City Slickers

My grandmother raised me to be a cowboy.

Each morning, amidst the sirens and the swampy Chesapeake Bay air in south Baltimore, Audrey Hall ensured that this city kid would grow up longing for the great southwest….

Too many mornings I spent watching reruns of Rawhide and the Roy Rogers show…

The last time I’d been horseback riding was maybe when I was 12 in the Catskill mountains in upstate NY. This time fun even though I’m a bit saddle sore. Also, my horse was a complete dick of an asshole…LOL.

Maybe I’m not a good rider.

6 Cool Tips To Style A Crisp White Shirt

When it comes to wardrobe essentials, a classic white button-down should be at the top of every woman’s list. You can dress down or dress up your white shirt with ease. Trends come and go, but the versatility and elegance of the white shirt is perpetual.

Trust me, there are myriad ways on how to make this beautiful top look awesome on you.

1. Wear It With Denim

The most basic way to wear a white shirt is with denim. Front tuck your white shirt into jeans and pair it with killer heels. Finish off with bandana or a bold statement necklace. Try the season’s hottest flared jeans or a lighter bleached look for summer months.You can also wear it with a denim skirt. Pair it with sneakers for a fun, casual look.

2. Layer It

Wear your white shirt underneath a sweater or a sleeveless vest. Pull the hem out and and keep your collar out for a casual daytime look. You can also wear it under a crop top.

Wear it underneath a strappy dress or jumpsuit to smarten it up. Liven up your outfit with bold colours and patterns. Be as daring as you like- nothing clashes with a white shirt.To tone down a naval-grazing neckline, slip a sexy black dress over a classic oxford shirt.

3. Work Outfit

Wear your white shirt to office. Go all white with a silk pleated midi skirt and a white button-down pairing. Pair with a neutral coloured heels for a sophisticated look. With a classic black suit, fold your shirting cuffs over your blazer. Add a pair of colorful heels to brighten up your otherwise black ensemble.

Tuck a crisp white button-down into an ultra-high waist skirt and finish it off with a belt. Slip into a pair of pointed-toe heels to stay chic and comfortable all day long.

4. Add A Corset

Wear a corset over you white shirt to take it to a whole new level. Wear it over a longer length shirt as a t-shirt dress or add on a short mini skirt and complete the look with thigh high boots. Try with jeans if you are not comfortable with the super mini look.

You can wear a corset of a solid color, a steel- boned corset or something in print. The corset will make your torso look cinched in and your waist thinner.

5. Belt It

Wear you white shirt over a skirt and add a belt on your natural waist to define your figure. Sometimes a tucked in shirt can be messy with a fabric skirt. Hide the lumps with a wide,obi belt.

Turn your shirt into a dress and  pair it with a thin brown braided belt.

6. All Leather Everything

Wear your white shirt with a leather skirt and tall leather boots. You can try adding a belt or tying a knot at your waist for a more daytime look. A super simple and elegant look is a crisp white shirt with your leather pants and a pair of heels.

Let out your inner fashionista by matching contrasting colours, such as black and white. Keep it simple and casual by combining a black cropped leather jacket over an oversized white shirt.

Author Bio

Rebecca Siggers is an avid reader who enjoys getting lost in the world of books. Holding on to her passion for fitness, she is also caught by the fashion bug. She has been writing for True Corset for sometime now. A traveller by heart, she enjoys meeting new people and experiencing new cultures.

Why I Hate Photographer Meetups…

Every time I see a majority of old white men in one place I get uneasy….

It’s a power thing. It’s a “my great-grandparents were lynched” thing. It’s a money thing, meaning I’m broke. It’s a racism thing, they don’t want me there and it’s obvious.

So when I walked into a local photographer/model meet at greet at a semi-popular warehouse last Saturday, I was immediately put off by the number of silver haired white men with big cameras I saw.

The problem with photographer/model meet ups is you get maybe a 40:1 ratio of photographers to models. You get huge “mines are bigger than yours” lighting setups popping off constantly. Randomly. You get a bunch of leery men rushing over to photograph an amateur model who just switched to her racy mini-dress, fishnet stockings, and heels number….

You get paparazzi practice basically. This is how TMZ should train their photogs. Send them to local photographer/models meets and greets.

How is it a meet and greet when the models are wary and hostile and the photographers look at me, a black man, as if I’m there to steal their gear or something? If I want to get rejected by a model I’ll go on Model Mayhem thank you very much. No need to get dissed in person after I paid an entrance fee. If I want to know where I stand with old white men I’ll check our President’s Twitter feed….

