I guess it all started with a selfie. As I mentioned on Twitter the other day I think I was about 36 when I took the first one using the mirror on my landing and a very crappy camera phone I had at the time. I still have the picture on my computer. I am wearing black lace panties with hold-up stockings. I took it for someone in particular. His enthusiastic response warmed my heart and other areas. It was the beginning of me and my camera. Yes I was his wank fodder and you know what, that was fucking hot because he was mine.
The first image I posted of myself on my blog can be blamed on Dick Dyke Dick ( sadly her blog is no more) I had been a long time reader of her site and admirer of her beautiful honest self portraits. In many ways I saw a woman like myself, our youthful perfections long gone to be replaced with something else, confidence and desire to enjoy our bodies. She inspired me. The response I got to those first few images were also inspiring and soon my camera became an increasing part of my life as a sex blogger.
I have always been a very visual person and when I started my blog I would search the internet for an image that I felt went with my words/thoughts. I liked the marriage between the two mediums but I liked it even more when the images where my own. It felt and still does feel so right to me. I love it when those two different mediums come together (excuse the pun) complimenting one another and hopefully moving the reader/viewer in some way because doing that is really the icing on the cake.
Over time my photography developed as my love for it grew. I went from a camera phone and a little point and shot (A great camera and I took some images on it that to this day I am still proud of; If you go down to the woods today and All Good Things to name just two) to a DSLR (Canon 1100d) a remote control trigger and stronger tripod. The outdoors was calling to me by this point.
I love the whole process of taking my images, from finding the locations, planning the outfit, or lack of, taking the practise shots with my clothes on and then going for the final shots. Working outdoors means that anything can happen. I can’t control the environment like you can at home. People suddenly appear, the weather suddenly changes, the light is from the wrong direction, the field I selected the day before to take pictures of me in the wheat has suddenly been harvested etc. I have to change my ideas all the time, often right in the middle of doing them. No shoot, even if I return to the same spot time and again is ever the same. I love it.
I have another camera now (Canon 7d but am currently lusting after the 6d, you can use your phone as a remote screen… oh my) and a whole bag full of lens which I lug about with me everywhere. From that one selfie on my phone a passion was born. A passion that not only has led me to an increasing intimate relationship with my body, my sexuality/kinks and world around me but also one that has evolved into a form of income for me.
My husband says he is in BDSM D/s poly relationship with me and the camera. To be fair he always laughs when telling people this and I always get the impression he is immensely proud of everything I have achieved but his statement is not without some truth. There could be worst things to be addicted though I think.
So what of you, the viewer and our relationship? I take my pictures first and foremost for me. Because I love doing it and because I find it truly liberating. In those moments I get to challenge myself, to explore my body as a piece of art, to see how it looks, how it feels and with regards to my outdoor self portraits how fitting my body into the landscape immediately changes how both things are seen. However I also take them to be seen. I want you to see them and most of all I want to make you feel something. In the prompt this week on Wicked Wednesday the writer asks;
1. Do you care what the viewer or reader does with them? 2. Does it turn you on to know that you stimulate? 3. Do they ask you for permission bringing you into their pleasure? 4. Does it humiliate you to be reduced to their masturbation fodder, you a merely specimen of the species?
1. Only in the sense that I own the copyright on my images and don’t want them stolen but they are there to be looked, to be enjoyed and consumed by the viewer.
2. Sometimes yes, it certainly has done in the past with certain people but I am probably my own greatest voyeur. As I wrote in ‘The Watcher, a piece about voyeurism
I am a very visual person, as I think my blog reflects. My love of my photography really does stem from my own voyeuristic relationship with myself. It is not that I think I am particularly beautiful or even sexy, I don’t look at my images and admire myself in that way, it is more detached than that. I see the sex in myself, the hunger, the greed, the potential for wanton behaviour, the love of man and woman, desire for, despite the flaws of my body, which I am all too well aware of, seeing myself stripped (and I don’t necessarily mean naked when I use that term)exposed and captured in that moment allows me to see something of myself as he sees me.
As the header on my blog says “I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew” There is a strong relationship between me and the viewer and yet it is a relationship that is often anonymous, frequently remote and difficult to define.
3. I am a little bit confused by this question. Have people contacted me and told me they have masturbated to my image and/or words? Yes. Have they messaged me in advance of doing so, asking for my permission? No and I think I would find that a little odd. By publishing the images I have given my permission for them to be viewed. If my pictures elicit a sexual response from someone then yay, because I made that person feel something.
4. No, not in the slightest. I’m glad my image caused a reaction in them and if that is the desire to masturbate then you know what, I caused a pretty powerful reaction. We are all a specimen of our species, no one is more human or more real than anyone else. The only difference is how we chose to share ourselves with others. I am not made less by someone ‘seeing’ me. In fact quite the opposite and if I make your cock hard, your cunt wet or I make you giggle, or cringe or think, ‘damn I would love to fuck her in the woods’ or your fingers tingle with the thought of spanking me, even if I inspire you to reach for your own camera, I want to know about it, because then I know I took a good picture.
If you look at my blog, my writing and maybe most of all my photographs and pass straight on without at least a pause then I have failed because you felt nothing. I want a response whatever it is, good or bad, because then I know I made you look.
32 comments