Just to proof to you that I am not on some Caribbean beach sipping funny colored cocktails, I will give you access to the Work In Progress, the new AMEA site at http://www.herengracht.com. Please have a look around, but bare in mind that the site is not nearly finished.

It is our profound hope that the new AMEA site will be launched somewhere in the coming five days. The structure of this site is completely new and will provide you with plenty options to be part of the project, so we hope you will enjoy it!

As soon as everything works the way it should, we will send out a mailing to inform you.

BTW: The third interface of AMEA in 1998 looked like this:

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The poor kid on the left simply gave up after crashing too many times. Yes, there actually fell some snow over the Netherlands and those who got up really early, say 04:00, enjoyed a white Christmas. Two hours later it started raining. For all I know it is still raining.

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It has been some time since I posted on this blog. Summer was a very creative period with a lot of studio photography. I was working on my Couples and Mature women series and I am trying to find the time to come up with a definitive selection of what I have done so far. A hard thing to do while both series are still growing.

I photograph mostly in the weekends or during the evenings because the models I work with are not professionals. They have their daytime jobs. That leaves me plenty of time to work on the websites, although I still have my doubts about the new AmeaNet site I promised to finish before the end of this year.

The last year has been difficult for AmeaNet. First there were some major difficulties getting a new payment processor and we ended up finding one for Amea Movies that takes a huge percentage on every single payment. While this was happening the dollar went down and a recession unfolded. It was visible in our stats. Credit cards were declined more often than ever. In the end AmeaNet became a site to worry about.

I am not just blaming the economy. After 15 years my enthusiasm went downhill too. I have considered killing the project for a while, but could not do so in the end. There seemed be just one way out and that was to build a new AmeaNet portal with a different concept.

As it is, the main AmeaNet site is way too static. The Internet today relies heavily on social networking. A site without member interaction is not interesting. Unless you sell a niche product, of course.

So, I started participating actively in social networking sites to see what could be done for AmeaNet. In the end there were two software packages left that I wanted to consider as an interactive backbone. Elgg and Buddypress. I played around with both and they seemed too unstable to withstand the amount of visitors AmeaNet still is attracting despite the very few updates we had in the last year.

Testing Elgg resulted in a site called The Lab. Although Elgg is pretty stable, robot registrations have already become a menace, so the site is currently “by invitation only”.

Buddypress is very promising too but in an early stage of development. Buddypress is based on the multi user version of my beloved WordPress and fooling around with that combination has not yet delivered a test project worth linking. I want to wait a while for upcoming software upgrades.

Testing the many plugins of WordPress was so much fun that I ended up building a site about photography on the old Camdogs.com domain where we used to run a video sharing site that became a real problem, because it was way too expensive in data traffic.

The deadline for the new AmeaNet portal is now January 31, 2010. Meanwhile I hope you will enjoy the new photography site:

AboutPhotography.Net – News, Reviews, Featured Sites, Member Galleries

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Poster of the Kinsey Juried Art Show with a top left insert of one my images, which is again not yet posted on my main site, so I am posting a full-sized version here:

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For many reasons I was not able to make it to SEAF, where three of my works were exhibited. It was really nice to spot one in the wonderful video above. Since that particular picture is not on my site yet, I am posting it below.

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You can find it at: http://www.hansvanderkamp.info

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My only excuse is that I think it is good for my coronary system. I just have to blow off steam once in a while. So after a very long day of photographing utterly obnoxious people I found myself – once again – in such a mood, when Ancilla Tilla tweeted about an article by Christine Kessler who seemed to have a nervous breakdown over the fact that “her friend” the portrait photographer was losing work because there were to many fake photographers around who were stealing away his clients. It was a simple point but Kessler went on and on about it as if she was not talking about a friend but about her own precious career as a photographer who likes to dress up women in condom-like outfits and calls this very popular art “Fetish Photography”.

When I woke up the next day I had no urge whatsoever to reread my comments, because I knew that – much like Keller – I had blown a fuse and I regretted my actions in all sincerity. But as weeks passed I became interested once again and I went back to that post and found my two comments. Instead of being ashamed of what I had written, I felt almost proud, so I am re-posting them here.

So here is the original article: Dear Models (and “photographers”) For some reason Google still cannot deal very well with indexing blogs, so just Googling for it won’t do.

And here are my two comments:

1/

Yes, I can see you are upset and I understand why. Still, this happens everywhere and in every profession. Everybody is a hairdresser and everybody is a carpenter or a plumber. I live in the center of Amsterdam, Netherlands and whenever the 18th century house/apartment needs some restoration some very cheap and unprofessional people are hired. Everything they do falls apart in a few weeks and yet another crew is hired by my landlord to create an even bigger mess.

They do not even bother to print business cards, hey I am not even allowed to know who they are.

The same thing goes for models. Not every exhibitionist is a model. Yet there are millions of thrill seeking exhibitionists out there who claim they are models. They often do not follow up on appointments, or show up way too late. And last but not least they are often abusive towards photographers if they feel that the pictures being taken are not what they are looking for.

With 30 years of experience in this profession I would say that there are more fake models around than fake photographers, but then again things may have changed with the arrival of the digital camera. Did they get so cheap in your opinion? My Nikon D3 did not feel half as cheap as the Rolleiflex 6×6 I started out with in 1977.

