Retifism - my theory

fet‧ish  (noun)
Defined as:

1. any object, idea, etc., eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect, awe or devotion.
2. Psychology. any object or nongenital part of the body that causes a habitual erotic response or fixation.

“It is thought that women's pantyhose are now the most popular female clothing fetish item within the male population of the western world”

The most popular women’s fetish is not, alas, concerned with the male pantyhose equivalent, but is, unsurprisingly, an obsession with shoes. Where this obsession is extreme and involves an erotic response, it is called retifism (named after the kinky 18th century French novelist Nicolas-Edme Rétif)

Modern language often refers to women “having a shoe fetish”. Usually this means that a woman merely has a lot of shoes, rather than it involving some sort of erotic fixation, although often the line between habitual fixation with shoes and true retifism is very fine.

My mother, for example, had a real fixation with shoes. She had over 300 pairs (her shoe cupboard was a black hole, and rather scary). I have a friend who has well over 100 pairs. It really gives her immense pleasure to spend hours searching for the perfect pair of shoes. A new pair of Manolo Blahnik’s makes her feel fulfilled, sexually attractive and powerful.

This obsession really is very common. And women in the western world do indeed spend way too much time fixating and shopping for shoes.

A recent study found that the average woman will shop for an astonishing 25,184 hours and 53 minutes over a period of 63 years. If the average shopping trip lasts from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., this means the average woman spends just over eight and a half years shopping. Of this, 2551.5 hours are spent searching for shoes.

Wow, that’s a heck of a shoe fetish in western culture.

So what is this obsession amongst many women for shopping ?

Anthropologists reckon it is genetically inbuilt into women, and is a throw-back to Palaeolithic (hunting and gathering) times when man did the hunting, and women did the gathering. Women had to spend most of each day searching for berries, nuts, edible roots and vegetation, as well as hunting small animals and looking for wood and skins for keeping the tribe warm. In effect, they spent most of their days shopping. Women provided the bulk of food for their group, and without it, everyone would starve.

Shopping is thus essential for survival! If you women out there deny your urge to shop, then you deny your ancient ancestry. You are hard-wired to provide for your tribe. Although it’s a fair bet that Palaeolithic woman didn’t devote much time to shopping for shoes.

“Retifism is the most extreme form of shoe fetishism and has definite sexual connotations”.

In modern western world, high heeled shoes are the most common women's fetish. Fetish footwear generally involves very high heels, and may extend to high-heeled boots, ballet boots and pony boots (which I think are beautiful, by the way). Some fetishists gain sexual stimulation from sniffing foot odour in shoes, but I’m not even going to begin to speculate if Palaeolithic man spent his nights stoned out of his brain from sniffing his woman’s feet !

Some “experts” reckon there is a link between shoe fetishism and sadomasochism, because kissing someone's shoes is apparently a submissive act (I’m not so sure about this.)

No doubt this post will greatly annoy all of you feminists and male fetish photographers out there. Please believe me when I say that I am not for one moment trivialising fetishism. I am merely playing devil’s advocate with statistics and drawing together some research with a view to understanding a common obsession in western culture.

More importantly, I am lusting after a magnificent new pair of shiny black 7.5 inch fetish shoes for Christmas.
So, Rich, has this well researched and highly informative post convinced you to buy them for me ?!
And I’ll even let you sniff them afterwards if you want.



This is the delectable Roswell, who loves pretty fetish shoes as much as I do!

The universe is quantised!

I just read a post on Don’s Hotel Room Nudes regarding “What comes after digital technology?” This is a discussion about where digital can go and why is cannot compete with film given its inherent digital restrictions and why analog is better than digital.

Don has challenged me to back up my statement that the universe is inherently digital.

This prompted me to consider a reply based on my experience in the field of physics. So here it goes.

At the smallest scale of the universe everything is quantised, that is it consists of finite steps in value. There is not a continuous set of states between any two values of energy; you must jump from one energy value to another in finite steps. This step size is known as Planck’s constant (h) and it has a value of 6.62x10^-34Js which is pretty darn small.

Now lets consider how this quanta effects photography.