I will never understand why these photographers clamor to get the exact same shot 32 other guys are getting….

My homie said when he goes to these events he doesn’t even bring his camera. I see why. Next time (as if I’ll ever go to another one again and waste $25 bucks)…. next time I’ll bring a blunt and a beer and maybe my business cards.

Exit.

 

 

Fall Random Thinkings…

Having a model girlfriend would be nice…

I know…we all want a model girlfriend. Still, I’m a photographer and having a live-in model would make things a lot easier for me moving forward. I’m not being selfish here am I?

I could rehearse lighting setups with her. I could shoot her wearing different colors and in different locations. It would be fun. Experimentation is my mindset here. None of that gutter stuff YOU’RE thinking about…. witcho’ nasty self…

 

She needs to be close to my age though…

 

🙂

 

My new lighting setup is working great. No complaints here. It took a few months to work all the kinks out and buy my strobes but now I’m all set to continue my street portrait career and kill shit…

My new site is R X R Photo

Check it out!

I miss bus trips to amusement parks. My favorite part of the trip used to be sitting beside a girl I liked and hoping our arms or legs touched…

Life isn’t fair but I suppose we all have our micro-struggles to deal with huh?

 

Exit.

Why Do You Hate Us?

I’m not going to cut too deeply here but I’ve been wondering recently why everyone seems to hate black people…

 

Culturally, we have the smallest footprint as far as interracial atrocities are concerned. We haven’t enslaved another race. We didn’t eradicate another race (quite the opposite actually). We don’t manipulate the banking systems of the world. We are generally poor of course (globally) and we commit a large number of violent crimes against members of our own race, but that doesn’t seem the be enough reason for the entire race of blacks to be hated…

There are no wars depicted in lore where blacks have raped and pillaged on another continent other than Africa. Blacks are generally festive and accepting of others historically, and that sentiment has been rewarded with being enslaved and discriminated against and made out to be a reason to clutch your purse when you see us on the street.

Like I said….I wont get too deep but non-black folks just ask yourself why you hate black people. What did we ever do? To ANYBODY?

Exit.

Dating Profile…

I have never looked better.

 

I have never felt better physically, besides maybe when I was in boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois or training at the RTC in San Diego, California…

 

I have never been more at peace. It’s a hard-fought, uneasy peace at times, but it is peace nonetheless.

I’ve never been more single though. I’m single as shit. It’s crazy really…

 

My retreat from the grips of “all-social-media-all-the-time” has been documented, (and needed) but I have also retreated from dating sites. They suck these days, dating sites…

 

Dating sites worked well maybe 10 years ago for guys like me perhaps, but not now. They don’t work as well today for me because my expectations have changed a bit. Also, I see the same people on all the sites I have tried in the area. Just recycled profile pictures all over the place.

I suppose I have resigned myself to the reality of living and dying alone. This arrangement isn’t all bad at the moment, but it could suck pretty badly if I reach old age and still haven’t found a nice pretty lady.

 

Pretty is a thing too for me. I’m dead ass sick of being rejected by mediocre looking women. If she isn’t truly exceptional looking then I’ll take my chances elsewhere. She also needs to be fit. I spend hours in the gym each week. She at least needs to be in shape.

The older I get though, the more I realize that the entire “mating and dating” phase of my life isn’t exactly in its beginning stages. I’m far closer to the end of the era where my reproductive drive dictates the majority of my decisions. Nowadays, I just want to plan and make art when I’m not working. I don’t want any stress related to pleasing another fussy human. I don’t want to be responsible for the emotional well being of another adult. Not yet. Soon maybe…

 

Beyond Social Media: The Old Ways…

Like any good Samurai, I long to do things the old way…

 

Do I like microwaves? Nah. I heat my food up in the oven. TV dinners too.

 

Do I like TV? Of course I like TV. Um….at least I used to. I guess TV has lost its appeal to me as the centerpiece of human entertainment…

What has replaced TV?

Facebook.

Instagram.

Snapchat.

YouTube (which I like)

Netflix.

Every video game ever made in last 17 years…

…the distracting temptation of each mindless app on your phone.

 

At some point you look at all these cable stations and social media platforms and you feel as though you are spending your waking hours in a place that isn’t real.

I mean, lets say you are at work, (which is most likely a real place) but when you get bored or frustrated or happy or whatever at work you go to this virtual place on your phone to share random thoughts or to gain some sort of misplaced perspective by driving yourself to irrational jealousy as you follow other peoples lives…

 

I don’t want to be too harsh here. Even a Samurai must adapt to change. When the Shogun dies we become Ronin. When the Katana is outlawed we buy guns. When guns are outlawed we buy wine.

