The last two weeks were eaten away by installing a Linux backup system for all AmeaNet sites. With the help of a real Linux engineer we finally got it going, but not without a lot of stress in what should have been a lovely sub-tropical week in Amsterdam. Often I pictured myself sailing off in a ship to… Well, to quote the late Chinaski: “Who cares where it is, as long as it is somewhere away from here!”

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Most of you already know this, but for me it was a revelation, because I had always laughed at sites as MySpace.com or that horrible Dutch clone Hyves.nl. I thought of these sites as yet another progressive step in a society that longs for a virtual economy, virtual money, virtual friendship and virtual happiness. I still look at it that way and I can hardly stop laughing when a complete stranger on a networking site approaches me in a PM with the line: “My dear friend!”

But it works.

There is one big disadvantage for people like me who photograph people as they are/ Without their clothes on, I mean. There are highly complicated rules about depictions of nudity. A nice male ass is fine, showing male nipples is okay too, but showing female nipples will get your page deleted. To fully understand what was done and was not done on these sites I had to go back to my childhood memories of a huge sign with rules and regulations hammered to the wall next to our one and only local swimming pool. (But I kept wondering why a naked male behind was not censored.)

I could not handle that. I saw an artist with 1049 friends/subscribers who had his page deleted by a desk clerk. The work was perfectly harmless. I have no idea how much time he spent whoring himself to get to that amount of connections but it broke my heart to see him restore that same page and censoring his own images only to have this new page deleted once again a month or two later.

So, I looked around for open source code, did some designing and in a few days my Networking Site For Photographers, Artists, Models, Collectors and Friends will see the light of day. Being quite busy with photography lately I wonder if I can find the time to actually promote the site, but I will do my best.

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I was also amazed how large my collection of vintage movies had become over the years. It made me wonder where it all started. Somewhere around age 10, I guess, when I fell madly in love with Betty Boop.

Didn’t I promise some time ago that this weblog was never going to be a video blog? I just could not resist it, I guess.

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For three years now I have been showing quite some discipline when it comes to updating, rebuilding and restructuring sites, although it is never enough for the members who do not fully understand that I am a one man’s band as far as the technique, the design, the graphics, the server and most of the content are concerned. The old portal may look the same, but the code behind it has completely been altered at least twice. The same goes for the Vintage Photographs site and The Hidden Archives. The BDSM site has not been upgraded yet, because the site is fairly new.

All this time I was ignoring the movies site, because I knew it had to be rebuilt from scratch and that is a lot of work, but in the end it just had to happen. I have not been very successful in building video sites. The first one, AmstelVisie.com was a complete disaster. The second one CamDogs.com needed a complete make-over before it became half a success, without making any or very little money, so I had to delete it eventually. So, obviously I was quite insecure about building yet another movie site.

Although I am quite chaotic, I do have a planning. Actually Karin, my partner is my planning. I walked up to here and said: “I think it is time to build that new movies site.” She was skeptical at first. She showed me how many subscriptions we had sold for the old movie site. That was quite depressing. I told her it would take at least a month of working 7 days a week to build the new site. She was relieved, thinking that I always produce a site in half the time of my original planning. Once I start fiddling around with code and design, I can not stop. Not because I like it, but because I want to get it over with as soon as possible. After that I usually fall apart for a week or two. It is not a healthy attitude towards work, but this is how it has been since 1995 and I still do not see how I can change that routine.

“I really need that month,” I said. “It is not the coding, it is not the design. It is all those videos that have to be converted and rendered. Computers can only work as fast as their processors are.” She still did not believe me, so we made a bet. She figured the site would be ready mid November and I aimed for December 3rd. I won. But I am really sick and tired of hard drives making these funny noises when 2 Gigabyte video files are rendered in two or three hours. In the end I had two computers simultaneously rendering and converting video. I would even get up in the middle of the night to start new conversions, so that no computer time was wasted during the 4 to 6 hours I tend to sleep.

But now that the site is finished, I do not even feel like falling apart. I am not stressed. I love this site and I know it is going to be a success. Third time’s the charm.