Light is energy, so light is also quantised and if we were to measure the frequency of the light reflected from a surface we could assign an energy value to it.

Visible light has a frequency range from 4x10¹⁴Hz to 7.5x10¹⁴Hz

Now you can specify exactly the energy of light from the equation e=hf, So this gives an energy range of 4.2x10^-20 to 7.9x10^-20 or a range of 3.7x10^-20.

The number of discreet energy values that are needed to describe every possible frequency of light in that visible range is 3.7x10^-20/6.62x10^-34=3.5x10¹⁴ states. So the whole visible spectrum has roughly 350000000000000 separate states in it.

So if we have a digital system that can measure with quantum accuracy, how many bits of data do we need to represent this with no data loss. The number of states in a binary number is represented 2^n, and a little bit of playing with my calculator shows 2⁴⁸=3x10¹⁴. So if we have a 48 bit sensor we can accurately record every single part of the visible spectrum with quantum accuracy.

Now a digital camera and colour film work by measuring the energy of the photons in the red, green and blue portion of the spectrum and summing them over time. This gives a measure of the colour but not a complete measurement of it. Each of the photons delivers energy to the sensor or crystal and determines its numeric value or exposure level.

The actual value in the sensor or change in the crystal is quantised and therefore can be measured, in theory, with a digital system that has sufficient accuracy.

Let’s consider distance. The closest you can place any two subatomic particles is also controlled by the Planck constant. This is the most accurate measurement you could make. You could convert all distances to a multiple of the Planck constant, so distance is also quantised.

Now Don brought up the factor of Pi and that the fact that you cannot represent it using a digital system. This is correct, but Pi is not a physical constant. Pi is a ratio that measures the curvature of space time at a specific location. If you were able to tie a tape measure to the centre of the sun and use it to measure radius, and then measure the circumference outside the sun, Pi would not be exactly the same as on earth because the curvature of space due to the mass of the sun would distort the measurements. Thus Pi is a simple ratio, not a physical constant. The circumference is quantised and can be measured, the radius is quantised and can be measured but the ratio cannot.

However, this is not a failing of the digital system or the quantum nature of reality, because the universe doesn’t measure Pi, Pi is a mathematical construct.

Thus I believe that having discussed the quantum nature of light and distance and the lack of relevance of a pure ratio, my statement that the universe is inherently digital holds true.

Now, after all that I really think you need reward, so here is the lovely Kate not thinking about physics at all.

Hoist by my own petard

Well, well, well. Who would have thought that our little blog, in a far flung corner of the world, would generate so much controversy ?

In the last couple of weeks, I have been subject to aggressive and overly defensive messages regarding my posts. This has been directed at me off-blog, before any one reader might incorrectly think this is about them.

Let me make it crystal clear that this blog is not intended as a criticism of any one person, or their art. This post, for example, is absolutely not intended to be about anyone in particular. It is about how I feel, based on the barrage of strange emails and messages I am getting as a result of starting this blog.

The blog appears to be a double-edged sword.

We are proud to be getting a loyal readership that come back every day or two to see what we’ve been up to in our little photographic bubble. This is fantastic. I love this. It is the reason I started the blog. I hope folks come back for both the photographs and the writing.

I love what I do. I am developing a real passion for the craft of writing, both on and off-blog. I tend to write emotionally, despite Rich telling me this is a bad idea. But this is how I write. I call it like I see it, and this is who I am.

But the very nature of spilling your emotional guts on a public blog means that people whom you’ve never met tend to assume they know you, judge you and send you messages of a very personal nature.
God how I wish I hadn’t posted some of my past entries. Yes I could delete them, but then that wouldn’t be honest, now would it ? I believe words should stand, even if I was way too open with my emotions (and potentially a total idiot) for posting them.

During the last few weeks, I have been approached by several photographers and male models off-list. Some of these have been lovely, and some haven’t. The ones that haven’t have resulted in my announcement that I am not going to be shooting nude with other photographers for now. This is partly a result of personal injury (see last post), but if I am honest, it is also because the blog has generated way too many dodgy modelling offers.
This is totally my own fault, as I did say a few posts back that I didn’t charge for shoots and I only shoot for art. I then joked that I would be approached with loads of offers for shoots.

