Copyright. A sensitive topic with certain creative types. It’s to be respected. Whenever violated, it creates all kinds of headaches. A touchy topic for sure. One many violate.

The Making of the Covers

When making the choice to create images for the storyline, it was a tough call. I’m a very private guy. My wife is also very private about her private life… with regards to the web and most of social media.

While I will post next to nothing about me (until I realized people don’t really care too much about content if they don’t know anything about the content creator) my wife post more things about herself and her family than I care for. But that’s not the point.

Making images for the cover of Dom vs Sub was going to be extra tricky. I am not modeling myself on the blog. Too many professional and personal reasons. While I can do some pretty nifty creative photos, wifey will not sign off on showing herself in a very sexual way on the blog.

Worse, she’s not fully aware of the extent of my imagination with regards to this very topic I am blogging about. So.. What is a man to do? While I have a few friends who would love to model for almost any project I can come up with, they’re involved with guys who would rather they not share that much of themselves to a photographer who is not paying big bucks for the luxury.

The Conundrum

Most of the archived risky photos I took are not considered racy by any standards on the web. They were risky to me when I was first branching out of my ultra conservative mindset and I took great pains to hide all identifying marks about what I was doing. Very silly of me when I look back at my history.

However, this blog needed something very creative. Something fresh. Something new. Yet no overly produced.

My history with the web went like this. If you took and shared a photo you didn’t take and passed it as your own, you got flamed. There was no sharing of what you didn’t photograph. Period.

Then times changed. People now take entire photo catalogs and pass it as their own, even if the gender and ethnicity does not match. There is no more respect of content ownership. No one bothers giving photographers credit or models a tag. (exaggerated for effect of course)

However, the thought of taking other people’s pics, even with credit, and making it the representation of my story… felt wrong. Especially for something so experimental and intimate.

The Solution

Take my own photos that would be uniquely different and hope for the best. I went the route of charicature hints. A tie would represent the Dom and nylons would represent the Sub.

Simple. Effective. Cheap. Not over the top.

Now, the simplicity of the props forced the creativity of design. How do you take these items and arrange them such as to convey the thought and ideals of the chapter being written. The challenge invigorated my creative spirit.

At the time of creating this blog, I was doing some serious soul searching (no… I’m not sharing or blogging about it lol) The creative part of me was relatively dormant at the time. A dead-end or roadblock of sort. I definitely didn’t want to end my creative writing journey before it started.

note… this is the third blog created to jump-start my creativity… that’s the only hint to the soul searching I’ll give

With this functional solution, many gears started to lock into place and every blog I was working on started to get new life breathed into it. The searching for ways to convey deep meaning with so little got the ideas churning and solving many problems that aren’t related to this blog.

What was supposed to be only three posts turned into an epic 13 week journey. The birth of this blog started out very strong. Towards the end of the series, I was using PowerPoint to create the images that would grace some of the chapters as covers.

Where to next?

Will there be a day when I go out and create my own original photographic content for the blog? As in ask a model to pose for a story? Who knows. For now, with the blessings of friends, I do get content to use for images that help set the story. I have hopes to collaborate with people in the future so that they can create some of the images that will grace some of the stories on the blog.

The evolution of image design will go much the same route as the evolution of this blog. At first, it was just a blog page. Then, a home page showed up followed by an about page. Now there is a portfolio section. The future is filled with optimism and opportunities.

For the time being, the temptation to go back and remake the covers is being held in check. It’s a nice historical point of value to keep the work as it was in the beginning. When the blog reaches a year old, comparing the imagery will be fascinating. Can’t even think about what five years out will look like (assuming the blogging trend has not vanished entirely)

Until next time, enjoy the imagery of burning passions this blog hopes to inspire.

 

The Covers in Gallery Form