I just got back from Las Vegas where I have spent a week every January since 2008 for the AVN Awards week. The first time I ever went, I went without any clients or plans and got a ton of great photos and it turned into a yearly trip that I have covered for dozens of outlets including Village Voice, LA Weekly, Playboy and Vice. But this year was a little bit different, between making my plans last second and my girlfriend being nominated for a bunch of awards (she also presented one) I decided to skip photographing the awards and just go as my girlfriend’s date.

(I did shoot a little video of Cardi B performing at the awards that ended up on Yahoo & Complex.)

We have a long distance relationship so I figured it would be a great chance to spend some time with her and shoot a bunch of photos, so while she was signing autographs I was shooting the AVN trade show which is now called AVN Show or the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo instead of just the Adult Entertainment Expo.  None of that matters but I got a bunch of photos from the show for you to look at if you want.

I also did a bunch of random photo shoots in hotel rooms along the way and I will get at least some of that stuff up this week as well. A few of the shoots are proper full sets that I will release on their own later, but I will pull highlights of them and all the photos from the quicker shoots into one update ASAP.

Oh, I should also mention that because I wasn’t working for any clients other than you guys, I kinda half assed it this year as far as the convention coverage. I still came out of it with over 100 decent photos, but honestly I was more interested in seeing old friends and playing with my new camera than I was doing a good job of covering the convention from an editorial standpoint.

Anyway, there are a bunch of photos here and they are pretty NSFW. Oh, and if you want to see them in higher resolution I decided to upload them to Girls of Driven By Boredom which I normally don’t do for event coverage but this seemed like a pretty good exception to that rule.

Now click here to see all my photos from the 2019 AVN Show in Las Vegas, NV.

Ps. Back my new book on Kickstarter!

I am going to Las Vegas for the AVN Awards tomorrow so I wanted to get up some new photos before I left. For updates from my AVN Week trip, make sure you follow me on Twitter and Instagram and think about backing my new limited edition book on Kickstarter… 

One of the nice things about living in Brooklyn is that there are always a bunch of great people just a few stops away on the subway, so when I got a new camera I texted my friend Stoya and a few minutes later I was in her office trying to figure to work a digital viewfinder. 

I have known Stoya for more than a decade but we have actually only done one proper shoot. I’ve taken her photo a million times but it’s always just some random thing and it has always come out well. Stoya has been a big feature of two of my books including being a main inspiration for my book Dinner With Igor (I took a photo of her drinking a milkshake that somehow went viral) and being the first reward to sell out for my Instaxxx book Kickstarter.

So when I hit up Stoya she had been shooting all day for her new digital magazine Zero Spaces and was pretty exhausted but she was down to take some photos as long as she didn’t have to get up from her desk. I was fully down. When I got there I realized how dark it was in her apartment but this was a perfect test of the crazy ISO of my new Nikon Z6. I started out shooting at 10,000 (if you don’t know about cameras please ignore this part) which looked great before bumping it down to 5000 ISO which is still way higher than I would go on my Nikon D810 which cost nearly double what the Z6 did. When I got the photos home I realized 10,000 ISO looked great and I can’t wait to see how high I can push it. 

There’s some stuff I don’t like about the camera, but maybe it’s just stuff I am not used to yet (like the digital viewfinder), but I got this thing to shoot some video, so I guess the real test will be when (or if) I start shooting video. Still I really like the camera for portraits and I haven’t quite given up using it to shoot for events. I think I just need to get used to it.

Anyway, these photos were just a test and there aren’t a ton of them and they aren’t that exciting, I was just playing with stuff, but Stoya is great and people seem to love photos of her so I figured I would post these photos while I am out of town for a week and you can check them out in the meantime.

Speaking of the meantime, while I am gone you should totally sign up for Girls of Driven By Boredom (these photos have been there in high resolution for 24 hours or so) and back my new book’s Kickstarter. Only 50 books are left!

