Friends. Photography. Adventure.
Yesterday was my birthday. Tomorrow is Christmas Day. I’m at home in Wales with my family and school friends, far away from partners and friends I play with. A very wholesome time of scrabble and seaside walks is being had.
However, earlier in the month I had a gift of an evening and a couple of wonderful early presents. I asked Focused and Filthy to capture a shot for my birthday/Christmas post. Enjoy!
I think many of us who’ve been blogging for a long time have had that experience of coming up with a title and then having the URL say xxx-2 because we’ve used it before. That happened to me in September when I posted this shot. I had forgotten all about the original Hanging Out!
Last night I was hanging out with Focused and Filthy and hubby and just look at the chair that’s the centrepiece in their AirBnb. For chair prompt week we had to do Hanging Out 3!
I went to see the Bill Brandt exhibition at Tate Britain today. It’s free and on till January 2023 so if you’re in London at all I recommend it.
I love Bill Brandt. I can’t remember exactly when I first saw his work but it was probably during university in the mid-nineties and it was certainly his (and Man Ray’s) work that first got me interested in nude photography.
After getting back from the exhibition I scrolled back through my blog and through my unused photos folder and it’s quite ridiculous how often I’ve channeled him, either through direct replicas or through heavily influenced black and whites.
In the unused folders were a couple of homages dating back to my lockdown project in 2020. Brandt had a habit of naming his images by the location and date they were taken so here I have done the same. The shot that inspired mine is below.
“And in all that time I just wanted you to come home unexpectedly one afternoon
And catch us at it.” Pulp, I Spy
For this weekend’s Noir prompt here’s another photo from the shoot with Focused and Filthy last year.
I love this time of year. All the mushrooms! Sometimes you happen across a massive carpet of them that you just can’t miss, but other times you have to really seek them out.
Scanning the woodland floor, crouching down to look behind a fallen tree, staring up to try and spot some bracket fungus – these are some of my favourite things to do at this time of year.
Of course, the best tingle comes when you spot a cluster of fairy stool Fly Agarics. You cant beat seeing those beauties!
I had a brief flash of performance anxiety thinking about what to post for this week’s 600th Sinful Sunday. After almost eight years of participating in Sinful Sunday, every week for the first four of five years and about 50% of the time these days, there are literally hundreds of photos in the archives.
The photos that exist are an incredible record of brilliant partnerships, enriching friendships and sexy adventures. There are captures that demonstrate just how much my friends and partners humour my batshit crazy ideas. And even if I say so myself, there are some utterly epic shots from my many outdoor adventures.
But I realised that I didn’t need to seek out a new showpiece location or somehow gather my friends together for a group shot to end all group shots, I just needed to share this photo. Because without Sinful Sunday I would never have taken this photo.
I took this last month in a cabin in the countryside. I was reading in bed and I glanced down and thought ‘ooh, this is good light’. I grabbed my phone and snapped a shot. Then I took a second because the first had a shadow of my phone in it. Then I sent it to my partners. This is exactly how I took it – lit by a small bedside light, no editing or filtering.
Eight years ago I would never have taken or sent this photo. I’d have tweaked my inverted nipple to attention, I’d have pulled the sheet up over my belly, I’d probably have turned the camera on my legs instead. The first time I sent a partner a nude I spent 90 minutes fussing over it. This didn’t even take 90 seconds.
Sinful Sunday is probably the most significant influencing factor in my evolving and more compassionate and loving relationship with my own body. So thank you Molly for creating this special place and thanks to the whole community for cheering everyone on every week.
Last weekend I had a couple of nights away in a beautiful cabin which came with its own wild swimming pond and this dreamy hanging chair. It was perfect! I rarely go back to places but I’ll definitely return to this one.
On Thursday I was finally reunited with the incredible Tabitha Rayne. The last time I saw her was Sunday 15th March 2020 in that frenzied period leading up to lockdown. I would be the last non-family member she’d hug for months and I wouldn’t touch another human until June. We’d wonder about the weirdness of that quite often in those early days.
On that last weekend we snapped a photo of Tabitha up tree in Crystal Palace Park. Over the years we’ve had some incredible photo adventures, from woodland adventures to London buses to car wrecks.
Neither one of us is really feeling the photography and blogging thing at the moment so we agreed that we’d just hang out and catch up this time. We don’t know ourselves at all do we? A Friday morning drift along the river in Tabitha’s boat was just too good an opportunity to miss.
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