Boy was I right. I guess more people were reading this than I thought.

And what is it about blogging that some readers think that certain entries are directed specifically at them ? A curious phenomenon, don’t you think ? But one which several folks subscribe to.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I am asking people to send nice messages to me. Be polite. Be a credit to your profession. My comments on the blog are not directed at you.

And to the one photographer who won’t take no for an answer, who messages me whilst drunk, who is generally making my life miserable, please : GO AWAY!

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention the word “creep” once !


Kate T

An uncomfy bear

I'm having a bit of a rough time at the moment and will be taking a few months break from modelling.

I wish I could report that my injuries are the result of either mind blowing acrobatic sex or a death-defying stunt involving an extreme shoot. (I do so enjoy trying to push myself to the edge with regard to modelling, but unfortunately the results are rarely photogenic, and most of the images get wisely deleted).
Alas, the truth is far more mundane, and I appear to have reopened an old wound due to excess overenthusiastic vacuuming (and not the fetish kind!). I’m blaming the kids as usual (three c/sections in the past), although I suspect it is also a feature of age. This comfy teddy bear is losing her stuffing!
So as I do tend to “give my all” when modelling, I'm not up to my usual stretching and posing, as I fear this would result in more discomfort (for that read “extreme pain”).

In the end, this break comes at an opportune time, as I keep getting pestered (sorry I mean “repeatedly approached”) by a photographer who wishes to book me, but with whom I have declined to work. Now after the flaming I got last time with regard to judging photographers, I have no intention of saying any more about the matter. Suffice to say I am NOT shooting with any other photographers for the foreseeable future. In effect, I have been “spooked” by recent events and need to back off a bit. Time to take a wee sabbatical, methinks.

Changing the subject, Richard had a great shoot earlier on this week with a beautiful model from Norwich called Roswell Ivory

Unfortunately I didn’t get much time assisting with the shoot, due to the fact that the central heating in the studio had a meltdown, and I was too busy trying to manage the heating engineer who was VERY interested in the beautiful model and kept trying to get into the studio, despite being told that it was out of bounds (He didn’t succeed because I stood between him and the studio door for three hours, but I was extremely frayed by the end of the shoot!).
Richard and Roswell, both professionals as they are, just kept on shooting regardless, and you will be seeing some great images in the next few weeks. Thanks Roswell, and I hope I finally get a chance to work with you in the future!

The greatest truth and the greatest lie! Part Two.

Here we have two images of yours truly, involving basically the same pose but with completely different styles. Which is the better picture ? Which is art ?

Photograph 1: To my non-photographic mind, this is the more emotive of the two images. But this might be me projecting my feelings, as I remember the shoot. This was taken at the end of the two hour “mud shoot” where I was feeling cold, wet, filthy, tired and old. This image had no retouching…it was a simple portrait, which captured the mood and emotion perfectly. He really is getting better, isn’t he?

Photograph 2: This is probably the most flattering picture of me ever taken. It’s certainly the one I will put on my wall to piss off the “ladies who lunch” who decline to invite me to their luncheon parties because I am not attractive (for that read “symmetrical”), sophisticated or fashionable enough. Although I love this shot, and it makes me feel like I’m a million dollars, unfortunately it isn’t real. The raw image was a lot less flattering, I’m afraid.

I believe my original words to Rich were “Photoshop me Baby. The full works. I want virtual make-up, plastic skin, everything.”
So he did, amidst much muttering that this wasn’t real photography and he was only doing this under protest.
My skin has been digitally smoothed (instantly taking at least 10 years off me), he enhanced my make-up using his considerable Photoshop skills, and did all sorts of other modifications that I don’t even begin to understand. To my mind, the talent he has with Photoshop is an art-form in itself, although he doesn’t agree.