Now click here to see all the NSFW photos from my camera test with Stoya.

If you are a regular reader of this website you are probably aware that I have been organizing every single photo I have ever taken. It’s taken me so damn long to do it and part of that reason is that I hate everything I do and I just get depressed looking at photos that I have decided I hate for whatever reason. I have been working on a portfolio for months now and figuring out how to make a few dozen photos reflect my entire body of work is the most frustrating thing I have ever done. It’s easy to edit a million photos down to a few hundred that aren’t awful, but almost impossible to get that edit down to a few that I actually love.

While I was doing all that I had this idea to go through all my 35mm work, which is my personal work, and pull every single image that I don’t hate that isn’t in another book or zine. When I was done I had an edit of 61 images and I decided I could make a decent zine out of that stuff, but it was just another folder full of photos in my endless collection of bad ideas I have for books and zines and art shows.

But then I realized the Kickstarter Make 100 project was coming up again. Every January they encourage makers that have used their platform to do a one off, short run project just for the point of creativity. This is the third year they have done it, and I really loved the idea but in 2017 I was in the middle of my Instaxxx book and last year I just didn’t have anything ready to go, but this year I had the perfect thing.

So I am going to make a book of 35mm photos I don’t hate. It’s going to be from the edit of 61 photos (probably much closer to 30 photos) and there are only going to be 100 copies made. Every one of them will be signed and numbered and the book is going to be square which I think will be a fun format to play with. 

There is also a limited edition of 25 books that will come with a 7″x7″ print (5 prints, each signed/numbered out of an edition of 5). It will have a variant cover and will have some additional photos and come in a fancy envelope! 

I just thought this project would be really fun to do, and super easy to execute. Shipping out hundreds of huge books was a nightmare last time I did a Kickstarter, but doing 125 small books will be a lot of fun and really simple to deal with. But don’t worry, I got a much bigger project in the works. My juggalo book is still coming soon!

Lastly, I wanted to give a big thanks to my photographer buddy Steve Prue for helping me film my Kickstarter video. It’s truly terrible, but that’s because I am awful on camera and I gave up editing after 30 minutes and just added ridiculous wipes and absurd sound effects so that my terrible editing would just look like a joke. 

Now go help me fund this book project! Even donating $1 helps my project in Kickstarters algorithm so even if you are broke even a tiny bit helps a lot. Thanks a ton!

Yesterday would have been the 108th birthday of Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins, the legendary tattoo artist who also happens to have a 92 proof spiced rum named after him. To celebrate the occasion Sailor Jerry (the rum) teamed up with Braven Brewing Company to create a new pineapple IPA called Sailors Beware that would pair perfectly with the rum. They also threw a party at the Brewery in Bushwick that I happened to be taking photos at.

The main attraction of the party (aside from the beer of course) was free Sailor Jerry flash tattoos from Bushwick’s own Allied Tattoo. Allied owner Andy Perez and Noel C were doing tiny tattoos all night. There were a limited number of free tattoos but if you wanted one you had to play a game of plinko to decide your tattoo fate. I actually have two of the tattoos that were options already on me, but I think if I had to pick I would have gotten the pineapple. It proved a popular choice. 

The party was a lot of fun and I got to hang out with my new roommate who was one of the last people to get a tattoo. She got a shark which is always a good choice for a tattoo. There was a cake for Sailor Jerry’s birthday and the french fries at Braven are pretty fucking magical so there’s that. 

Oh, I should also mention that this is the first event I have shot with my new Nikon Z6. I don’t know if it’s going to be my main body going forward but that thing sees in the dark and is way lighter than my normal body. My flash was weird on it and I haven’t quite figured out all the settings yet but so far so good. Now I gotta try and shoot some video on it.

Okay, that’s enough of that, but please come back tomorrow. I am announcing a new Kickstarter here in less than 24 hours!

Now click here to see all the photos from Sailor Jerry’s 108th birthday at Braven Brewery. 

