I’ve had this blog for 8.5 years. It was the first place I was brave enough to share my nude self portraits. It has helped me grow in more ways than I can say. Sure, it has been an enormously frustrating place at times, but without the community I found here of wonderful, talented, weird and brilliant artists I’ve met here (both online and in person) there’s no way I’d have the confidence to make the kind of images I do these days.
This was the last place on the internet where I could share my work uncensored and for free. I hate having to hide my work behind censorship or a paywall, but I’m pretty much out of options now. I’ll be letting my queue run down for a few more days then I’ll be closing this page.
Tumblr as a social media platform was a predominantly visual medium. While it supported textual posts, scrolling through your Tumblr feed was a cascade of images created, curated and shared through blogs you followed. Like Instagram, you could scroll through images of your favorite blog. Unlike Instagram, Tumblr’s interface actively encouraged reblogging – allowing others to curate their own collection of favorites and share their curation with others. The joy of Tumblr was discovering new art, artists and bloggers through an ever-expanding circle of like-minded curations of imagery.
One of the things that distinguished Tumblr from Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest was the platform’s lack of censorship. This allowed users to post sexually explicit photos, videos, art or writings. In fact, it was a bit of a running joke that Tumblr was the place to go if you wanted to view porn.
I’m continuing now with my photos of Rebecca Tun in Iceland in 2014. In my last post from that trip (click here), we had not yet crossed the great black nothingness of the Skeiðarársandur flood plain, but for these new photos we had, moving into an area with no large settlements but plenty of large glaciers.
The area where we went to photograph, trying to get away from a touristy crowd, was by the shore of a glacial lake. The large glacier was on the other side of the lake, but on our side some small icebergs had washed up on the shore.
Rebecca was accompanied on this part of the trip by a friend, so I said to her traveling companion standing next to me, in a voice loud enough for Rebecca to hear, “Do you think I should ask Rebecca if she wants to…
In contemplating possible articles related to ace week, I tried to think of classic geek characters who are asexual. That led me to wonder, “How would I even know? It’s not like we get 24/7 access to these fictional people’s’ lives.” But then, very quickly, I realized that we do know that a lot of our favorite characters are not ace/aro because so many of them have had on-screen relationships and sexual encounters that are presented as a product of the characters’ own sex drive (rather than as ace people who are accommodating their partner). But why? Is there something about our sexual lives that is so essential to our identities that it requires exposition in our fictional characters, or is this just an example of ace erasure? After some additional geeky contemplation, it occurred to me that there is one beloved character who is, in fact, perfectly suited to…
So you are a photographer, and you’re new to shooting with models. If you read the first article in this series, you may have done your research and be ready to book your first shoot. You may have made your booking and be planning the shoot itself. Let’s set out a few facts for you, and perhaps explode a few more myths.
You may be nervous if this is your first shoot with an experienced model. Again, that’s natural, but there is nothing to fear. A good model will be a people person, they will be able to set you at ease, they will be able to help you in many ways, and we will talk about them later.
Respect
Respect, such a simple concept, and one that all too often people forget about. If you are a professional photographer you will probably already recognize that every shoot is…
Conceived and photographed by James Hall, modelled by Rebecca Tun, styled by Claudia Oliver, post-production by Paola Sammartino
I published an early version of one of these pictures a few weeks ago. Since then, Paola Sammartino has been able to work her post-production magic to these finished pictures. As ever, the key to success is to collaborate with highly talented people, and this is something I was certainly able to do on this shoot.
Conceived and photographed by James Hall, modelled by Rebecca Tun, styled by Claudia Oliver, post-production by James Hall and Paola Sammartino 
Conceived and photographed by James Hall, modelled by Rebecca Tun, styled by Claudia Oliver, post-production by Paola Sammartino 