Yesterday I sent out the mailing to most of our members and in the middle of the night I sat behind my desk, staring at my screen waiting for new subscribers, but nothing happened. I finally went to bed in one of my worst moods to wake up a few hours later with a luminous idea. Maybe I had changed the e-mail address for incoming payments? Yes, I had. When I opened my other mailbox I could not believe my eyes. This site is a bigger success than any other member site I have ever built.

Tonight I am going to walk to the bar on the corner and wash away a month’s worth of designing, coding, converting and rendering — and feel good about myself for a change. If I can still see straight when I return home, I am going to pretend I am a member and log on to the site to really enjoy all the marvels I have posted there.

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I felt awkward when they opened the door, although the house they lived in seemed quite normal to me. They offered me a coffee and started talking about their love life, smiling a lot and holding hands. I still felt uncomfortable. The ear of the coffee cup felt kind of sticky and so did the fake leather couch I was sitting on. Maybe I was starting to imagine things?

Before I had left to do the assignment, a psychologist working for the same magazine had explained to me that a healthy BDSM relationship was all about men being submissive to the female, dominant partner. When the man in the house told me that he was the dominant and that his wife was his submissive, I asked permission to use the phone to call my editor. I was sent to the wrong address. No doubt about that. A woman beating up a man for sexual pleasure was completely in sync with contemporary conventions. But a man inflicting pain on his wife… That was unthinkable!

The couple seemed pretty amused and they explained that their role play had nothing to do with aggression and I reluctantly followed them to the basement that looked like a set for a Dracula movie. There were hundreds of strange gadgets hanging from the walls and there were ropes and chains everywhere. I wanted to go home, but as the woman sat down on the chair and the man started to tie her to it with a rope, I became intrigued by their ritual. Something had changed between them. There was a tension in the air but not one of stress or fear. Somehow the atmosphere seemed almost religious to me.

As always I was hiding behind my camera, pretending there was no reality outside the limited space of my viewfinder, while I slowly and carefully moved around the couple to take pictures. As I was standing behind the woman, her man unexpectedly squeezed her nipples very hard and her head fell back with a sigh. She was staring right into the center of my viewfinder and the look in her eyes made me shiver. Somehow I recognized that look, but I could not place it. Up to this day I still cannot find the words to describe what I saw. A mixture of serenity and arousal maybe, but these words seem so flat and they do not fully reflect the intensity.

Something snapped inside of me; I mumbled some excuses and left the house in a hurry, leaving two lens caps, a costly exposure meter and several rolls of film. The moment I returned to my studio I starting developing the film and began making enlargements of that last picture, fearing that what I had seen only existed in my mind, but it was right there on photographic paper and the longer I looked at the picture the harder it became to determine what was going on in her mind, but the look in her eyes kept fascinating me for years.

When the editor asked about the pictures; I made up some story about bad lighting. He bought it and I kept the photographs to myself. It took almost two decades before I started photographing BDSM again — with only one goal in mind and that was to see what I had seen in the eyes of that particular woman. [To be continued...]

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I was intrigued and did not know what to say at first, so I just aired some very abstract ideas about BDSM.

Many discussions followed. It was interesting, because there was a lot of confusion and it took me some time to figure out that definitions differ throughout the world. I will try to keep nationalities out of this – for a change – but to give you an example: the words Fetish and Fetishism. For the largest group of members these words covered any sexual practice from bestiality and pedophilia. A smaller group defined Fetishism as a form of sexuality focused on specific tactile needs like rubber, leather, latex, fur, etc.

Yet another group was convinced that it was just about blood, pain, needles, whippings and other forms of torture — making it impossible for them to read the posts without getting upset. Two or three members even thought it was illegal to download BDSM photographs to their hard drives.

It seemed strange to me that we should have a forum without BDSM, so to please those who got so upset about it, I started another site: bdsm.ameanet.com. I launched it a few months ago with a 2 month free membership to see if anybody was interested. A site with free memberships is always popular, but this particular site had 500 members after the first month, which is quite a lot for what I would call a “special interest” site, receiving traffic from AmeaNet only. At least 20 of these members were the same people who had displayed their disgust on the forum. They were just checking things out, I assumed, but they are still there as regular visitors.