The first post of the new year is about getting rid of a bunch of stuff from the old year. In what is becoming a tradition I am about to dump on you guys a bunch of photos that didn’t quite make it as a full set and then preview some upcoming new stuff. Did I mention all these photos that I’m talking about are nudes? Oh yeah, that’s a thing.

I am gonna go through these photos in the same order that they are in the gallery so you can try and figure out who’s who. First up is of my friend Heidi V. I actually have a full shoot with her that’s still coming, but I haven’t published it because I shot it with these cheap LED lights I bought and I just had one of them with me and they weren’t great. But Heidi is real cute so I am just gonna suck it up and post them at some point, but here’s some random stuff we shot after the shoot was over.

Next up are these pigeon photos that I cannot possibly explain. One of my friends asked me to shoot her topless in Times Square with a pigeon mask on and I wasn’t gonna say no. I should point out that these photos and the ones mentioned above have all been on Girls of Driven By Boredom for a minute now and if you paid for that site you would have seen them in HD by now.

Up next are some random photos from Exxxotica NJ this year of Pouty Kitty and Veda. I shot a ton of 35mm of them but gave up on digital real quickly when I realized the light was useless. Still there were a few photos worth lurking and there’s actually some more explicit shots from the shoot on Girls of DBB — hint hint.

The next group of photos is from my recent trip to LA. They are the photos that didn’t make it into any other sets. The first three are of this girl Lua Saturni. We got stuck in traffic and by the time we got to the place we were going to shoot it was too dark. I managed to get these three shots that look halfway decent if you lighten them in photoshop, but then I totally forgot to do that when I uploaded this gallery so enjoy these aggressively underexposed photos. Sorry. Next in the LA batch is a bunch of photos of Lil Brown Eyes. We just didn’t shoot a ton of stuff and there’s barely any nudity so I tossed them in here instead of doing a seperate post. And lastly in the LA group is a few photos of a girl who DMed me on Instagram at like 4am on my last night in LA and we just met up and shot in the middle of the night on the street. It was a pretty fun story even if we didn’t really get much.

You might have seen a couple of the photos of Syd Vicious that I shot at the Gathering of the Juggalos. I posted a few photos of her with those photos this year (and of course uploaded the full set to Girls of DBB) but now you get to see them all. She got naked in front of a bunch of people and rolled around in the grass. It was fun.

After that we have some non nude photos of Weed Slut that I shot for Playboy at the AVNs in Vegas last year. Not sure why they never ran them but they paid me and I’m not going to complain. I guess it’s still possible that they are going to publish them so I only uploaded a few of them to give you a taste for the set, but at least someone sees a few of theses photos.

Okay, from there we get to the previews of upcoming sets. Gonna go through these super quick because I am gonna publish them and talk about them in full later, but it’s a little taste for what’s coming. A lot of these I have posted on Twitter or whatever so you might have seen them already. 

The set I shot with this girl Sammy just needs to be color corrected but I am so lazy that it’s been like 10 months and I haven’t posted it. Same with the next shots of this girl Dina Michelle. Her and I got locked on a roof which was totally insane but we didn’t take many photos on the roof because we were freaking out about how to get down. The next three preview are of Sabby and a different Sammy and then Sabby and Sammy together with my friend Margot. I shot Sammy and Sabby back to back and they wanted to shoot together so I brought them to Margot’s place and we had a blonde, a brunette and a redhead all together and it was pretty fun. After that are photos of my friend Isabelle who I am going to be shooting again soon. And after that is a shoot I did with my friend Kirra and her friend who just randomly got topless in the middle of it. Kirra is one of my favorite models but this was the first time we ever did a full digital shoot. 

