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Bodies, light, and clothing
This is my second entry in an hour ... just so you don't miss anything. After three days without words here, I have a lot stored up.
There's a big image in this entry, which is why it's taking so long to load.
Over the weekend, as you'll recall, Nonelvis helped me take some photos of myself. (These are the photos I was so frantic to get developed on Labor Day and couldn't.) I am never patronizing Film Lab R again, in any of its myriad locations. I went on Tuesday afternoon and they were telling people that photos would be ready the next morning. One hour service indeed. I went to the place next door - Film Lab M - and had my photos in an hour and a half.
Yes, I'm demanding. I don't care if they were closed all day Monday and therefore had a backlog, just as I didn't care that another branch of Film Lab R was obviously understaffed. I am cranky. I expect flawless service at all times. Think of it as preparation for the day when I am Queen of the Universe.
Anyway, these photos were pictures of me in clothing I normally wouldn't show you. No, not because I find it embarrassing - heck, I've worn weirder things in public places - but because I know the photos won't look good enough.
See, when I am wearing a corset and satin underwear, I expect to look sexy. If I can't look sexy, then it's not worth getting into the corset in the first place. As it happens, I think I did look sexy in that night's outfit and makeup - as I have other times I've tried this dress-up-and-take-pictures game - but the pictures seldom manage to capture that sexiness, partially because of constraints (no proper space to photograph in, poor lighting, etc) and partially because I'm not sure how to photograph my own face to best effect.
These photos were not as sexy as I wanted them to be, but I had hopes. For one thing, we took them in the bathroom, the only brightly lit place in the house. For another, my makeup was some of the best I've done (not that you can see it in the photos).
Despite their sexiness level, some of them are good - interesting photos, if not especially hormonal. The weird thing is that the ones I expected to be good weren't, and vice-versa. The ones Nonelvis took, of me in various full-body poses, were the failures. I can't be sexy with my hair back, and even in the photos with my hair down, my unfeminine shoulders kept spoiling the effect. At best I looked like the Russian agent in the second Austin Powers movie - a female with severe hair and those damned shoulders. At worst I looked like Tom Hanks with his wig off in an episode of Bosom Buddies.
My experience has been that self-portraits one takes by pointing one's camera at a mirror Just Don't Work. To my surprise, those were the best of the lot. Some of them will need a lot of tuning to scan properly, but here's one that hopefully came through the image-mangling process okay.
Here's another. I was too tired to do a better job with the scans - that was Wednesday night, I think, in the middle of the mouth organ editing.
I learned something important from these pictures. I have a long habit of complaining about my nose. Well, I realized after seeing all these photos that it's not my nose that bothers me the most about my face any longer. It's my chin. Maybe I've learned to love my nose. I've certainly learned to hate my chin - what there is of it. In many of these photos you literally can't see where my chin ends and my neck begins. Next time: Photograph so that the chin casts a shadow.
Or cover it with a camera.
In other body news, I have gotten two or three messages from people who say they found the Virtual Model on the Lands' End site very interesting, but they couldn't actually get any of the clothes "onto" the model!
Well, I agree that it's a pain. I don't know why they stuck in a needless intermediate step - first you have to check the clothes and put them in the Dressing Room, then you have to go to the Dressing Room, check them again, and put them on the model. Dumb. But it does work. I went back again this morning, just to check.
Of course, I would never wear shoes like that, but they don't let you pick the shoes.
The last thing I should note about bodies and such is that I am now officially tracking whether a given day is a "boy day" or a "girl day." Yesterday (9 Sept) was a boy day. Today is a boy day too, so far.
Do bear in mind that I usually learn which it will be within the first ten minutes after I wake up - it all happens in the bathroom in front of the mirror. And sometimes dress influences femminess, sometimes the other way 'round. Sometimes external circumstances do it. Sometimes dreams. In other words, it may be very superficial.
Today, for example, it was raining. It's pointless to try to be beautiful when it's raining, if you can't use umbrellas. So I didn't bother.
On the other hand, if I'd been feeling really girly, I might have given in and used an umbrella just to keep my hair dry. So who knows?
I suspect I'm going to have more boy days than girl days. To me a male doesn't really care much about his appearance or his bearing, so days when I'm indifferent are likely to get tagged as boy days.
And, frankly, if I were clocking my internal mindset and reactions, almost all of them would be girl days.
Safer to stick to surface things.
© Columbine
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