After twelve years of experience with AMEA, I think I have a general idea what is driving people who are looking for erotic art and vintage pornography, but this time I have no clue whatsoever. [To be continued..]

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As a young photographer I was often asked to bring my camera to family gatherings to make pictures. Like many people I have a hard time refusing, but when it came to printing the rolls of film my attitude became less considerate. Of course I had the very best of intentions, but there was always something else that needed to be printed first. So in the end aunts and uncles stopped sending me Christmas cards as a way of telling me they were disturbed by the fact that they had not received their pictures.

I had no real excuse. It is not that I disliked the dark room — I loved to make enlargements of my best work — but printing 10 rolls of film of people dancing and drinking or both was quite a monotonous affair and I often lacked the money to buy enough photographic paper to get the job done. I could have asked for an advance, but that would have been like admitting that I did not make enough money as a freelance photographer and at that age I was way too proud for that.

With the help of a friend I switched to digital photography around 2000. Most existing equipment was expanded with digital equivalents. The center piece of that new digital studio was a Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED with ICE technology, my new dark room and I am still working with it today. It had to be repaired once, but it is still humming on my desk.

I am using the 8000 ED to digitize my archive of negatives. So, whenever I have the time I scan a few sheets and currently I have about 40.000 digital copies of negatives. When I started a few years ago I decided to pick only the best of my negatives but soon I learned that was the wrong approach. My archive has a history of its own; it was once put out on the balcony in the rain by an ex who apparently had some unresolved issues to deal with, so a lot of negatives are in poor condition. Most of these images are “unprintable”, at least that is how I looked at them, before I started using the ICE technology to digitally remove sticky dust particles and scratches caused by hopeless efforts to clean the film surface.

A part of my past is now slowly starting to reappear in nice shiny 600 dpi files of about 60 Mb each. It is a miracle. Most of the material however cannot stand on its own. My best guess is that in the end I will have about 350 pictures who can in fact be showcased on my main photography site hansvanderkamp.com. Still, I find those other photographs, badly in need of context, very interesting too.

Monday I brought a camera to my son’s graduation to take a few pictures and I ended up taking quite a few more and I was immediately struck by that old fear of how I was going to distribute the photographs to the people I had photographed. I know there are plenty of options like posting them on FlickR, but somehow I do not like posting on these sites, certainly not if the files are quite large.

So, the best solution was to install a web gallery on my own server. I have enough experience with that, because most AmeaNet member sites are built around a robust program called PhotoPost, but buying an extra PhotoPost license to distribute 36 pictures seemed overkill to me. The only option was to use an open source gallery. I have done that a few times in the last 10 years, but it always turned out to be a very bad idea because of common security risks as sql injection and exploitation of the upload directories. And I do not like the way open source coders like to brag about a few hundred bug fixes in the latest upgrade — released only three days after you have installed the software.

So, I reluctantly installed Gallery2, an open source gallery package, thinking that my pictures were not going to be on the server for very long. It was a calculated risk, I figured. Much to my surprise there was a hefty security manual packaged with the program that made a lot of sense, so after installing a gallery for my son, I started installing another copy for this weblog, because this software can be integrated in the blog with a “simple” plug-in.

The random picture in the right sidebar is created by Gallery2. For the time being I am posting some Netfinds, my own drawings, a few family album pictures, and some photographs that do not deserve a prominent place on my main photo site.

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When I started building websites in the mid nineties, everybody in the field was an amateur. There were few training possibilities, so we lived under the guidance of RTFM; Read The Fucking Manual. I was under the impression that I was one of the few photographers over the age of forty doing web design. Soon I learned that was a misjudgment. Many pioneers in web design were photographers.

