Being a low-key weeb is one thing – but how one such weeb can go from a passive R18 media consumer to an erotic content creator?
Well, the short answer is - liking the medium so much that you eventually try it out yourself and the process turns out to be so much fun you stay for longer… lovin’ it.
Weeb early days and setup for the future
Horrible puns aside – I guess the very start of a journey happened on Steam (out of all places) back in 2012 – where one of my online gaming pals decided to use a quite explicit anime avatar of Saeko Busujima.
After bantering with him about it he coaxed me into actually watching Highschool of the Dead as my first ever proper anime (since I wouldn’t really count a couple of random episodes of Naruto, Pokemon or Dragonball I watched prior). Suffice to say – I was hooked and after finishing it I immediately began binging similar classics like Highschool DxD or Rosario to Vampire.
Now… as you can probably see, even based on just these three titles, there’s a heavy lean here towards ecchi tag with some romance and comedy vibes. Watching these types of shows in majority of cases lead to a very specific frustration due to romantic plot not really… going anywhere most of the time. I even specifically remember seeing the last seconds of Zero no Tsukaima last season’s finale feeling almost cheated by it dedicating so little time to romance plot closure.
I. Want. To. See. More.
Where source is dry, fandom delivers
And we’re straight to nhentai and e-hentai for some fan-made doujinshi to satisfy my shipping needs. That lasted an awful long, didn’t it?
… what?
I ain’t a saint.
You ain’t a saint, you’re literally on this website as we speak.
Anyway, point is over time I started pivoting away from watching anime to satisfy my romance needs and switched to mostly reading doujins as anime seemed to never quite deliver (well, maybe aside from gems like Rakudai no Kishi, but that’s a different topic). With this I basically ventured into unknown parts of anime fandom and started reading anything that looked good based on tags and cover art. That’s how I met your moth-... got to know a very important author to the story – Puyocha – as his works about naughty Idolmaster girls were both very prevalent and hot, with Mika series leaving the biggest impression on me.
Erocosplay enters the scene
As I often stick to just the websites I know, I haven’t really left the nhentai/e-hentai bubble for a really long time. At some point in 2019 I remember searching for some definitely family-friendly phrases trying to look for a specific character and Google decided it’s time to show me not only drawn ecchi or hentai content, but also erocosplay.
There I got to know two cosplayers – Siaoding Komachi (Patreon) and Mikomi Hokina (Photoset shop) – and started to look forward to any updates from them on their respective Twitter pages.
For Mikomi I specifically remember her High Elf Archer from Goblin Slayer being a sort of revelation – as I felt no connection with the character itself, but her interpretation with added eroticism was superb.
As for Komachi I don’t quite remember which photoset I saw first, but definitely the one that made a lasting impression on me was the white and oil one.
Of course as the time went on, I started following more and more artists and now I have over 400 of them on my Following list.
Time to dip the feet into photo water
In 2019 we had a video idea with Shizuka where we knew that we needed a proper camera to record clips with as our phones wouldn’t deliver the same impact or quality. We organized some Fujifilm DSLR from a friend and got to filming.
After the clips were shot I felt a very distinct urge and asked Shizuka if she would be ok with us taking a couple of erotic photos to our own SD card and she happily complied.
From the initial trial photoshoots we had there was one very specific photo of Shizuka lying down flat on a bed, dressed in a creamy white sweater, where she left her butt exposed just the right amount. This pic was so glorious at the time that I still think about this as the one confirmation of “I can totally pull this off!".
First tries and classy failures
After that we dusted off our own point-and-shoot cameras and tried to capture something nice with them… but failed miserably despite trying ten times with different outfits, thus shelving the idea of making photos.
2020 rolls around and by that time I was still more into the “dress up my darling" and sewing some obscure bikinis or buying some cheap costumes online and not really considering snapping pics again.
At some point, after reading yet another banger release from the doujin artist Puyocha, I managed to collect all my introverted courage and sent a fan message. Inside were both words of encouragement to keep delivering such glorious art, and attached a photo of my newest sewing creation – front-only sling bikini that attaches to a buttplug - something that was a staple in Puyocha’s work. (Fun fact – I think to this date it was featured in our most popular photoset).
And surprisingly, not only did I got a response, we even had quite a lengthy chat! Pervert vs pervert banter continued and somewhere in there that one message landed -
“I wanna see someone wear it tho XD"
– which reinvigorated my will to try and take some erotic pictures again.
And so I did take pictures again, and that resulted in the first demo Shizuka photoset – with all the typical issues of such first-time endeavours.
- Naughty outfit? Check!
- Slightly stiff posing? Sadly also check.
- Low quality and blurry smartphone photos? … also check.
