Technical issues are slowing what I knew would already be a glacial pace for updates.  I “opened” the site well before it was ready, and I’ve heard indications that, old and creaky as it was, people liked the old design.  So I’m trying to work up a compromise between the old and new design, and have it work the way it’s supposed to.  So that’s what’s going on.

New York Bound started shooting pictures in 1999. We used this thing called “film.” Although we always had a digital camera as well, we started before the word “megapixel” had been invented. We were just about to make the shift to mostly-digital when we had to stop shooting altogether in 2005.

The upshot of this is, for each shoot, we used quite a few rolls of film. Each roll became a small envelope with 24 to 36 prints in it. This very quickly became a LOT of stuff. Boxes and boxes and boxes of photographs to store.

Well, turns out I can’t afford the space to store all of them. Fortunately, although the prints are nice to have, they’re not essential; only the negatives need to be preserved. So, I planned to rehouse the negatives, and shred the prints. Not the easiest decision to make, but a necessary one. That’ll reduce the amount of space needed by several orders of magnitude.

I kept putting off actually starting this process… and then Hurricane Irene struck. And then the next weekend, another huge rainstorm hit the already oversaturated ground, and the basement room some of the photos were stored in flooded, high enough to soak the boxes lowest to (not on) the ground.

Sadly, Jack Cutler, the man who’d done all our film processing and who had rescued our negatives when they’d been water-damaged after the fire in 2000, went out of business a few years ago. I grabbed all the wet envelopes, and started to move the negatives into new sleeves. But I was too late for some of them; there are quite a few strips from which the emulsion has completely dissolved. If I haven’t already scanned those particular pictures, they’re gone forever.

… to be continued …

So, the first thing that happened was, the last revisions to the government regulations regarding adult entertainment included something missing from the first major revision in 2005… namely, a grandfather clause.  As I’m given to understand it now, for any item produced before the 2005 revisions went into effect, models’ IDs which satisfied the regulations at that time, and the less stringent form of records acceptable at that time, are satisfactory under the new regulations, whose revisions now only apply to material produced after they went into effect.

I phrased that poorly, but what it means is, hypothetically, I could now republish a whole bunch of photos I was forced to take down in 2005 because the models were not US citizens and I’d relied on their non-US passports to prove their identity.  Models like Chanta Rose, Anna Lieb, and Tiffany Walker.  Also, the records I already had proving their legal ages would be enough; generating a whole new set every time a file went online would no longer be necessary.  Two of the main things that drove me off the Web no longer apply.

Hmm…