I had asked this question with our latest post in the Wetlook forum, but it gets a lot less traffic than the messy forum so I will also pose it here. I know I am old school and probably in the minority, but I am from the early days of the interwebs when pictures were all that my dial up connection could handle. Streaming video was unthinkable in those days! And photography has been a hobby of mine since I was a kid. You can best believe when I started sploshing with girls, I made sure to photograph that I still photograph most of our sploshings now, even though we are shooting video. It came to my attention recently that someone was complaining about the amount of pictures I post and blaming me for the UMD loading slow. Not gonna lie, that annoyed me when I heard that. Especially since we are producing original WAM content and giving it out for free! But I guess it does beg the question, does anyone here care about pictures anymore? Or is video all that people care about nowadays? Quite frankly, it would be a lot less work for us to not bother editing pictures to post publicly. Your thoughts?

-JD

Keep posting - love it all and Andy always looks great!

Love the pictures, and you always get such great in-action shots of Andi!

Personally I prefer pictures. There's an element of your own imagination reading the expressions, what's being thought etc which only adds to the allure

I prefer pictures. If I watch a video, I just pause it at the terminal moment anyway.

I enjoy both pictures and video, and appreciate you sharing your wet & messy experiences!

Aboslutely! I've held wetlook and slime shoots that were just for photography, no (practically useful) video footage recorded. It sounds cliche, but a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when you can get the color, sharpness and depth from a look that simply isn't there from just a screencap of a video.

Complainers gon' complain. This issue doesn't even seem to be with the amount of photos you post (a LOT of photos get posted here on a daily basis!) but rather some backend tech stuff, so keep doing you.

You know, I definitely prefer video. Slime has always been my biggest love and it's the way it splatters and gloops that gives it so much appeal for me, especially when a total cutie like Andi has a big smile getting all slimy, and the (typically small) movements like that really do it for me as well. But I hate to discourage photos when certainly that has its fans as well. And every once in a while a still does manage to capture that perfect splat of a pie or a sliming that gives it a real sense of movement, and I certainly appreciate those. In the end, I lean heavily towards video, but I lean even heavier towards a creator making what they want to make. And if that's a whole bunch of photos, I will not be complaining!

Without stills, there would be a lot of WAM history lost and a lot of new work that would be underappreciated.
I spend a lot of time making stills from videos I purchased for my own enjoyment.
Which begs the question, if still photography is a trouble for producers, why not offer something for people willing to take the time to edit for you?

Yes

I am in UK and have no problem with photo download speed

There's a delicate balance to shooting photography during a video shoot.
The complaints might stem from the obvious noise of the photo camera shutter.

My potentially out-of-left recommendation is to photograph on 35mm film photography cameras instead of a DSLR. Having only 26 to 30 shots on a roll really makes the photography in tune with what is unfolding.

I had no idea that person's comment was aimed at you, but the idea that the solution to UMD's slowness is for content creators to stop uploading free content, seemed absolutely like putting the cart before the horse. I do think that was one person, frustrated by UMD's particular slowness that week, venting. But I am sure it really stung.

I love good wam photos. Some of my very favourite wam moments have been photographs (I love Bagheera's captioned photographs which really float my boat, for example).

I think your work is fantastic and I hope you don't let anyone put you off. Thanks for all that you give to the community

I love photo sets. I know videos are easier...but I do love a good photo set.

The slowness was not down to anyone uploading anything, MM said work was underway and sure enough, a few days later speed took off again. While I'm not privy to the server logs I very much doubt that a post full of still pics made any noticeable difference to server performance, it's video that eats bandwidth.

I still like still photos which is why I still shoot them. While WAM is very much a "flowing" medium and video is wonderful, sometimes a still taken at exactly the right moment can really "hit the spot" in a way video doesn't always quite manage. So I agree with The Rev, what you two do is awesome, and very appreciated.

WAM is kinetic, but high speed photography has the ability to capture some amazing shots (in just the right moment) - I love seeing the Mess being made, but I also love great candid shots and certainly posed shots after the mess has been made.