End Result = I LOOK YOUNG AGAIN!!! Hurrah !
The ability to do this is worth more than diamonds, I can tell you, and is the best way to make your partner happy! I am now living in a bubble of self-delusion where I am constantly 10 years younger than my real age, and I really do look this fabulous all of the time. I reserve the right to ignore the reality that 99% of the time I look like a swamp monster.

I would say that photograph 1 is the more artistic of the shots, and is a better photograph, although the image doesn’t do me any favours at all, and it sure as hell doesn’t make me look pretty or sexy or sophisticated. The second image does fit these three criteria IMO (although you may disagree), but it is fake.

So, I say again, which is the better picture, and which is Art ?

OMG All my photos are gone!

As a digital photographer what is the worst thing you can think of that could happen to you. Excluding death or serious illness I would bet it would be going to look at your photographs and finding all the directories empty of files. All the photographs deleted.

This is what happened to me this afternoon. I fired up Adobe Bridge to take a look at my photos so I could locate some of the Christmas themed shots I did in the summer and start to ready them for Christmas. You can imagine my horror at seeing all the folders empty. All the images, RAW, JPG and PSD were gone but all the folders remained.

I went pale, I felt faint, I believe I uttered a few expletives.

I searched the drive, and found the photographs, and I found the culprit.

Adobe are about to release a new product called Lightroom. It supposed to be a new workflow program that makes your life easier by giving you lots of handy organisation and modification tools. I had installed it in order to see how well it worked. It worked very badly.

After installing I told it to index all my photographs and leave them where they were. There was a checkbox, something like “Index in place”.

It ran like a dog, I have around 8000 images in my system and it took hours to create the thumbnails. Well now I know why, it was moving all my photographs from one location on the hard drive to another.

So I found my pictures, I have put them back where they belong, and I have removed Lightroom.

You would think that it would not be rocket science for a company that releases two products that do almost the same thing, Bridge and Lightroom, for them to actually be able to coexist without one screwing with the others settings.

If you try Lightroom you may want to keep my experience in mind.

This is Lynx looking very seductive, and fortunatly, not lost.

A Creepy Week

This has been a week of creeps and refusals, or maybe refusals of creeps, if you see what I mean.

On Tuesday I was approached by My First Creep. I kinda feel like I have graduated now….obviously I am a real and valued model, and at least somewhat attractive, if I receive such salubrious offers from such quality photographers.

To be fair, he really did pay extremely well, but unfortunately his web site was basically older models, in ordinary clothes, shot doing a slow striptease. In order to see the full monty, you have to pay to enter. There was no studio. The models in the site varied from around my age to around 65, and I’m sure they are lovely ladies in person, but the photos were of very poor quality and did them no justice at all. They were filmed stripping on the beach, in the back of a car park, and at various secluded forest locations. I mean, what in Gods name possesses a woman to go out into a remote area of our local forest to shoot with a complete stranger who is obviously …er…creepy ? Yes, I’m being naïve, aren’t I ? I’m sure the photographer in question is a very nice chap, but honestly, he could be a mad axe murderer, for all I know.

If I had accepted the modelling assignment, I would have been featured on a pay-per-view site, with my very own email address via the site, so that viewers (no doubt jacking themselves off over my Marks and Spencer undies) could contact me direct. I wonder who would have replied to these emails ? It sure as hell wouldn’t have been me. I doubt if my reply of “Die Vile Maggot!” would have been particularly alluring, or increased his subscriptions much. Then again, it might. I guess I’ll never know.

I’m ashamed to admit that I felt physically sick after this email exchange. It took me at least an hour to stop ranting. Rich, of course, was the perfect gentleman and dispensed cuddles and a cup of camomile tea in order to calm me down and stop me removing my portfolio from all the modelling sites. My 8 year old son was also magnificently supportive and offered to “duff ‘im in” for me, whatever that means (He wants to be James Bond when he grows up).

24 hours later, I was actually able to think about modelling again without feeling nauseous. I really need to develop a much thicker skin, don’t I? As an ex-auditor, I really did think I had a formidably thick hide, but clearly this does not extend to modelling.