- Bad lighting both in terms of positioning and temperature? … check.
- No regards towards background and how it composes with anything else in the photo? *sobbing* also check.
However I did share it with Puyocha in the end and received the life-changing message of:
Holy shit! That’s hot!
Starting the real deal
With new-found motivation acquired I started to sink deep into the world of photography from the technical side – anything and everything that YouTube has sent me regarding cameras, lenses or lights I consumed on daily basis.
After a couple of months I bought my first ever DSLR – Sony A330 with Minolta AF 17-70 f3.5-5.6. The setup wasn’t perfect – I selected a discounted body with a busted screen and picked a zoom lens with dark aperture to save money. That combination however allowed me to narrow down in just a couple of sessions what works and what does not - with two most important results being:
- turns out that both I and Shizuka dislike the wide angle look of anything wider than 35mm and much prefer the telephoto end of 70mm, so soon after I found a good deal on Minolta AF 50mm f1.7 (which on A330 behaved like a 75mm lens) and it became our main lens to use for a long time
- we probably need another IKEA visit for a 2nd hooded floor lamp and use light bulbs with more than 1000 lumens of brightness if we ever want to have anything sharp without relying on our poor A330 constantly maxing out its ISO
Together with Shizuka we also set some boundaries for the project that are alive and well till this day:
- This project is my baby and I’m the front-man of this band that posts stuff; Shizuka will contribute with posing, photo selection and sewing help
- We’ll focus on posting artsy implied nudes, with both face and private parts censored whenever they’re in frame
After about 20 short and sweet test photo sessions later, July 2021 rolls around and Shizuka Kawa Twitter account was born and first pictures were shared publicly. You can even find some of these initial test micro photo sets on our page, like the red harness, foxy maid or the succubus one. While every bone in my body tells me that I’d rather banish them into oblivion due to obviously low overall quality I decided to let them live in the depths of the archive so that you, the visitor, would have the context of where we came from and what you could expect from your own foray into photography.
Photos around same plugkini concept in chronological order, beginning with oldest one.
Now you can contrast the first photos I sent to Puyocha with the more recent ones – quite the difference, huh?
Shizuka project vs other erotic creators
It is nothing out of ordinary if you came here thinking “huh, Shizuka is a bit different to other erocosplayers I follow" and there are a couple of good reasons behind it:
- Neither of us really vibes with a concept of being a social media influencer, bound by the rules of algorithm and using every latest marketing gimmick to gain traffic… and it clearly shows. While our growth is slow due to lack of daily posts and we sometimes go into hibernation for a bit, we hope that every time we share something - it’s worth the wait.
- I decided right from the get-go that we will never charge anybody for any piece of content we release, thus opting to share everything for free via Twitter or Gumroad in the past, and now via our own web page and photoset directory. Why? It simply felt weird for me to charge people 30, 50 or 70 USD as some other creators did for a folder of 20-ish photos and then do that every month, times 4. Such “business idea" has always collided within me with the ever-important rule of “Posting anything on the Internet means probably it’s never disappearing from there" so if somebody could just repost my photoset somewhere I’d much rather release it for free myself.
- We try to keep our photosets about as much down-to-earth as possible. My waifu phase died years ago, neither of us are much into roleplay (we both actually awfully suck at it ^^’) so we don’t care about things like accurate character depictions and instead just focus on having fun with concepts that source material provides. This is precisely why you might find weird photosets like Blue Archive Toki bunny girl skin mashed together with a Nikke-inspired bunny suit or St. Louis with alternative color palettes and extra bling bling.
The down-to-earth approach continues also to how we handle the photos. During mastering from RAW to JPG the most drastic change we do is probably the color toning, mainly to fight off hue shifts from us using cheap LED light bulbs. After getting JPGs we only ever alter them if they either need to be censored as per our rules or if they contain small, but noticeably distracting elements, like a bruise, cut or similar.
There’s no smoothing, clarity slider, air brushing or VFX work done. The most adventurous I’ve ever felt is playing around with color remapping for one particular foxy maid photoset. It scratched that itch and I never felt the need to do that again.
Closing thoughts
There you have it.
If there’s anything I want you to take away from this article is that – if you want to start snapping pics yourself – you’re inevitably going to suck at it at first. To git gud you have to do multiple sessions and assess for each what you have learnt, what is there to improve and what doesn’t work for you.
While expensive gear might make your photos look more professional – don’t make it a requirement to try photography out. There’s a literal well of knowledge and experience that goes into making sure that the majority of photos you take are at least usable to begin with – things like posing, light setup, camera positioning or even set design.
Go out there and have fun!
You’ll piece your photography journey puzzle piece-by-piece as you go.