It's one of the things I love about THE MAN & THE WIFE's content. They do Before and After Photos that really sell me on the scenes. And while it's not an exact comparison, it's somewhat reminiscent of the way SPLOSH used to do Video's of their Photography sessions for the Magazine - The models are getting messy, but also posing for still shots as they go.

I'd love to see more of those types of dynamic/kinetic still shots captured of course as well.

NGL - Photography is harder than most people think. The best examples are from those who either already know what they're doing, or have taken the time to figure it out. (Or just have exceptional Cell phone cameras these days lol)

The issue was technical and MM has sorted it, the site really flies now.


No, in this case someone thought the entire site was slow because of the number of photos included in a forum post. Now, technically if everyone tried to download the same post, with all images full size, at exactly the same moment, that would cause a brief slowdown - but it wasn't the cause of the issues a few weeks ago, which was something much deeper that MM has fixed.

Back in our UMD video days indeed... sorting out 2000 images from our 5 cameras was an entire pain in the starfish.
Then adding a watermark etc

But, they were valuable for promotion. We used to bundle the pics into zip files, but I don't remember actually selling them? Hmm.

I just looked... I have over 3000 of my favourite UMD messy images on my computer. I can't say I ever look at them, yet I save them?

I currently have Zoe on her back with a pie on each tit as my laptop wallpaper. Gotta get em somewhere!

Tara x

I love photos. What's most important to do what you enjoy doing. But I think with wam in particular, video is generally better. Mess moves and stretches and flows and sloughs, and it's part of the visual appeal. With 4k video being the standard in pretty much every phone these days, I don't see the point in doing simultaneous photo shoots/video when you can just select the best screenshots from a video. With wam, it's physically impossible to consistently get the most perfect shot while manually taking photos. Better to just ignore the focus on still photos and make a good video, because the screenshots will genuinely be better. The best wam photos are almost always screenshots these days

Oddly enough, I was going to reply to this thread over the weekend but the UMD was loading really slow. It wasn't us this time, I swear

Thanks to all that voted and those who replied I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the poll results, guess I'm not the only one who appreciates still pictures! As stated in my original post, I had posted this question with our latest dunk tank post but also posed it here in the messy forum because it tends to be a lot more active. Proving that point, no one actually responded in the wetlook forum Going forward, I think we will only bother editing pictures for the messy posts. If anyone reading this is also into wetlook, you can DM us if you want to see pics from wetlook posts.

And while not the point of this post, someone did bring up the issue of the camera shutter noise. I am actually a bit torn on that myself. While I do like still pictures, I can find the shutter noise to be distracting. Normally we would do like someone else had mentioned Splosh! doing where we would take a pause in the messing for photos; then try to edit those pauses out in the final video. I had bought a remote shutter release for the dunk tank shoots, and recently started using that with the messy shoots. Not sure if I will keep up with that habit as there is no way to edit those sounds from the action and a shutterless camera is not in our budget. As far as making stills from the video, we are shooting on 10+ year old consumer grade HD camcorders; the capture quality would be well below that of my old DSLR. And much like a shutterless camera, replacing the old camcorders with a 4k set up is also not in our budget

Thanks again to all that took time to post and vote! Here's a few unseen still pics from a paint messing

-JD & Andi

I definitely appreciate your photos and vids as it is great seeing amateurs posting for all the right reasons and not just posting to make a quick buck like so many other amateurs who post here.

I didn't vote in time, but I still love photographs!

I do like pictures, for several reasons:

-they're usually free, while videos are expensive (a dollar a minute is a lot more than, say, movies cost), and I'm not made of money.

-video tends to be more arousing, but actually jacking off to it is problematic because you're on the clock, trying to finish before the video runs out, and going to back and forth to your favorite parts is a hassle. With a still pic, you can stare at it as long as you want.

-sometimes I'll buy a video and be disappointed that it wasn't what I imagined was happening when I saw the preview pics. It might have bad acting or fake orgasms, or a dom in a bondage scene might be too nice and not domineering enough, and so forth. With a picture I can imagine things happened exactly how I want.