Hi, blog!  I guess that since I quit being a full-time traveling nudie model, I ran out of things to write about.  Or at least, I ran out of motivation to write about things here.

I've been sitting for local groups and classes frequently, but shooting has dropped down to nearly zilch.  I have picked up a couple of paid shoots here and there, which have pretty much served as reminders as to why I cut loose.  Eesh.

However!  I've also done a couple of trade shoots, and those have been great!  I'm not bothering to update most of my portfolios any more, so I find myself in this awful conundrum where I have photos that I'm excited about, and no where to put them!  Oh noes!

So I'll put them here.

In February, I got to work with Gary M.  I've admired his work for years, but never managed to coordinate a shoot with him.  Part of the reason for that is, no doubt, my crippling shyness that prevents me from contacting photographers that I'd like to shoot with.  Yes, really.

As of late, he's been collaborating frequently with my good friend Dewey X on rope bondagey goodness.  While the three of us were all in Detroit for Dirty Show, we got together for a hotel shoot one morning.

We started off with ropework.  Yay!  We ran through a few modifications to the tie, and bounced around to a few locations in the suite.  Wee!

From there, we moved to classic art nudes.  I said or did something awkward (I do that kind of thing frequently) and threw the curtain with which I'd been posing over my head.  This promptly led us down a rather esoteric path.

We finally wrapped back around to the more standard variety of art nudes.  Gary also pulled out a few portraity shots from the last series.  While I do pretty well with "posing without looking like posing," much of what I've shot has been on seamless.  I have relatively few photos of myself like this one, which look like they could have maybe possibly been candidly shot.

A few months later, I was contacted by Duke Photo, a local photographer friend.  We've only shot once, though we've kept in sporadic contact since then.  With but the haziest of plans, we headed off to a Colorado state park.

We came under fire from biting arthropods repeatedly during the shoot.  I suppose that's to be expected when you roll around in fields, though.  When the repeated bug bites finally got to be too much for me, we headed down to a nearby creek.

I started off being a dutiful art model and being graceful on a rock.  Then I stuck my feet in the water.  Then my legs.  By the end of it, I was rolling around in the cool water.  As it turns out, creeks have some amazing anti-itch properties.  I doubt it was very photogenic, but it sure felt good.

After a trip to Indiana for my grandmother's 90th birthday, I stopped by Andrew Baran's studio.  He's another photographer that I admired for years before finally getting up the guts to contact him in 2010.  We've shot several times since then (it turns out that I pass through Omaha with some frequency), and it always blows my mind.  This time around was no exception.  We ran around in an old emptied out factory, shooting nudies and avoiding rusty nails.

Before shooting this morning, we'd been chatting about past shoots we've done- including what certain lighting and poses did to my figure.  I asked if he ever shopped my chest to make me, ahem, bustier.  He said that the only shopping he does on me is clearing up blemishes, which is pretty cool.  That conversation hung in my mind when I received images from this most recent shoot.  Great light and perspective, and look!  Chin hairs!!  I am unduly pleased by their prominence and how they catch the light.

So that's it.  That's what I've been up to for the last six months, at least photographically.