One of the most common questions I get when people find out what I do is how I got in to this niche of photography. I can only imagine the crazy story they are expecting to hear, but the answer is really quite simple.
=== I often get asked how I got mystart and how did I get to where I am. I have 2 answers to this depending on who is asking.
For thiose with a general intrest, it's not very exciting: I wanted to do this for most of my life, so once I worked up the skills to not embarass myself and the courage to hire a model, I started there. The rest is mostly word of mouth through models talking to each other.
For those that want to start shooting content themselves, it is a whole other story! As noted, I always had an intrest in photography and in porn, so it only seemed logical that I would eventually want to combine these intrests. So what prevented me for so long? That would be anxiety. What if I am not as good as I need to be? What if I waste the model's time and produce nothing? These fears prevented me from doing anything about my desires for many years.
One fateful day I was browsing twitter (where I followed a few local sex workers) and was checking out the accounts of people in replies to a thread I was interested in. This is where I found Roman and noticed they listed modeling in their bio. They seemed cool from what I knew from their replies, so I took a huge leap and DM'ed them asking for their modeling rates. Once I confirmed I could afford it we set up a date and time. This was it, no going back!
I met up with Roman at their house on the day, and we almost instantly got along really well. I was very careful to communicate that this was my first attempt, and I can't guarantee any useable results. This was fine, payment for their time was enough, useable photos was a bonus.
I spent a lot of time fumbling through that shoot and getting things wrong, but more importantly I spent a lot of time getting to know Roman and forming a freindship that lasts to this day. Roman loved the photos and was able to use them to advertise their escorting services.
Something I did not know at the time, Roman was working for the local non-profit, peer-based organisation focused on protecting and promoting the rights, health and wellbeing of Queensland sex workers. Roman was happy to recommend me to other sex workers who needed advertising photos but did not have the thousands of dollars that most photographers wanted for a shoot.
After this, I no longer needed to pay models. All my shoots came from word of mouth as sex workers would recommend me to each other. As it turns out, it was not easy finding a trustworthy photographer, and all I needed to do was be a decent person and take decent photos. A wild concept, I know!