When I was in high school, a cute boy who got stabbed didn’t have the option to photograph himself swaggering and smiling on painkillers (I assume) in the hospital and get 15 minutes of fame. You can check out Nate Scimio’s Instagram here. I’m sure there will come a time when…( Read more )
by Amelia G : May 5th, 2010
You’ve probably seen some of Richard Avery’s shots for Juliland in the Blue Blood Contributors Pages because of his recent work with Blue Blood beauties such as Aiden Starr, Darenzia, Lexi Belle, and Justine Joli. Juliland also features Aria Giovanni, Dana DeArmond, Roxy DeVille, Emily Marilyn, Ariel X, and Dita Von Teese, so you know we’ve got some taste in common, The site he does with Juli Ashton also features dozens more incredible women. Blue Blood in print published a teensy bit of Richard Avery’s work some time back, but we actually met in person for the first time through Lange. In this interview, Richard Avery and I chat photography, creativity, and hot women. We’ve got a little free Juliland photo gallery to give you a taste. Enjoy.
Amelia G: It is pretty common for the music world to utilize both color and black and white photography, but I think it is relatively uncommon for erotica. I have this theory that all the erotic sites which utilize both are music culture influenced. From a creative standpoint, what do you like about color versus black and white?
Richard Avery: Wow! That’s a tough one. I have many thoughts and opinions on photography today, digital, color, b&w and the future. I’ll give you some of the basics… No matter what you do or use, there has to be a vision behind it. As an artist it doesn’t matter what you do or who you do. You just have to show that you know what you want and are very clear. Quality is most important. b&w or color, it just needs to be good. Today most photographers rely on photoshop tricks and forget about the subject. Tricks are for kids!!! A great photo is one . . .
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This is a shot from the sweet 16th set of Rachel Face ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
forrestblack and I have shot for the Blue Blood VIP. I love how uber-punk Rachel comes across in this series and the swanky boutique hotel we shot these at was so amazingly cool. Despite the fact that people from neighboring hotels complained about Rachel’s appearance, our hotel was still down for sending someone to get me an iced latte when my energy started to flag. Oi oi, now that is service.
Senior Blue Blood writer Will Judy calls Forrest Black’s shotgun “the luckiest shotgun in the world”. What can I say about beautiful Dana Dark that I haven’t said before?
This is a sample shot from the 15th set of Rachel Face forrestblack and I shot which has been published in the Blue Blood VIP. We shot this at a nighttime hotspot called The Jockey Club. We had to wait until after the bar closed and, when we got there at like 4am, there were still some, err, patrons using the bar. They were kind enough to more or less vacate for a while, so we could shoot.
Blue Blood VIP updates are usually scheduled a long time in advance because it would be a heck of a lot more difficult to organize scrambling to post a varied update every day on the actual day. So today’s Fetus de Milo shoot by yours truly and forrestblack was set to post on October 21 quite some time ago. Oddly enough, my LJ birthday reminder popped up today to tell me that it is Fetus de Milo’s birthday. What an odd little bit of synchronicity.
forrestblack and I always like to photograph smiles. Sometimes I find that certain sorts of models will apologize for smiling. Happily Jax makes no apologies for her grin. We’ve shot a lot of kind of refined-looking smiles on Jax, but this one is particularly delightfully possessed-looking I think. The whole set this shot is from posted to the Blue Blood VIP today.
forrestblack and I often come up with shoot ideas to justify goofy fun purchases. In this case, we were very amused by the idea of latex bondage tape, which is basically brightly colored Saran Wrap for people. So we figured red hair on Yolanda and red hair on Szandora meant they would color coordinate nicely with red bondage tape. Szandora’s flexibility and double-jointed limbs are always a plus for bondage, and her topping from the bottom — harder, harder, tighter, tighter — is always entertaining.
Tech tip: Yolanda dyed her hair a slightly different shade of red right before the shoot, but a bit of playing with the hue function in Photoshop keeps it all looking relatively of a piece.
Full series in the Blue Blood VIP.
It is a glowing testament to the awesomeness of Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich that this shoot turned out great. I hope to photograph them both again soon.
The prep for this was pretty much cursed.
Syd is a bit of a gladiator, so my initial concept was to put the two of them in armor with swords. A guy I’d done a lot of favors for in the past, and gotten armor from in the past, told me that he completely had stuff that would be perfect for the dancer body types I described to him. It turned out that the only stuff he had was some embarrassingly awful half-assed stuff he had made for Britney Spears’ back-up dancers . . . which the Britney Spears people had hated so much they stopped working with the guy. There was no way I was putting Syd or Jiz in those defective outfits, but it had been a couple years since I last got armor from this particular source and I don’t think he’d cleaned his studio in the intervening time. He was hyperventilating about something or other and so I looked through the armor myself and had an allergic reaction to the filth. It was all sort of tragic and I was going to just get a couple pieces and see if I could put something together with some mismatched stuff and then the guy all of a sudden wants a totally ridiculous price and gets really aggro and tells me he is having a very bad day. I try not to take my bad days out on other people, so that hurt my feelings, especially as I was kinda pulling stuff at this point to be polite. So I decided to skip the whole mess.
