adventures, also with ISO (preview)

When I moved to Málaga from Barcelona I wasn't very happy in the first weeks. I lived in a very small 1-room apartment without all my personal things that were in a furniture store in Valencia, some 700 kilometers away. The apartment was located in one of the less attractive neighborhoods, and apart of the short times when one or two lovers from Barcelona visited me, I felt quite alone.

I had no idea how to come in contact with new people, and even less with the beautiful Andalusian girls I saw walking by rapidly without even taking notice of the lonely elderly man whose sad eyes followed them. You must know that although Andalusia is Spain as well as Barcelona, many things are very different here, I'd say more Spanish and this has its advantages and disadvantages. The stereotype says that Andalusian women are very fiery but also very reserved and catholic, to use another stereotype.

But then I got a bit more used to the way of living here - and the other dialect. Andalusian Spanish is hard to understand, even for Spaniards of other pats of the country - they love to "eat" beginnings and endings of the words, talk very fast and so my difficulties already began with differentiating one word from the other, then adding the missing parts in my brain and guessing the meaning of what was said. You must know my Spanish is about on the level of my English what makes it a bit difficult, but on the other hand also gives a lot to laugh about and sometimes creates really lovely misunderstandings.

Finally one day, one more of my very lucky days, I got to know Moni. A wild, untamed, very (but very!) playful and all natural young woman who combines about everything positive you can interpret in the stereotypes of an Andalusian woman. And when she first undressed in my small, poor room and I saw the perfection of her body and that wonderful huge bush of pubic hair that caressed her marvelously round and soft private parts, I had to pinch myself to be sure that I wasn't dreaming the typical old-mans dream of lucky fortune that never happens in real life. 

But it happened.

One of those lucky days Moni and I went to the beach and I took my brand new camera with me. It was of the same brand as the old one, just the more recent model with some more pixels on the chip, so I didn't look at the manual not for a second. The beach was small, the light came from the "wrong" direction, but that shouldn't be too much problem. We were both naked on the beach and after a while, Moni played with some flags she brought with her, I started to shoot.

As you can imagine I never use the automatic functions of a camera. I use the manual mode and so I did also in this case. But somehow it was like jinxed: the exposure didn't change whether I opened or closed the aperture, used a longer or shorter shutter time. I was almost going crazy. How can that be? I checked all the settings: manual, ISO 100, all automatic features turned off. I changed ISO. Still no change, the background was too bright, my lovely subject of desire a bit too dark. I thought, maybe the abundant charms of my company had blown out my mind and I forgot about how to use a camera, but then again: when I open the aperture the image should get brighter. And reverse. Shouldn't it? But it didn't.

Actually I couldn't solve the problem this afternoon. Only later, at home, having Moni laying on my belly and the manual book in my hand, I found out: this camera had an automatic ISO-setting that remained automatic even when you turned automatics off. So when I closed the aperture or used a shorter shutter speed that camera simply increased the ISO so that an exposure was reached that the camera thought it was good. I still can't imagine why the ISO setting changes automatically when I explicitly put the camera in manual mode, but well, it is what is, and finally I found the hidden setting so that from that moment ISO stays as I set it. I put away the manual and the camera and directed my attention to the lovely creature that was patiently tickling the hairs on my belly down there.

Well, that's the long story about the series I just uploaded for my patrons of Motivation-level and up. For the known reasons those images aren't technically perfect, but still they are beautiful and fun - and they literally show not only the beginning of my work with the new camera, but also the beginning of a series of very lucky chances of which my patrons already have seen a lot.

And hopefully will continue to see :-)