Building a Naked Snowman

[description: series of videos depicting a naked man building a snowman]

I tell you, I had no idea building a snowman was such vigorous exercise - rolling an increasingly heavy snow boulder around while in a perpetual crouch works quite a few muscles. I was sore for days!

You're probably thinking that it must be cold going out in the snow without any clothes on. And you're right. But there are some tricks you can use to extend your endurance. The key to lasting longer out in the cold is to limit your contact with the snow. The air may be cold, but the snow is wet, and cold is worse when you're wet - especially when temperatures are below freezing. So if you're planning on diving into the snow, you should expect to come inside immediately afterwards to dry off and warm up. Otherwise, wearing boots and/or gloves will prevent the snow from coming into direct contact with your naked skin.

Weather is also a factor. Obviously, if there are arctic winds blowing flurries around, it's going to be colder. But if the sky is clear and the sun is shining, you may be surprised by the extra warmth it provides to your skin. Plus, if you're moving around and getting exercise, that will also raise your body temperature. Just be reasonable. If you start to feel cold, go inside. I wouldn't do this every day, and you don't want to spend hours out in the cold without proper protection. But if it's just an occasional stint here and there, it's not going to kill you.

It might seem crazy to go outside naked when there's snow on the ground. But if you're a nudist, and you enjoy the thrill of nude recreation - especially outdoors - there's nothing like being naked while building a snowman or, say, shoveling the walkway, to cure your cabin fever and melt the wintertime blues away!

Spent

Retrospective: At first, I thought this was going to be the perfect year to do a 365 project - it was the ten year anniversary of my first daily nudes project, and I had just moved from an apartment building into a house for the first time in several years, with a yard I could go naked in. But aside from that, and for several other reasons, it actually turned out to be a terrible year for a 365 project. But I still did it!

I wanted to do more holiday-themed shoots, and celebrate things like the 100th, 200th and 300th days of the year. I also intended to shoot more dSLR photography (the vast majority of material ended up being produced with my cell phone). The project started out early being very structured like that. But then we got an unexpected extended house guest who is not a nudist. And even if I had felt comfortable enough to still go nude without reservation, I would have been very self-conscious performing my photography - some of it quite scandalous in nature - without sufficient privacy.

So daily shoots turned into a feast-or-famine type situation, where I might go days or even weeks without shooting much of anything, only to get a few short hours here and there in which I would go hog wild and shoot as many different concepts as I could before time ran out. This helped to buffer my output for those times when I couldn't shoot anything, so that I'd still have something to post on my blog every day.

It got to the point where I had weeks, even up to a month's worth of posts waiting in the wings of my blog, ready to be posted at any given time, so that the sharing of my activities began to lag behind the activities themselves (quite a bit in some cases), making it hard to post anything relevant to the day it was being posted (that said, I ended up doing a pretty phenomenal job winding down to the last day of the year - I still have concepts I'd like to shoot, but not really any leftover material except what you see in this post).

Nevertheless, the outcome is a completed project (several times I wanted to quit, but I had enough material to coast through those low points) - 365 days of blog posts, each one containing a nude, erotic, or fashion-oriented photograph (or video) of me, many supplemented by my writing. I hope you've enjoyed it - though the experience had its ups and downs, I certainly did. Now it's time for me to take a break. If I can step away from the camera...

[description: a naked man poses with an unopened wall calendar held in front of his body]
Happy Nude Year!

What's next: Obviously, I'm not done with photography, but I'm going to try to take a break from shooting every day, and spend that time on some other things that I've been neglecting, like game development. In the photography world, however, I'd like to switch from creating new photographs to showcasing some old ones. With the sheer volume of material I pump out (especially this past year), it can be a full-time job just managing it. I'd like to go back and finish an earlier project in which I've been sharing some of the best of my older phone selfies on...FetLife [defunct], I guess*. I believe I have two more years' worth of selfies to post.

And, of course, I'd like to shift my focus back to posting my more serious and artistic photography on deviantART [NSFW]. I'm still a year behind on that. At this point, though, differentiating my photography by medium - "spontaneous" cell phone selfies versus "serious" camera portraits - becomes difficult, as with the advent of my getting an iphone, the line between the two have blurred, and now I use my phone camera for all kinds of serious, artistic, and planned shoots. I suppose I'll need a little more time to figure out how I'm going to handle that. In the meantime, though, you can stay connected to my blog here for all the latest news and photoshoots!

*I was going to say Tumblr, but they engaged in a massive purge just this past month, banning all nudity and adult content. I had previously enjoyed their service, but after a gut-wrenching move like this, I'll be happy to see them fade into obscurity. On the other hand, some of the changes in store under Flickr's new management include no longer needing a Yahoo account to log in. So, no guarantees, but I might actually be able to access my account again after years of being locked out due to an annoying glitch! Don't expect my celebrated return, however - free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos, and I'm already well past that mark.