On Thursday I was then approached by a phenomenally aggressive journalist of a national women’s magazine. She wanted to interview me and write My Life’s Story. This wasn’t about nude modelling (at least not initially) but is to do with the weird healthy diet of which I partake, and which I am EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN to mention on the blog by Rich (who is sick of the whole thing).

Now I wouldn’t have minded, but this woman was incredibly pushy and rather creepy, and she wasn’t remotely interested in the science behind the diet. She was clearly not a quality journalist, but wanted to do a sensationalist story about me, and “mention the science in passing as our readers aren’t really interested in that sort of thing”. I would have been portrayed as a perverted nude anorexic weirdo trying to live forever via starvation. I kid you not. The last interview I did for an online diet magazine three months ago resulted in major misquoting, resulting in the complete opposite of what I was trying to say and an article which I would rather forget about and bury somewhere very dark.

Anyway, I refused to partake of the said interview. Exit angry and frustrated journalist. Again, my thin skin let me down. This would have been my 15 minutes of fame, I guess. Oh well. I’ve always been the type of person who prefers to remain in the undergrowth.

Since then I have spent way to much time baking horribly fattening cakes (which I always do when I get stressed out, like Izzie from Greys Anatomy), resulting in Rich moaning about getting pudgy whilst munching on a coconut and apricot muffin.



Me. Hiding in a remote area of our back garden, covered in mud and icy cold water. I had a chill for a week after this shoot. Don’t ever say that I don’t suffer for my Art !

Photography: The greatest truth and the greatest lie!

A picture paints a thousand words, but should we believe those words?

My train of thought for this post came about after seeing a documentary photo set regarding a group of people who frequented a bar and how they interacted. The photographs were shot on film using natural light and show emotional snapshots of their lives at the bar. However, it was not the quality of the photography that made me think, it was the reality of the images and the point of taking them.

There are many aspects to photography, photojournalism, documentary, glamour, art. Each has different goals but they all use the same medium, the photograph.

The photograph was traditionally seen as a fixed image of something that happened, something tangible, immutable and believable. However, as technology has moved on this is no longer true. It is now possible to fake practically anything using digital manipulation with almost no way to tell that the photograph was manipulated. Even without digital technology it is pretty simple to contrive just about anything.

Thus we must question those photographs that seek to depict some occurrence as to whether it is a true record or a staged and manipulated depiction.

If we see a heart rendering picture of a beggar in a ditch with his hand held out, can we trust that it is real or staged? If we see an old woman in poverty, is it real, is she truly in poverty or is it simply a creation to get an emotional response?

If the photograph we see generates a response that changes the way we view the world does it matter if the photograph is real or contrived?

If the photograph of the beggar is staged, but causes you to donate to world famine, does it matter?

If the glamour models on the magazine cover are so heavily manipulated that they are no longer real, does it matter?

Ultimately, I believe, that the purpose of photography is to create an emotional response in the viewer. If a photographer achieves the response they want then they have succeeded.

The photograph is a way to communicate. It can communicate absolute reality, it can communicate the photographer’s view of reality, or ultimately it can communicate simply an idea that the photographer wants to express. Each of these is a valid objective but as the viewer we should be aware that no matter how real the images feel, how convincing the story that is told, it is still only an image, a report, a depiction of what the photographer wants you to see and ultimately how they want you to respond emotionally. It may not be absolute reality!

This is Lynx looking as beautiful as ever.

Evacuate the Building!

This afternoon I’m evacuating the house and holing up in the studio for at least three hours whilst the air in the house turns blue. From my serene corner of the studio I can vaguely hear large bouts of swearing and yelling in the distance.
Yes it’s that time of the month again. Richard is cleaning his sensor.

God only knows how much money we have spent on sensor cleaning equipment. Practically as much as we’ve spent on the camera, methinks. But nothing seems to work. He tells me this is a common complaint. Digital cameras are notoriously hard to clean. Brushes, sensor wipes, we have tried them all. The best solution appears to be copious amounts of alcohol (on my part) and hiding until the storm has passed.

This isn’t helped by the fact that my 2 year old Darling is having probably the biggest tantrum of her life because I didn’t put her Teletubby video on quickly enough. Mercifully the boys have detected that the house is now a war-zone and have disappeared to somewhere we will never find them, although they will no doubt surface later around dinner time.