Looking back on it, that was no miracle either. Photographic techniques were constantly changing, so most photographers were quite flexible. Most professional designers however seemed to be allergic to two things; digital technology and functionality. Much like fashion designers they were dinosaurs as far as computers were concerned. As a rule they used Mac computers, not only because they ‘looked better’, but because the software on these machines is idiot-proof. (This is by no means a denial of the fact that Macs are superior machines, that is — if you can live with the fact that there is so little choice of software to expand your horizon in a technical sense.)

If you have ever tried to carve a steak with a designer’s knife, or poured coffee from a designer’s can, you will know that most designers are absolutely deaf and blind to functionality. If you think this is an overstatement; try sitting in a Rietveld chair for one night, or better yet; try to embrace your partner in it like you would do in an ordinary chair. Within seconds you will find yourself in a classy pile of firewood picking splinters from your behind.

Few designers care about you or the functionality of the items they have designed — but you have to hand it to them; they are not too shy to use these products themselves. Just walking through the city one can spot designers from a mile just by looking at the glasses they wear. Whatever the fashion is, they always wear glasses that are utterly impractical and will look hopelessly ridiculous on photographs two or three years from now. To make things worse design as an art form has always been underexposed and underrated, so they act like arrogant, pompous, know-it-alls to compensate for their misfortunes. (Please bare in mind; it takes one to recognize one.)

So I would rather file them under ‘masochists’ than under ‘misanthropes’ and of course we could not live without them. Our society would be absolutely boring without design and it is very easy to ridicule a particular profession or any profession at all for that matter. I could ridicule photographers like myself even more effectively and come to think of it — I probably will one of these days.

With websites becoming more important every day, the interest of graphic designers who normally work for printed media is shifting towards the web. This resulted in better looking websites that do not function very well. Which is okay of course if the content of a site is of such high relevance that visitors gladly take a day off trying to locate the content they are looking for. Fact is that a site that will win an award for design is likely to have fewer visitors than a website designed by a code hacker who knows about compatibility, search engine optimization, and content navigation. Just look at the top ten of best visited sites and it becomes quite obvious that no graphic designer ever entered the building of the companies exploiting these sites. (With the exception of the logo, of course.)

At age 16 my son went to a school for graphic design that was slowly shifting towards a school for new media. You can imagine the chaos on a school where teachers were still deeply committed to printing, paper and hand-binding books, while in fact they had to teach action scripting, interface design and other multimedia disciplines. I have always adored my son for being a better person than I am, because he is an unlikely genetic mix of the best of his mother and the best of me, but I have learned to admire him even more for his ability not to become insane in an environment where insanity rules.

My son is now almost 22 and in the coming week he will graduate from this school and he is one of the first of a new generation who works with typography and design within a web environment. Although he did do some design for printed media, his portfolio is filled with designs for websites and other interactive applications. I feel pretty sure that the chaos he worked in during his education will have discouraged him enough to pursue a career of ‘websites only’. His interest in art has become broader and he will probably continue his studies sooner or later on an art academy to become an independent artist.

Whatever happens, I strongly hope that photographer-web designers and designers who are brought up to pimp printed media will slowly withdraw from the web to leave web design to a new generation of true professionals, so that in a few years the web will be wiped clean from the alienating web design that has become the trademark of graphic designers who think in ink and paper.

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I had it all worked out. In the last three months of the year I would launch three new sites. The first one was for a client: love2pay.com. He just wanted an adult directory, so I started working on it immediately and I finished the job before deadline, which was definitively a first-timer in a very long career of working with deadlines. The client looked at it, was happy with the results and I moved on working on the second site bdsm.ameanet.com; a project I had started two years ago, without ever finishing it. Since then my idea about websites had changed dramatically, so I decided to start from scratch again. (Ever heard a better excuse from a man who lost his backup?)

Two weeks into that project, the client, who is a starting entrepreneur on the web, rang my doorbell.
‘Actually, an adult directory is nothing more than a lot of pages with links..’
He look kind of puzzled.
‘Don’t forget all those nice greasy banners at the top and the bottom of the pages,’ I replied.
There was no stopping him. He wanted more. While he started listing what he wanted to add to his site, the project became bigger than anything I had ever built on the Web, but since he is a nice guy, I started working on love2pay.com once more. ‘Do not worry!’ he said when he left. ‘There is no real rush.’