Then part of the camera broke when I took it out of the bag at the location.
All of which I would have taken as a bad omen and called it a day under many circumstances, but I was really excited to shoot Syd Blakovich and Jiz Lee and we met for coffee beforehand and I just felt like we were creatively on the same page. And, of course, there is the part where they are both ridiculously gorgeous. So forrestblack and I still did the shoot. As an artist, I could fret about this or that which is marginally different from whatever, but everything turned out really terrific. Sometimes what a shoot seems like it will be in the prep stage evolves into something different yet excellent as various factors play out and as part of the collaborative process of shooting.
This is a shot from the first set of Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich for the Blue Blood VIP. You can check out this free Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich gallery. More updates of them to come, plus a video interview about their Twincest art project.
by Amelia G : September 27th, 2009
Blasphemy Day is a new internet-spawned holiday like Talk Like a Pirate Day or CAPS LOCK DAY. I’m not surprised that more people added typing like a pirate to their holiday calendars than typing in all capital letters, but I would have thought more people would have gotten into Blasphemy Day.
Blasphemy Day is set for September 30, as a tip of the hat to the riots caused when a Danish newspaper ran a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. According to the anonymously-run Blasphemy Day web site, “International Blasphemy Day is not just a day. It is a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism . . . The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.” Noble aspiration, although I’m not sure a mean-spirited cartoon really advances human knowledge. Slaying sacred cows can be humorous (Heck, even the existence of the idiomatic expression sacred cow is pretty funny), but I have yet to hear anyone explain what the joke was in the Danish Muhammad cartoon, except maybe that it would piss people off.
I used to feel like each person’s individual relationship with their deity or deities or lack thereof was . . .
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Work forrestblack and I created with the beautiful Dana Dark is on Yuhmm today!
Is it weird that I shot photos for over a decade before I got around to putting together a portfolio site for my work? I find it difficult enough to choose a favorite image from a series that choosing just enough images for a portfolio always made me hyperventilate. I’ve shot more than 3,000 people. How to choose just a couple dozen photos from all that? Hopefully I made good selections. Anyone who feels like checking my port out and giving me feedback, I would welcome it.
forrestblack shot this portrait of yours truly at the recent Vampire-Con. He and I shot a bunch of vampire costumes at the event. Free gallery for the perusal of those who do not let fangs get their black panties in a bunch. I also spoke on a panel about vampires and sex. Big shocker that would be my topic; what with Blue Blood and writing my thesis on it and all ;-
(Image Courtesy of Blue Blood)
by Amelia G : August 10th, 2009
Whisper is a kitty photographer who wears a CatCam on a timer and, well, takes pictures. Taking pictures is what photographers do.
Whisper is half long-tailed yellow tabby and half Siamese. He gets his nom de photography from the color of his fur.
If you want keepsake photographs taken by a cat, you can even get prints with Whisper’s signature pawprint. It is always good to have a distinctive signature. Mine is unfortunately an un-aesthetically pleasing scrawl. Maybe I should switch to fingerpainting a . . .
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by Amelia G : August 12th, 2009
It is no secret that I love the vampire genre. I received Honors at Wesleyan University for my thesis on vampire legends as a paradigm for aggressive human sexuality. And I would like the record to show that I will be speaking on exactly that topic this weekend at Vampire Con in Hollywood. I’ll be taking part in the panel programming Sunday afternoon, after the movie nights, and before Vampirella’s Ball (more on this in a moment.) I’m excited that Wendi Mirabella and Lotti Pharriss Knowles have put Vampire-Con together.
The panel I am on is called Hot-Blooded: Vampires & Sexuality and is at 1pm at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd. It will be moderated by David J. Skal, Author of Hollywood Gothic and V Is For Vampire: The A-Z Guide Of Everything Undead. I’m especially excited that Pam Keesey, who I’m looking forward to catching up with will be on the panel. She is the editor of multiple anthologies of lesbian vampire tales, Women Who Run with the Werewolves: Tales of Blood, Lust, and Metamorphosis, and Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale. Pam Keesey has a very engaging personality, has published yours truly, and once gave me a tour of Forrest Ackerman’s memorabilia collection. Other panelists are Hal Bodner, author of Bite Club: A West Hollywood Vampire Tale, filmmaker Fred . . .
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