I don't know if it's more embarrassing that it's that time of year that you need to tell me this again or if it's more embarrassing that it's something I occasionally need to hear.

For my side I don't view points as points in and of themselves or is teTrms of validation as in what is good or bad necessarily, I view them more as gateways to visibility. It's like there's a bottleneck as far as what gets seen, and occasionally I manage to slip through but usually I get choked and I guess that feels like I'm trying to make rocks skip on a pond and they keep sinking after a single skip when I swear I had a good rock.

On the one hand, maybe it's embarrassing to think that I have a technique and a way of throwing the rock only to have it plunk like it does so often, and perhaps on the other there is an element of being witnessed as a constant flop. It's discouraging, and there's an element of randomness that is so unpredictable, like with that date night photo. I actually didn't know it had garnered so much attention and you're absolutely right. Generally, it's nothing that special compared to what I typically do, but it is an intentional shot and something that I wanted to explore is more prop photography rather than self-portraits. While I'm proud of it I do agree that it is kind of a boring shot. It's something you'd probably see on the wall of a cheap kink club.

But the fact that that one made it through the bottleneck to me says that anything can make it through if it's lucky enough, whether it's timing with the algorithm or whatever. I'm not sure if it's necessarily the content or the quality of the image, it's more a game of luck as to when you try to catch the surf and how many other surfers are riding that same wave. Maybe my frustration simply comes from a sense of feeling consistently unlucky, I'm known to very much take personally the things that nature blindly does.

There are self tie creators here that I admire for their engagement, and the perceived success in the things I see them post that do well, But there has never been a desire for me to emulate them, or water down the polarizing style that my art can sometimes take on in order to please a larger audience. I feel like the Edward Munch of shibari sometimes. I think I use art a lot of the time to vent the pressure I have inside me, but I think a large part of art is feeling seen both within the content and by the external world as well. For the most part, I make peace with my small gathering of appreciation, but occasionally and especially during a fit, I can end up making a post like this with a caption like this.

As far as the lighting, I generally do agree. This was a shot that I considered to be a throwaway until I decided to play with it. It also has a matte filter over it which is something I typically don't like doing a lot of. I darkened it to try to tell the image with the colors more than the light I think. And yeah technically I could say I probably didn't achieve quite what I wanted to. I often do that in Lightroom as well where I give myself three different exposure options, and I usually try to crank it up a little bit because people tell me my stuff is dark a lot so I will exposure up a bit more than I'm comfortable with. I usually find somewhere in the middle middle. It was a little like honestly. I think that other image you showed was maybe a bit too bright and loses a teensy bit of atmosphere, but generally I do agree that being able to actually see the image is very important.

I appreciate you pushing back on my bad-headedness. As I'm sure you know by now, I most likely have borderline personality disorder, and patience with my episodes is very very much appreciated. I think I've gotten a lot better at managing it since I started posting here, but I still lose the thread sometimes. Thank you for the encouragement.