Whisper is a kitty photographer who wears a CatCam on a timer and, well, takes pictures. Taking pictures is what photographers do.

Whisper is half long-tailed yellow tabby and half Siamese. He gets his nom de photography from the color of his fur.

If you want keepsake photographs taken by a cat, you can even get prints with Whisper’s signature pawprint. It is always good to have a distinctive signature. Mine is unfortunately an un-aesthetically pleasing scrawl. Maybe I should switch to fingerpainting a signature.

Full disclosure: Kitty Photographer is an advertiser. Further disclosure: Sometimes the most awesome thing about accepting advertising is the opportunity to discover fun sites like this one.

AltPorn.net interviewer Beda Hoydenish writes:

“Everyone knows Amelia G runs the Blue Blood empire and also does some of the photography and writing for it. Here on APN, we’ve featured photographs she has shot for Blue Blood many times and we’ve mentioned her writing once or twice. (You can also see the interview we did with Amelia G five years ago — Ed.) I write for APN and I have all the old Blue Blood print magazines from the 90’s in plastic bags with cardboard backing, so I thought I was pretty aware and I still found a lot on Amelia G’s new AmeliaG.com site to both inform and entertain me. In addition to running the business end of Blue Blood and working as an editor for many projects, Amelia G has had hundreds of photo sets published and thousands of articles. Amelia G has done writing and/or photography for all the major adult publishing houses including Playboy, Penthouse, Flynt, Crescent, Magna, and AVN, plus niche magazines including Marquis, On Our Backs, Skin Two, Tattoo Teasers, Fetish, Extreme Fetish, $pread, and of course Blue Blood. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica, Best S/M Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica and dozens more books. But she still took time out of her busy schedule to give APN this exclusive interview.

APN: Blue Blood magazine in print was really ground zero for jump-starting the whole altporn genre and you’ve managed to maintain a top ranking for Blue Blood for more than sixteen years. To what do you credit your remarkable success and longevity?

AG: Thanks. I always hope the universe will smile on me for hard work and doing the right thing, and sometimes it does. A big advantage Blue Blood had in coming to the web is that the magazine was always subscription-driven and we had free sites for the community for years before we launched our first membership site. We actually had paid members before we had even actually launched the first pay site because we tested out a banner rotation for a few minutes and people saw it. I really appreciate the support we’ve gotten over the years and try to really put a lot back into the scene and into having . . .

Cool promo pic of yours truly by Forrest Black. Read the whole interview by Beda Hoydenish on AltPorn.net.

In this video, I interview fab photographer Steve Diet Goedde about his creative process and recent collaboration with composer Robert Waechter. The GoeddeConcerto CD features twenty-one concertos by Robert Waechter, each inspired by a specific image by Steve Diet Goedde. The photographs are included in an accompanying booklet designed by Steve Diet Goedde. Special thanks to Stockroom for the shooting location.

You can get signed copies of GoeddeConcerto now at SteveDG.com (if you don’t like to type or spell anything complex) or SteveDietGoedde.com (if you prefer being completist).

Steve Diet Goedde has been shooting much longer than I have and he has been very generous with good advice to me over the years, so I was really happy to do this interview. His perspective is interesting in general. Enjoy.

Last month, Blue Blood made a submissions site live for models and photographers and writer/photographers to submit to various Blue Blood projects, mostly BlueBlood.com and, to a lesser extent, BlueBlood.net. Blue Blood enjoys publishing a variety of body types, both male and female and in between. The most important thing for modeling for Blue Blood is that someone have that certain something, star quality, individuality, passion of personal expression to put in front of the lens. The original Blue Blood magazine in print featured exclusively interactive pictorials of people who were lovers in real life, who would be doing what they were doing, whether or not a camera was present. Non-feature photos in Blue Blood in print were generally related to specific entertainment news or how-to articles.

BlueBlood.com features pin-up and interactive erotica photo sets where all the images in a particular gallery will be of a person or couple, in one setting, in a series, which generally tells some sort of story. BlueBlood.net, of course, features articles and galleries about cool events, genre movies, goth-industrial music, punk nightclubs, interesting clothes, and similar fun stuff i.e. BlueBlood.net publishes photo galleries which are about a particular topic of interest. You would think that more photographers would shoot entertainment news, fashion, and music work than shoot nudes, but apparently that is not really the case. I’ve found that the most common question I get from interested photographers is what the galleries on BlueBlood.net should be about. Somehow, once the naked aspect is removed, many of them don’t know what the photos are about, other than that there is a photographer who happens to take pictures. I am baffled that there are people who consider themselves Photographers with a capital P and have no idea what their work is supposed to be saying.

