Hans van der Kamp

Yes, I made it. AmeaMovies.com is now live. The old AMEA movies site was a project I have regretted for a long time. The site was a pain in the neck to update and the members were rarely very pleased with the site. For some time now, with an ever expanding AmeaNet and more photographic work, I find myself in the situation of my father who once bought a house that was too big for our small family. He had promised himself to redecorate the place in his spare time. When he finally finished the last room, the first one was on top of my mother’s list to be redecorated. It was a painful circle that only ended when he sold the house.

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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The first time I was asked by a magazine editor to photograph a couple engaged in BDSM, I simply refused. A few other photographers also refused. Somehow that made it into a challenge, because I was the youngest photographer aboard. When I was asked for a second time; I accepted the assignment.

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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AmeaNet members never cease to amaze me. A few years ago a member – I forgot his name – posted a picture showing a picture of a submissive man enjoying punishment by his Mistress. Nobody responded to that post. A few weeks later another picture was posted. This time a woman was being tied up to be flogged by a man. One member complained and that kicked off a discussion about BDSM and Fetishism.

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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