Life Upgraded

Hello again. I have been so busy I forgot about my last post! It is now August and we owe $85,323 on the house!!! Time has still been flying by and I am happy to report that the moments of feeling like a slave to my job have subsided a lot. Acceptance is a powerful perspective.

While all of that is great, I am mainly coming by to write some other thoughts.

Lately photography has been a passion of mine. Trading hasn't interested me in anyway whatsoever, and while I still watch video game related stuff on a daily basis I have had practically zero drive to participate in them. I have in recent months been obsessively shooting with my wife on our weekends and on our vacations trips. I have watched her go from a very timid "un-beautiful" feeling woman, to a much more confident model who is proud of the way she looks thanks to her tremendous efforts at the gym, and at home with her diet. We have had some progressively great times and I feel super grateful to have captured some really nice shots. It has become something of a bonding exercise for us. Not that we aren't already very very close, but it never hurts to have something the both of us enjoy with our time together.

The main reason I am here writing these things is because I have, for the first time (that I recall), been finding my passion (and my thoughts about how to proceed with it) bringing concern in my mind over how others will react. I honestly don't remember living my life in the light of thoughts like that before, as I've mostly always just done what felt natural to do. You see, my wife's parents are religious and they've had several years of distance between them due to her last marriage and the shenanigans that went on with it due to her husbands manipulative nature and lack of being able to treat her with respect. Since our getting together they have now reunited and the doors of communication are open again. What's the potential problem with all of this?

If you know me, the obvious answer is that I don't just shoot regular portraits of my wife, but those that are erotic in nature. I have never felt negative over doing so in my life, and as time goes on and I recognize the very reasons we like these things ever more clearly, I feel progressively more passionate and connected to what is.

If I were to just keep these images to myself I likely wouldn't be writing this right now, but I find myself so appreciative of the photos I take that I intuitively feel I should share them. I liken it to a child wanting you to listen to a song or watching a video they really like. They want you to enjoy this wonderful thing with them, and at the same time, it enforces affirms their taste. I am sure on some level that is a part of it. I have no delusion that I'm a photography master, just that I like what I see and I think others would as well. Because of this I have been frequently contemplating the creation of my own website such as the current popular greats like METART, & Femjoy. After all, if I am sharing these things, I might as well monetize them if it's an option. The potential conflict in the context of everything is pretty obvious, so I'll steer clear of expounding on that. Instead, I'm happy to report that as much as my wife is grateful to have her present relationship with her family back, she is surprisingly accepting of whatever it might mean to be supportive of my photography venture. There is of course trepidation, as in her previous marriage any gateway that could be used for her ex to open the doors to infidelity certainly were, especially under the guise of "it's for you" or "it'll bring us closer together". I say this because it has been a consideration of mine to photograph other people as well, which is where things definitely have a more potentially problematic side to them.

What I have discovered over the recent months is new and interesting to me. In the past I would simply enjoy shooting whoever I was in a relationship with at the time, but now I have become kind of engrossed in shooting in general. There is something about operating the camera that I find enjoyable, so I end up pulling the trigger a lot. I guess it was how playing guitar was to me on some level. It felt good to make it function, and as a result I simply ran through scales and noodled around rather than actually playing what I would call music. While yes I have been taking photos for the last 10 years or more, I have done absolutely zero in terms of learning about how the camera I hold even works. In the last months I have spent quite some time coming to appreciate the function and science behind photography. That can and probably will be a post on it's own, but what I want to express is that I think the understanding I have come to in terms of handling the instrument, has actually caused me a desire to engage with what I understand much more. It's rather entertaining to see how some obvious principles of light and mechanical function have engrossed me.

To continue on the recent mention of shooting others, I have been happily surprised to take inventory of myself and conclude something: That I simply love looking at and photographing the female body. I always have of course, but more importantly, I see that I can accurately deduce that it's something I should love doing in no small part thanks to my DNA. The human drive is all thanks to this mesh between the hardware of the machine we live in and the programming that compels it. Religion attempts fervently to deny this reality, and thus those who operate under the programming of it, suffer greatly as they attempt to deny an even deeper programming. It is literally the program we have to thank for our very existence, the one to multiply and thusly, "survive".

My recent assessment of where I am has brought me to (for probably the first time in my life) a place where I have conviction that I could simply photograph beautiful people for the fun and money of it, and leave it at that. Even as I write this I feel the stigma surrounding it, as anyone with a right mind and understanding of what it would mean for most, would be naturally inclined against someone in a deeply committed relationship photographing other people nude. And I can easily agree with that. Without knowing the man that was proposing to engage in such a thing, I too would have my doubts. The plain and simple fact in my experience throughout life is quite bluntly that men are fucking cheaters, and that men will do anything to to follow that instinctual drive their DNA has given them. Who knows though, maybe I've simply watched too much of Dateline's "To Catch A Predator" 😂

Some of the concepts roaming my mind lately have been about our ideas of beauty and where we get these ideas of what is right or wrong. I like to play devil's advocate a lot. It's just where my mind goes frequently. I think I like to study logic, and I find it satisfying to encounter contradictions. Especially in my own thinking, as the awareness of these things often opens me up to my own bullshit so I can move past it. That is consistently the hope anyhow.