I entirely understand, however, why many models are confused by the submission process and gunshy about asking questions. Running a site can be stressful and there are never enough hours in the day, but I’m genuinely kinda weirded out by how many site operators or model coordinators hate to answer questions from models. I’m always happy to answer anyone I might work with’s questions beforehand. It makes me ballistic when people try to go back on their word, once they have made an agreement, but, to me, that just means everything should be entirely clear from the beginning. The most common question I get from interested models, once they have read the Blue Blood Photo FAQ is almost the opposite of the most popular photographer question. Models are puzzled by the whole nudity vs. clothes thing. Some models don’t seem to get that they have to keep their clothing on for BlueBlood.net editorial. By the same token, any model who has even considered modeling for a membership site besides BlueBlood.com wants to double-check precisely what she must do on camera and what she must not do. This is because of the way these models have been pressured to do either less (nice girls only do conservative nudes) or more (all the cool girls give strangers blowjobs) by sites they have considered working with. I really don’t get the thing where some sites feel like everyone has to be fully nude but nobody is allowed to (heavens to Betsy!) insert anything or where some sites have the attitude that anyone who hasn’t fucked everyone else on it shouldn’t be allowed in the clubhouse. It really bothers me that there are models who go along with this conformity BS and peer pressure other models to only do exactly what they have decided is okay for them personally, no matter whether other models personally prefer to be more conservative or more extreme. These are not decisions which should be made via groupthink.

If everybody on BlueBlood.com was doing the exact same level of nudity or naughtiness, with the exact same amount of explicitness or lack thereof in presentation, that would be as antithetical to the point of Blue Blood as if everybody looked exactly the same. (You are not required to have tattoos either; they are optional and only a plus if you got them for a meaningful reason or they are quality ink or ideally both.) Of course, all publications have to have some sort of structure, a certain promise to the reader of what they will find inside. However, any pay site with a bunch of chicks who look the same and apparently all want to get the exact same amount naked is just pandering to a fetish and it is not punk and it is not about freedom.

Many of Blue Blood’s photographers and writers and models, and certainly your truly, have fetishes too and naturally they are more likely to be represented in the variety of BlueBlood.com content than kinks various creative team members are less into, but Blue Blood doesn’t have all the hang-ups so many of the sites seem to about nudity. The whole point is that it is about individual expressions of sexuality and sensuality. Individuality is key. If all a photograph does is hit a format, that is not art, just commerce. If a photo utterly fails to hit any format, that is not art either, just wanking. For photography to be art, it must both express something and communicate something.

The thing I love best about photography is the way it can capture and preserve a moment.

Most of my ephemeral moments have gone unrecorded. When I got to college, it was my twelfth school in twelve years. Moving that often gave me many qualities I like about myself, but it also meant that there were so many people, so many communities, so many adventures, and so many times in my life which evaporated with nothing to show they ever took place. Just my memories with no one to share them with. People who do not move can at least have conversations about “remember when . . .” but my friends and compatriots were scattered across dozens of countries.

I always loved when people showed me their photo albums and yearbooks and explained the most important images. Oscar Wilde once famously said, “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.” Oscar was speaking of absinthe, but pictures are a lot like the green fairy that way. Sometimes a flattering photograph represents a loathsome situation and sometimes a hideous photograph is a reminder of something wonderful.

I reminded myself of what is most important about a photograph, while going over the scans for the two most recent photo galleries by Forrest Black and yours truly. These galleries are bittersweet. While I was going over the final edit to put the pictures in the BlueBlood.net system, one of the people pictured instant messaged me to tell me she had just had a nasty break-up with the guy, also pictured, who she was with on this particular Halloween night at Bar Sinister. Two of the girls Forrest Black and I shot that night became mortal enemies shortly thereafter. Over a guy, of course. There are pictures of people from multiple bands which should have broken bigger than they did in there. Heck, there are pictures in there of someone I used to really like who eventually was nearly singlehandedly the main reason Forrest Black and I all but totally quit rock journalism and photography. Occasionally shooting musical friends and high dollar jobs, Forrest Black and I probably still shoot more rock work than most of the knobs wandering around Los Angeles claiming to be rock photogs, but we used to do so much more and feel so differently about it. These two galleries also feature a girl I thought could be a great mainstream model, but she never followed up the contacts I gave her. There’s the promoter, who was one of the first people we ever covered in Blue Blood in print, who just closed his most recent venture. The list goes on. It was a fabulous night, even though we broke the camera we were shooting with. This happens more often than I’d like in a nightclub setting. I’m not even sure where all the pictures from that shoot are because the ones we shot on a second camera seem to be MIA.

Regardless, there are so many people here I have felt such fondness for. Dreams and relationships may wither or shatter, but our photographs preserve one hot moment.

There is even one person in our photographs here who is dead now. He was a nice person, talented and fun, and he passed away far far too early. Some of Forrest Black’s and my photography was used in his memorial service, but he never got to see these pictures. There are many things I feel there will always be time for, but sometimes the clock stops. Rest in peace, J.D. I guess there was a reason you had to wear a shirt which reads, “Die young; stay pretty”?