After that we have previews of the full shoots I did in LA with Alex DeLaFlour, my buddy Eddy, Nicki Hearts, Melina Mason’s return to being naked on the internet, and my first of hopefully many with a girl named Jade Baker. In between all that there are photos of Kasey Warner, Khloe Kapri and their friend Damia who isn’t a nude model or porn star or anything, she’s just real cute. Those three girls I shot a ton of content with including Damia and Khloe by themselves, all three of them together and then Kasey and Damia together which I have already uploaded exclusively to Girls of Driven By Boredom. So fucking sign up already.

Finally we have two shoots I did very recently. I shot some photos of Arabelle Raphael who I hadn’t shot in years and some photos of Stoya who I have been friends with for more than a decade and we’ve still really only done one proper shoot. The photos I shot of her the other day were just a test of my new camera, but more on that later… 

Okay that’s all I got. There are over 100 photos in this gallery so please enjoy the photos instead of complaining about the fact that a bunch of them are poorly lit or whatever. I just don’t have it in me to care when none of you care about anything but seeing nipples or whatever it is that keeps you coming back to this damn website.

Click here to see my massive 2018 NSFW photo dump!

10 years ago today I was laid off from my job at Archive.org. I was digitizing books that were in the public domain so that anyone could read them without having a physical copy. Archive.org is a non-profit and a huge part of their budget came from Microsoft donations. The housing market collapse in 2008 caused a lot of companies to reevaluate their corporate giving and Microsoft massively cut their donation for 2009. 

Two days before we left for the holiday we were told that the late shift was being cut completely and that everyone from both shifts could reapply for their jobs the next day. They would pick the best from both groups for the shift. Unfortunately for me I was working part time as a nightlife photographer and there was no way I could get to a day job at 7am every day when I was getting home at 5am. I took 6 weeks severance, filed for unemployment and took a few weeks to figure out what I was going to do next.

I also ended up benefiting from the market crash because that January I was hired to photograph Sundance for the main liquor sponsor even though I didn’t even have a legit professional camera at the time. I did the job for way less than I should have charged, but it was a ton of money for me and everyone was happy. Right around that same time someone randomly found a photo I took of all my cameras and paid me a few thousand dollars to retake that photo for a poster for a Swiss photo competition.

So suddenly I went from going paycheck to paycheck to having a little money in the bank and enough to buy a better camera and by the time my unemployment ran out I still hadn’t run out of money. 10 years later I have had a lot of ups and downs but I still haven’t had to get a job. Given the state of the industry, I might not make it 11 years, but I made it 10 years as a professional photographer and I am pretty proud of that.

I don’t really have any other new content for you today, but here’s a bunch of links to the best photos I have taken over the last 10 years. I am also uploading a new set exclusive to Girls of Driven By Boredom today so if you want to see some new NSFW photos of Kasey Warner and her friend Damia, go sign up there.

Now here are links to my “Best of” posts from 2009-2017. I will start working on the “Best of 2018” post in January.

– Best Of 2009 – Best Of 2010 – Best Of 2011 – Best Of 2012 –

– Best Of 2013 – Best Of 2014 – Best Of 2015 – Best Of 2016 – Best Of 2017 –

A few months ago Kimberly Kane told me about her friend Ashley who was moving to New York. She was like “Ashley rules and she needs to meet new people in the city.” KK is one of my favorite humans of all time so I took her word for it and got some food with Ashley. She does in fact rule and a week or two later I went over to her place and we took some photos. 

This shoot is like the perfect example of my strengths and weaknesses as a photographer. On the strengths side, after meeting me once Ashley was comfortable enough to want to do a shoot with me. She had only posed nude once before and apparently I am only the second dude to ever see her naked which is a god damned honor. I think I made her comfortable while we were shooting and we got some photos that she was really psyched about.

On the negative side I don’t use lighting so shooting in a fairly dark room was challenging. A studio photographer would have set up a couple lights and wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But that’s where we get back to one of my strengths. I am pretty good at figuring out ways to make shoots work, be it using a TV to light a shoot or in this case a projector and a lamp.