Several hours later.

Report from the Front line: The battle is over and he is victorious!

The frighteningly expensive brush didn’t work. It appeared the brush had some sort of oil on it which of course left smears on the camera. In the end, he used Digi-pads as usual, which took many hours, a horrendous amount of stress and the rest of the family being banished from most of the house (so as not to stir up dust in the air).

Now I must go and pour large amounts of lager down our intrepid photographer from the front line, and see if I can locate the rest of the troops.

Before you think that Richard has abandoned the blog, I assure you this is not the case. He has been re-vamping the web site, plus I have been flogging him to death with the next version of the software (day-job), which is progressing nicely. However, because he is doing the work of at least three people and fighting to save our company, this results in a shell of a man at the weekend, with very little inspiration left for communication or photography. He returns to human form briefly on Sundays, which is about the only day he has enough energy to generate blog posts.

What can I say ? This poor man works so hard – he really deserves some beautiful naked ladies to soothe his fettered brow.

This is Claire Louisa from a few months ago. Incredibly long legs.

Descent into Madness

It has come to my attention that quite a few non-photographically orientated people are reading the blog, which is excellent news! However in the process of pushing my boundaries as a model, I am simultaneously horrifying my father-in-law, friends and non-photographic readers, all of whom clearly think I have lost my mind.

Please note, although you have seen me as a quiet, conservative, repressed and intelligent accountant and mother, like everyone there is more to me than meets the eye. Do you really think that Rich would have married such a staid and boring old fart, let alone stay with her ? That’s not what I am like at all. The external costume that I put on of the professional, demure, Laura Ashley country-type yummy mummy is merely a mask, one which I have worn for far too long, to the extent that it stifled the real person underneath. Modelling is letting me push my boundaries and explore “the real me”.

My mother-in-law thinks Rich has corrupted me utterly and that I’m doing increasingly desperate things to save my marriage, and prevent Rich running off with a young fluffy model. This judgement is despite me constantly trying to explain that Rich has no intention of doing any such thing, and that he knows I am doing this to explore my inner psyche. We come up with ideas for the shoots together. I am not being coerced or corrupted at all (accountancy corrupted me 15 years ago - it was downhill from then on!)
Richard and I are not perverts, despite this is what the neighbours think, and I have not lost my marbles, nor am I having any kind of nervous breakdown.

Is this a mid-life crisis because I am turning 40 next year ? If it is, it’s a helluva lot of fun and frankly I should have done this years ago!

Will this post make any difference and reassure people that we are coherent, sane and operating to the highest possible ethical standards?

Er, no, I doubt it. As we progress deeper into ourselves and our aspirations to art, we may be pushing our own boundaries, but I can guarantee we are way outside the personal comfort zones of most of our friends and family.

Whose blog is it anyway?

Last night was eventful. Lin and I had a bit of a tiff about the blog.

Lin has not posted in a while and wanted to make a post asking you, the readers, what they wanted to hear about. She typed up the text and gave it to me to proof , we always do this to make sure there are no major typos. Everything went well with the post until it hit on some example topics that Lin might post about. One example was making sure you eat the right type of selenium!

Now Lin is a nutrition guru, she is a member of the CR Society and has read just about everything you can think of about nutrition. She reads research papers in the bath to relax! Diet and nutrition are a big part of our everyday lives as Lin and the children have some major allergies and making sure that they eat correctly while excluding major food groups is a nightmare. I’m sure that what she would write would be very interesting to those who were interested in it. My view is that I would like the blog to remain diet free.

Now, the problem was that Lin had only meant the selenium quote to be a kind of joke, but it hit a bit of a nerve in me and I over reacted. Thus we had a few hours of ‘discussion’ as to whose blog it was and what they could post. At one point Lin pretty much threatened to quit the blog.

Well, to cut a long story short we have reached a consensus. Diet may make an occasional appearance but there will be no long treatise on the benefits of the right type of selenium. There will be posts on subjects that touch on photography, even if only slightly.