So I’ve been exceptionally busy the past week or so… but you’ll know why in a moment. First of all, I had the immigration interview this week and now officially have my Green Card to stay in the US for a good while :) This is what the necessary paperwork looked like.

In other paperwork news, it’s also been catching-up-on-bookkeeping week, and I thought I’d share some of the financial details of running this site.

Many people assume that running a paysite, or any kind of camming/modelling rakes in the dough. Well, it can, don’t get me wrong. I see ads all the time on places like Craigslist to make a buttload of money modelling for adult sites, but it depends on what you’re doing. I have trouble relating to a lot of the other stats I see people post, since I seem to go about things in vastly untraditional ways.

Almost everyone from the webmaster side of mainstream porn world who checks out my site is horrified. Why are you charging so little! Where are the ads! Where are the galleries! Where is the update schedule! So I can’t promise I can really tell you what goes on in that big strange world of theirs. I do things the way I want. Even little things, like charging something like $10 instead of $9.95 makes me feel like I’m offering something special and personal, not a Wal-Mart special. I probably could charge and make more, or spend less, but then I’d feel like I was being held to expectations that were not in line with the way I want to expose myself here and run the place.

Anyway… my grand total income for StephTheGeek, Inc. last year?

About -$1500.
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The shoot last weekend got me thinking — how can I call myself an “amateur” when I strive for creating images that showcase professional quality photography?  But I see a genre that falls between mainstream “pro” erotic photography and “I’m taking this in my living room with my point-and-shoot digital camera” photography.  Both have a certain appeal, but I’d rather showcase my non-pro nature through the inclusion of less-than-perfect poses, lack of retouching, and occasional cat in the background than poor quality images.

Overly dark or blown out images are a distraction from the subject of the images.  I want to create arousing art that I am proud of the quality of.  Does that make me a professional?  I don’t think that seeking to polish one’s art should make that person any less of an artist.

The corset photos were posted hours after they were taken, after sifting through to weed out near duplicates and shots that just didn’t quite work.  The colours were corrected, and a few were cropped or tweaked slightly, but they remain largely as shot.  Buster (friend and photographer, who you may remember as doing several of my earlier shoots) will be putting his critical eye to the shots at some point and doing more extensive edits to release a “director’s cut” version of the shoot.

The bottom line is that I enjoy such a wild variety of content that it’s impossible to put it all in one category.  So much of it is raw and in the moment, while other stuff is planned and more elaborate.

If anything, I don’t mind being difficult to pin down  ;)