I looked at him like I was shot in the butt with an arrow.

All through the project I kept moaning and groaning, but I finished it in 40 days and technically speaking it is a shining example of a web developer’s good behavior. All databases are in sync and the interface architecture is a computer newbies wet dream. You don’t see a lot of sites like that on the web these days. A friend suggested we should have a drink to celebrate, but I refused and that does not happen very often either.

I knew very well why I was so edgy. Months before – in a fit of megalomania, I presume – I had decided that I was going to interview 365 inhabitants of Amsterdam all through the year 2007 for a project called amstelvisie.com. Short interviews, of course, but 365 short interviews still make up for a lot of preparation, video shoots and editing time. My response to skeptics who did know what I was heading for had been arrogant, to say the least. ‘Listen I have been a journalist and a photographer for most of my life, so I should know all about planning!’ Forgetting for a moment there that I had never been too good working with deadlines. ‘What I will simply do, is make sure that I have at least one month of interviews in stock before I even start on January 1st, 2007.’ There was a lot of nodding going on, but nobody seemed quite convinced.

Now I am sitting behind my desk looking at the clock and knowing that I have less than 100 hours before amstelvisie.com is launched and when I look at the material to be webcasted I can see that I am completely covered for the first day of 2007. That interview is already on the server although it is not linked. It will be linked on January 31, 00:00 (CET).
Tomorrow I have an appointment for interview #2 and for the rest I am listening to friendly excuses coming from people who do want to interviewed but only *after* the first week of 2007.

Why did I do this to myself? Well, after sitting on my behind, constructing and updating websites for years in a row, I thought it was time to explore the Great Outdoors once again. I live in a one-room apartment, where I eat, sleep, bath and work. The walls started to move in on me. Believe me, I will make this deadline or I will die trying.

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Some time ago I received a request to build a website that was quite complex. It took me about a month to build it and that includes working through the evenings and weekends. Once in a while I really enjoy that. Most of my sites – with a few exceptions like hansvanderkamp.com, theinsanerobot.com and ameanet.org (main entrance) – are built following a simular structure.

The design and the basic coding are done in Photoshop and Notepad. For all functionality that demands interactivity and database connectivity I use ready made applications that I redesign and adjust where necessary. Picking the right software done by the right coder is a tedious task but a bare necessity with security in mind.

While working on the client’s site I forgot about AMEA a bit for a while, so once the job was done, the list of things to do for AmeaNet had become endless. I started receiving e-mails of members of the Movies section that it was about time for some new movies and the Picture of the Day once again ressembled National Geographic’s TV concept; rerunning reruns.

Usually I do what seems urgent first. It is like redecorating your own house. Once the last room is finished, the first one is up again for a fresh coat of paint. The Vintage Photographs section always ends at the bottom of the list and I never seem to find the time to work on it. Why? Because there are never any real problems. The members are happy. There are no conflicts between members and moderators. In fact it is the most successful AmeaNet website.

Still, it was about time that the site had a thorough upgrade. With over 15.000 pictures and 947 members it was an inch away from collapsing. We already had to manually activate accounts after payment because the databases were not in synch anymore and there were some warnings that predicted a possible sudden collapse.

So, I am currently working as hard as I can on a completely new, upgraded Vintage Photographs Section with a lot of extra functionality such as video uploading and downloading. The site runs on an American program for photo posting with a Russian payment front end. Both programs have to correspond through one database. Both programs are easy to install. Integrating them however is a real pain in the neck. The Russian coders are real wizards, they work miracles, but if you ask them a question the confusion starts. They had me busy for half a day looking for a line of code that had to be ‘the line above 'cancel_return' => "$config[root_url] /cancel.php?payment_id=$invoice"‘. So I was looking at the line directly above it and did not find what I was looking for, until it hit me; they meant ‘the line on top of the file’ — positioned 97 lines up.

But it is getting there. If you have an active account you can test it at:
http://vintage.ameanet.com
There is still a lot to be done and I am not sure about the design, but it is working..

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