It was a lot of fun to mess with the projector, using both the light it bounced off the wall and the projector directly. She also had some LED smart bulbs so we played with those a bit too as well as the little bit of natural light that was coming through the window. But on the negative side again, we were using very little light and I missed a bunch of shots because they were just slightly out of focus or the projector hit my lens creating less than compelling lens flares.

On the plus side again, I really like shooting in people’s spaces. It feels very real and natural and I like that. But on the negative I tend to do stuff like not notice that there’s something dark hanging on the wall directly behind dark hair and it’s distracting as fuck or just the little things in the background like plugs or trash cans that lead to a messy composition. 

Whatever the case, I ultimately really enjoy these photos and I hope you guys do too. Also Ashley and I have become friends so not only will you probably get more photos of her in the future but she is also becoming a fan of my hockey team and that is incredibly important.

And now it is time to sell you things. 1) Ashley was the very last person I shot for my absurd Driven By Boredom Dental calendar. There are only a few copies left and if you wanna get one my Christmas order now! 2) There are some photos of Ashley fully naked on Girls of Driven By Boredom and as always all the photos from this set are available there in high resolution. Go sign up! Okay, let’s get to the free photos already.

Click here to see the NSFW photos of Ashley!

Don’t worry folks, this is going to be my last Dolphins related post of the season. I mean, I guess there is a tremendously small chance that the incredibly subpar Dolphins could somehow win their next 4 regular season games, make the playoffs and then win several more games after that and I would have no choice but to do a post about my trip to the Super Bowl, but let’s just say that’s unlikely. 

As I mentioned a while ago, I organize this big event when the Dolphins play the Jets in New Jersey. We do a pre-party the night before, we do a huge tailgate party on game day and then we sell tickets to the actual game. I have to imagine we do the largest away game event in the country for any football team, we certainly own the largest several group ticket purchases in MetLifeStadium history (and they have two NFL teams playing there). This year we sold 1100 tickets and raised several thousand dollars for charity since we (DolfansNYC) are a non-profit. 

Anyway, the game was way back in September, but the video is finally out now. Go watch it if you want. I am pretty proud of it.

Oh and don’t worry I promise I will post some nudes or something fun next week. 

After Tumblr announced they were banning all adult content from their site I made a Twitter thread of all the absurd images that Tumblr had flagged as adult. After seeing the thread Xeni Jardin asked me if I would like to write a couple hundred words for the site Boing Boing about my experience with Tumblr. I figured I would write something longer for this site and then Boing Boing could just pull from that but they ended really liking the article and running the entire piece. I have been a Boing Boing reader for more than a decade so it means a lot to be published there. Click here to read the copy edited version on Boing Boing or read my unedited draft below.

There was a time when Tumblr was my favorite place to post photos. It was a social network that you could customize in so many ways that you could create a blog or a mood board or hide a secret project behind a password protected gate. It was used by so many people in so many different ways. You could posts .gifs on Tumblr before they worked on Twitter and you could post uncompressed images that looked good on desktop or smartphone without having to know any code. 

I used it as a great place to post images that I could then send to Twitter to get around Twitter’s terrible compression and constantly flowing feed. I used it as a place to organize my images because of Tumblr’s tagging system. I could search for a person or subject or send someone a link to just a specific tag so they could see all my favorite photos of juggalos for example. It was a fantastic tool and my most popular social network until Instagram really exploded.

My career as a photographer took off right around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr and Tumblr really felt like a place where I could post my more personal work alongside my more commercial stuff. I would shoot digitally for my clients and then post my 35mm work to Tumblr’s fantastic film photography community. My road trip photos didn’t feel out of place with my nude work on Tumblr. The band photos I shot for Rolling Stone didn’t feel strange next to the outtakes of work that I shot for Hustler or Playboy. My nightlife work for the Village Voice worked with the snapshots of my friends that I took with a point and shoot camera. The journalism I shot for Vice worked with the terrible Dos and Don’ts I also shot for Vice. 