You may have aired some of your discomfort, but I do not think that it will change much. Media today are owned by “the people”. Many say that is a good thing and in a way it is, because we receive pictures and video of events that would normally be censored for political reasons.

>>> …and as I became more irritated by the other comments…

2/

Why is almost everybody agreeing with this statement? Are we willing to say that amateur photographers are a real threat to professionals?

How professional are we than? Every baker has to compete with Mum’s favorite apple pie…
What I see here is a bunch of masochists licking the somewhat famous photographer’s ass. Come on, let’s be reasonable about this. I do not give a flying f*** about amateur photographers or amateur models. If the clients can’t see the difference, it is their problem, not mine.

I saw the same thing happening in the seventies when cheap SLRs were introduced. That did not last for long either.

My advice to the models is: Always demand RAW files. If you have those, you can go to your local suck up nerd who thinks he is a graphic designer and have them Photoshop into something that fits your portfolio.

God, you people make me sick. Stand tall, for crying out loud. Photographing every exhibitionist in a dress that looks like a condom isn’t exactly going to better the world in any aspect either.

>>>

The difference in quality between post #1 and #2, both morally and intellectually, is astounding. Having had the opportunity to delete the second post would have been nice. But on the other hand it is what it is. I still feel strongly about what I posted there. What’s the fun of Internet if you cannot blow a fuse once in a while? What an incredible outlet for both Kessler and me.

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I explained to him that these were cavemen. They were doing – almost everything – in dark hidden places, thus the name CAVEmen. They did not like to be eaten alive by sable tigers or to be stampeded by mammoths. Heck, suicidal artists might have even carved on trees for all I know, but the trees are no longer there.

I generously added that these drawings were not meant to be porn or erotic art. These were spiritual, religious fertility symbols.

My irritation with some of these emotional and intellectual retards who call themselves “erotic artists” is growing. They remind me of a college student from North Carolina who sent me an email in 1996, just after I started AMEA, telling me that he was surprised to see that people already had sex before the Sexual Revolution. (But hey I am no Einstein either, because I was just as surprised to learn there were colleges in North Carolina.)

I am starting to think that History Of The World by Mel Brooks was understood by (too) many as an educational movie instead of a comedy.

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Part One is here.

>>>>>

The problem is that porn is also culturally and geographically defined. Show a female nipple on a photograph in the US and some if not most will find that distasteful or even pornographic. Show a male nipple in a Calvin Klein ad in that same country and you can buy all the billboard space you need. Show half a male butt, and have a bunch of female office workers licking their lips while looking at it, bingo you have a Pepsi commercial.

I do not doubt the military leadership of the US, but as cultural leaders, I’d prefer the Europeans. We are not scared of nipples male or female, we show sex on tv and we have Rembrandt etchings of copulation in museums for children to watch. In fact most of our famous artists since the Dark Ages and even before have depicted sex in the most explicit ways. These artists were rarely excluded from exhibits, not even in the most prestigious museums. Not even today.

This particular site – http://eroticsignature.ning.com/ – I believe is hosted in England, the country of the private schools where homosexual behavior is quite normal even amongst heterosexuals, but please, please do not show an erect penis here, because they will faint on the spot.

It is not porn or the definition of erotic art we are discussing, we are discussing moral, cultural issues and above all the hypocrisy of countries that somehow got lost in a mostly global effort to celebrate the act of love. That could be Saudi Arabia, Iran, the US, or China. Countries that celebrate industrial production more than anything else. Sex distracts from production. Worker bees should not be distracted, they should produce, preferably 24/7. It is an old trick that goes back to feudalism.

If we return to the original meaning of the Greek word pornography, the meaning is much wider. In this meaning Fox News is pornography and showing pictures of innocent children being slaughtered is pornography. I think we should keep that in mind once in a while. And do not forget that the Greeks did not think of the depictions of erect penises on their plates and drinking mugs as pornography.

>>>

I am starting to really enjoy clubbing seals in a zoo…

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So I really was enjoying myself with Keeley’s page and I was struck by a quote of William Eggleston:
– I don’t think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day -
I simply do not buy that, or better I cannot imagine this to be true. I can see myself picking a camera that is best for the job, supposing I had a dozen laying around, which is not the case, believe me. So it must be a pose, I assume, much like the late Helmut Newton’s answer on what his photography is about: “Oh, it is all about entertaining models”.

I am strictly monogamous when it comes to cameras. For two years I worked with the Fuji S3 Pro and even named it Prima Donna, because of the poor focusing and some other unexpected electronic behavior one would not expect in a 21st Century camera. But I really loved working with it, because it always kept me on alert.

When I was finally able to afford the Nikon D3, I swore to myself that I would never take it outdoors and use Prima Donna instead, just in case I ran into a junkie who thought the D3 represented a few weeks of smack. But the Prima Donna ended on my shelves. After the D3 I never used it again. D3 is named Vera Donna (True Lady) because of its unbelievable technical achievements and most of all because its reliability under all circumstances.

Now I am carefully avoiding camera shops because the D3x has been out for some time now. That has everything to do with my budget. I know I will not be able to resist that camera if only to name her Ultima Donna.

With the D4 I will be running out of names in the Donna sequel, maybe then I will start naming them after actual people. If it comes to that, I will seek professional help, rest assured. :)

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