I really don't have to dive deeply into the fact that society is the creator of these standards, whatever they may be. That should be obvious enough. Instead maybe I'd like to think of the contradictions that exist because of them. For example, a thought came to my mind in where my mother in law would argue that there is no need to see naked women for "work" and that is just an excuse to see naked women. Immediately the role of a doctor helping give birth came to mind. He's viewing a woman in possibly a far more intimate setting/moment than I would be. Is he sinning? It could be argued that ultimately he is doing no wrong, for how else is a child supposed to enter the world, right? It then would all boil down to intent, and the benefits weighed out against every negative factor.

Don't get me wrong, I know from years of being devotedly blind to reason myself, that there's no convincing someone of something else if they are that committed to their current way of being. I don't intend to convince anyone, but I must admit, there is once again a certain satisfaction I receive from watching someone be presented with very solid logical arguments and conveniently ignoring them simply because... well, they're inconvenient. "People don't like having their world views fucked with" as Jed McKenna so nicely put it.

The bottom line, distilled question I truly have is: Who the hell determines what is morally right or wrong, good or bad? Just as the good doctor must bring babies into the world, perhaps I must bring these beautiful expressions into the world. And the people related to me that would argue their beauty based on their own standards... well, they can have their opinions, but this is my life and I intend to live it just the way I have been: By doing what I want.

We came out naked. It doesn't get much more obvious to me that being naked is a perfectly natural thing. We've been trying to document things we find beautiful from the moment we stuck our fingers in the sand. I am responsible for my life and my happiness. No one else. Now, I recognize that it's all a mix, and that harmony doesn't come about by living so selfishly that you inadvertently ruin your life through your choices. I am grateful to say that I have been shaping my life in a harmonious way for a last several years, and I intend to continue doing so. It's not that no one's opinion of me matters, it's that I need to know who's does, who's doesn't and live accordingly. Thankfully my wife loves that shit out of me and supports my passion for photography.

At this point I do not know if I will be photographing other people or not, but it's a beautiful thing to know that if I do, I have the support of my most cherished person. Many know the saying, that "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" and that might perfectly apply to me shooting other people nude, or in intimate situations. One thing that crossed my mind had to do with my cycle of interest with erotic images and galleries that I frequent. While of course I find these things pleasing due to genetic impulses to reproduce, I now also view them as a photographer and sewing machine jockey. I am lucky enough to count myself among one of the probably very few men in an amazing relationship, that can look at erotic content and not feel like I am lacking something in the woman I am with. I spent several years doing just that, and I'll tell you one thing I've learned over that time is that everything is always about perspective. Heaven and Hell is between the ears, truly. I have been honing (haphazardly) this one facet of life in one form or another, pretty much all of my adult life.

I have been with heavier women and been quite happy, and I've been with fit women and been pretty unhappy. It is the human tendency to compare that is the culprit. We are often comparing what we do have, to something perceived as "better" that we aspire to have, feeling the loss of it though we never had it to begin with. The trick is to compare what you do have, to having nothing at all. If you still feel unhappy then, after allowing yourself to exist in the alternate reality with sufficient focus to analyze it, then you may have something after all. Otherwise, your unhappiness is probably due to comparison in the less beneficial direction.

I am of the understanding that even though there may be no real problem with photographing other women, that the mere exposure itself could possibly cause me to lose sensitivity to my own relationship, just as perusing galleries does for pure enjoyment or trying to find cool outfits, poses, or ideas. That is yet to be known, but I think it is certainly worth keeping in mind. Too much of anything sours what makes it special. It is one of the most fundamental principles there is. In other words: Stay balanced. Even as I write this I am out of balance. With deliberate consideration and discussion, we agreed to spend $3,300 on a new camera and some high quality lenses. While it will at present put our payoff date a month out due to not putting that money towards the house, we felt it was worth having the tools necessary to produce the quality I wanted. This is definitely not an excuse, as our old Sony A55 is almost a decade old now and I have missed focus more times that not. We have upgraded to the Sony A7iii, and by doing so we have evolved into the very recent technological breakthroughs of today. We've went from a smaller 1.5 x crop sensor to a full frame 35mm sensor, and from a mere 15 focal points in the camera, to a whopping 693 focal points with the best eye auto-focus in the industry at the moment. To say the least, I have been overboard on things and have at the moment, ironically achieved burnout. 😂

It seems as time moves forward, we are certainly progressing towards some sort of more beautiful and harmonious existence. Yes, there are bumps along the way, and when they hit they suck, but we overcome them by refining whatever process we need to. We are still moving forward. And while I feel I've let myself down on some level with spending so much on a hobby, the schedule can be caught up on if I truly wanted to do it. The real question is: would it have been worth paying the house off on the arbitrary date a calculator told me I could do it, versus going the next 39 months being frustrated with my blurry photos? Probably not!

We will see what the future holds.