The photographer Corwin Prescott put it perfectly when he said “I think the saddest part for me is Tumblr was the only place that all my work could be displayed side by side.” His Tweet featured gorgeous photos of a buffalo in the fog and a mountain reflected in an icy pond next to two equally beautiful erotic images. Tumblr was a perfect place for us, photographers who crossed the line between commercial and adult work many times over.

Tumblr had some problems of course; content was constantly posted and reblogged without a source, tags like “#thinspiration” became upsettingly popular and porn was everywhere which was clearly a problem for a social network that had a younger audience. But it was also a place for people to explore their sexuality and gender and find adult materials without blame and find communities of people dealing with issues they were going through. Like Facebook with “Fake News” and Twitter with Nazis Tumblr faced these issues with the grace of a pigeon nubs for feet. 

When Tumblr was sold to Yahoo! for over a billion dollars in 2013 Yahoo! did what they do best, they destroyed the company. I don’t really want to go through the history of Tumblr’s downfall, there’s plenty of stuff you can read about it, but let’s skip to 2017 which is when they lost me.

Last year Tumblr started filtering “adult” blogs. Instead of giving you an option to mark specific content adult or not, they just marked any Tumblr account with nudity as adult and the only way you could view these Tumblrs would be to log into your Tumblr account and turn off “Safe Search”. This meant anyone without a Tumblr account, or without being logged into one, wouldn’t be able to see anything I posted. So that means sharing to Twitter was done and it meant I could no longer send people links to my work via Tumblr. It gutted me. That was the end of Tumblr for me.

A year later I decided that I should maybe go back to Tumblr. I wasn’t going to share that stuff with Twitter anymore, but I had 20,000 people following me on Tumblr and I felt I could post the occasional post for them. I didn’t update a lot after that, but it was actually fun to see feedback from Tumblr because the few people left were actively engaging with my content. I had missed Tumblr.

In March of 2018 a bill called FOSTA-SESTA was passed. The House was called FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and the Senate bill was called SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). They passed with wide bipartisan support and were hailed as some great achievement in stopping sex trafficking. In reality what they did was destroy the Internet as we know it. 

The bills make websites liable for sex trafficking and child pornography on their platforms. Meaning if someone uploaded child porn to Tumblr, then Tumblr could be responsible for that. (This also had major implications for consensual sex work because a platform like Craigslist is liable for escort ads published on their site. I could write a much longer article about that, but for the moment we are talking about Tumblr.) 

In November Tumblr was kicked off the Apple Store because of child porn reports and less than a month later Tumblr decided that they would shut down all adult content on the site (meanwhile Twitter is still filled with Nazis) including “female presenting nipples”. It’s like killing a fly with a rocket launcher. 

I went to my Tumblr today and I found that the majority of my posts over the last couple years had been flagged. They missed some stuff, but more often the flagged things that weren’t adult. They flagged women in underwear, “male presenting” nipples, and even images of alcohol and smoking. Clearly some of these were a mistake like an image of my friend eating ice cream and Tumblr has created a review process, but if click to “Learn More” about the review process it opens up blank browser window. Impressive. 

This has been a disaster for Tumblr and instead of fixing their platform, it’s just putting the final nail in their coffin. I have been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but I would be very surprised if Tumblr is as relevant as MySpace a year from now. 

If you have a Tumblr with adult content (or really any content) make sure you download or export your Tumblr before December 17th.

If you want to enjoy some of the incredibly offensive things that Tumblr flagged please enjoy this Twitter thread at least until Twitter blows itself up a few months from now…

I am just going to make a thread of photos flagged by @tumblr as I go through reporting everything to force Tumblr to spend paid man hours reviewing all my content. Let’s start with the first two. pic.twitter.com/faSzAGLTGE

— Nate Igor Smith (@drivenbyboredom) December 3, 2018