Shooting from the Hip
by A. Jed Dude
If you think about it (a process I wouldn’t recommend, for what that’s worth), when you’re well into your second decade of covering the exact same annual event, it starts to get a little mundane. One of the most difficult truisms of this business we ever try to explain to new people we meet has to be this fact: Contact with even very beautiful and sexually adventurous women begins to have less and less of an “impact” in and of itself. At this year’s convention we didn’t have any literally new people helping us, and the Big Boss figured out that this was the 20th show he’s attended.
It’s no wonder, then, that he tends to “Wander into the Weird” coverage-wise. (OK. So he honestly wanders into the weird fairly regularly – as you can tell if you’ve been a member for any time at all – but that’s not really the point today, and I’m quite happy with the regular paycheck here, so we’ll just move happily along if it’s all the same to you.) We traditionally open our coverage of the Adult Entertainment Expo by offering up a series of scanned memorabilia, along with Mav’s condensed floor show video.
The Weird Leader approach this time around, though, seemed like it might be worth highlighting as an introduction. (Again with the paycheck thing; I know.) Considering the unusual perspective presented here, though, a brief explanation seemed in order.
The variety of people attending the show honestly illustrates one of the most fascinating aspects of a porn convention. All the typical “news” coverage of the event, however, sadly misses this elient, or you have to look for it yourself in the backgrounds of the myriad of more traditional shots of scantily-clad women. Armed with a new ultra-wide lens, then, for some reason El Jefe decided to just put his camera on his shoulder strap and wander through the show pushing the shutter release without ever looking through the viewfinder. (For a more technical explanation, see the bottom of this page.)*
We thought some of the results were fascinating, but we’ve already mentioned the internal struggle we face with the Been there. Done that. tendency. While there’s a whole other page of some of the “art” that resulted from this approach, we did have a few office favorites, and thought that a little insight into how we viewed these shots might help focus you (so to speak) should you decide to go ahead and look at the other photographs. For example, if you look at the picture above, you can surmise that while the men in the picture and the women in the picture seem to be looking at the same thing, the gender split appears to create a rather different response to the display. … Go figure.
