Opening Doors

Peter picked me up at my flat one morning after our first successful shoot and drove me to his little studio in the Summerset countryside.

On the way he said he needed to pop into PC World for some techy stuff for his kit. I milled around the store aimlessly trying not to get in Peters way. He picked up what he needed and we went and stood in the queue to pay. As we did he pointed out some printers on special offer. He asked if I had a printer for my little laptop. I had an old black and white one that had seen better days and cost more than its own value to keep in fresh ink. Peter picked up a printer from the top of the pile and stated that he would buy it for me. I tried to argue that he didn’t need to and what the heck for but he was very persistent and clinched the deal with “you can owe me ok!” so I agreed. I kind of felt uncomfortable that some guy id only really just met was buying me £100 printers for no apparent reason but I figured he wouldn’t have put up such a fight if he didn’t want me to have it.

When we got to his studio he showed me around. It was small and grubby round the edges but fit its purpose and its environment was quaint. He quickly set up using a pale back drop. He told me to strip off and explained what poses I was to get into. We did some standing, some lying down and some sitting up. All tasteful but simple.

It felt like only ten minutes had gone by when he said “All done. Give us a hug and get dressed”. I got up and put my arms around his neck and planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek accompanied by a thank you. We went down stairs to his office and he played the images back to me on his computer. He said he’d give them all to me on a disk but he taught me how to delete images and rotate them and how to change them into black and white. How to make my teeth and eyes whiter and how to print the pictures out on glossy paper with a fancy border round them on my new printer ready to place in my book. I was awe struck. Wow. Now I could edit my own pictures and play with them to make them look more appealing for my portfolio.

My first proper portfolio images. Now I felt like a real model not just someone being paid to have sex.

I emailed my new images out to people and got defensive when I got unflattering comments back about how black and white images meant they couldn’t tell my skin tone or how this image or that didn’t really show my body off very well. What were these people going on about? Couldn’t they see how great these pictures were?

Peter chatted to me on the way back telling me all about his adventures in porn and life in general. Who he knew and who he had fallen out with. I didn’t notice at the time as he seemed so nice and generous but in retrospect he did have alot of enemies. I decided it must be these other people who were the baddies. Peter was too nice.

Peter started telling me about a guy he was working with to build a website and how they were looking for some girls to build sites for too. He had another model he was good friends with – they had similar tastes and she had agreed to do a site with them and now that offer was extended to me. It wasn’t quite ready to go just yet but that meant id have time to build up some content ready for my new site. I’d get 50% of the profits made from people signing up to the site to see pictures of me doing... well doing everything and anything really. Sounded easy peasy. Peter even said he’d take the photos to help me out.

A website sounded like a good way to earn money for not doing very much but it also sounded very permanent. Although I was taking the business seriously I still had no ideas about how long term my new career would be. I was still prepared in the back of my head for the work to just stop one day soon and to realise that that was my lot, time to go back to the rat race. A website gave me some dept in my new role. It was something that wouldn’t just go away one day.