?
Girl 1: I’m wearing my ______ underwear and _____ bra and heels.

(2) celebration where little kids dress up and get candy, teens dress up, get drunk, and go get candy, and adults dress up, get drunk, and give out candy, funny how things all work out.

im dressing up as a farmer for halloween. im so cool.

(3) the day that makes the other 364 worth living.”

For a lot of people Halloween is the one day out of the year that they can truly be themselves. It was always my favorite holiday and then one year it seemed like almost a let-down, like it wasn’t really any different from any other day. Which, in a way, meant that I guess I’d made the right life choices to get to be who I wanted to be all the time, but, since then, I try to pull out the stops when October rolls around, so it still feels special. Sometimes trying to pack so much into one short time period makes me melancholy and high strung around Halloween, but I generally end up feeling good about it, after all is said and done.

As usual, this year, Blue Blood is the media sponsor for a ton of events. The ones Forrest Black and I will be personally shooting at include the just passed Release the Bats Nine Year Anniversary and the upcoming Hex Hollywood Halloween 2007. You can see what we shot . . .

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Stockroom Syren Retail Store Grand Opening
by Amelia G : October 27th, 2007

Proving the power of going direct to the people, etailer and cataloguer Stockroom has been on a bit of an acquisition spree. A while back, Joel Tucker’s Stockroom joined forces with Syren, Andy Wilkes’ latex couturier. At the time, Syren was housed in a small space in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, an area known best for its good Jewish restaurants and photo and art supply stores. Stockroom has re-opened the Syren storefront in a large space in the Silverlake District of Los Angeles, an area known best for its young hipsters with trust funds and aging hipsters who might have given up on Hollywood ambitions but are still cool and craft-y. The new location for the combined Stockroom and Syren is 30,000 square feet. Customers enter the primarily fetish fashion retail area and can go upstairs to an area with a variety of BDSM gear and sex toys. There are print catalogs for people to take away which have a more complete selection of gear and toys. I hear that Silverlake may have some idiotic zoning ordinance which limits the selection of products which can actually be on disply, but I haven’t checked into the accuracy of this. The building also houses manufacturing, warehousing, business offices, and distribution for the company.

The grand opening of the new Syren store, in Stockroom’s new amalgamated location, drew a good-sized crowd. I ran into a bunch of people I hadn’t seen in ages, which was really cool. Luminaries in attendance included Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Blue Blood hottie Xochitl, photographer Jim Groves (who will be a Blue Blood photog once his pictures of Gia Primo . . .