 

Still… I think back to my youth, when we had 3 TV’s (which each had 5 available channels to watch) and a chorded phone and a radio. Nowadays I have all that in my iPhone. All of it. I long for the days when the world was smaller and I couldn’t interact with so many people virtually.

For instance, I have several Facebook “friends” in Indonesia. I will never see them in person within this lifetime most likely, and even if they really aren’t so special that I’d go to the other side of the planet to holla at them, part of me wishes I could see them. Why? Because I see them on my phone and maybe we traded some adult photos back when Facebook was newer and people did that shit. That makes me want to see them. That makes me subconsciously compare American woman I meet to these world-apart Indonesian gals. Life was a lot simpler when Indonesian girls were a “theory” or a curiosity and nothing more. In short: the internet has made the world smaller but it has also made me feel smaller too, while making my expectation of the world bigger.

I deleted my Instagram account today. Why? First because I was shadowbanned and secondly because it was useless to me. I have never made a single meaningful contact through IG. R X R Photo has never booked a photoshoot or made a dime from it. I have felt bad when a photo didn’t get as many “likes” as I felt it deserved though…

Will I delete Facebook next? That’s possible, but I’ll give that another year or two. I have a feeling I’ll just end up using Facebook messenger only…which I really don’t understand how it’s superior to regular old texting, but whatever. I would like to be like the old photographers who booked clients through word of mouth and their own websites and not through becoming a bitch for social media. I’m starting to hate what I see everyday. Nothing is separate any longer. There are no sub-genres. Every little interest you may have on social media moves along the rivers and dumps into the big social media oceans of presidential politics, social causes, and blindly fighting with strangers. It sucks. I suppose this social media thing as isn’t social anymore…

 

Exit.

 

The Follower…

I have never been comfortable with the concept of being a follower.

This attitude and subsequent behavior pattern for me dates back to my days as a toddler, according to my mother. I’ve always been a bit of a rebel she says, or more precisely, a little badass free agent.

Not to say I haven’t followed behind friends and done dumb shit. Of course I have. Those experiences just made me more adamant about not being a follower.

So along comes Twitter and then Instagram and these apps ask me to follow people and try to attract followers by any means…. and ya boy Ric Ray is immediately offended. Followers huh?

I mean, Tom of Myspace didn’t ask me to follow him. Tom wanted to be my friend. I sort of liked that about Tom. Even Facebook went the “friend” route and did so more intimately by limiting the number of friends I could have to 5 thousand. As far as reductionism is concerned Facebook is an outlier. IG and Twitter put no limits on the number of followers you can amass. Myspace had no limit to the number of friends you could add.

IG doesn’t limit you. Nope. Your pathetic, uninteresting, pedestrian life limits you. Ive never had more than a few hundred followers on any platform….

I’m too humble to think myself so fabulous that I’d have actual followers. To be fair though, I know “follower” in the social media sense means that this or that person is following my feed, not the creepy “Jim Jones in Guyana with a few cups of cyanide and a cult” type of followers…..but it still seems contrived and unseemly. Of course someone like Taylor Swift has millions of true followers and deservedly so. She’s a megastar. Perhaps a person who amasses say… 25 thousand followers on Twitter can have a slice of that megastar feeling. Maybe for a price…

You of course can buy followers. You can also “follow for follow” with people and then get sneaky and unfollow them so you can have that golden ratio of 1000 to 1 followers.

Like when you look at some pop star’s follow/follower count and she has 1.2 million followers but only follows 1200 people….Nice.

I just don’t like the concept of following anyone. No one is worth following to me really. I don’t care what my favorite rapper is doing this evening or when my favorite pornstars’ next live cam show is happening. Who gives a fuck?

The reasons I’m done with IG and Twitter sort of mirror my hesitancy to buy into bitcoin at the current time… Allow me to explain….

Bitcoin was good to get into early. You could mine bitcoin without using a completely prohibitive amount of power (electricity) to do so. Nowadays mining bitcoin can only be undertaken by people (or sovereign nations) with a lot of money and resources already at their disposal, like North Korea for instance. Otherwise your ROI will be negative in all but the most ideal circumstances. Similarly Twitter was hot to get into early when people were following like crazy, but a few million spam bots and Nigerian email scams later and people are a bit more conservative with their follows, UNLESS you are a person with a lot of fame, money, and resources…..

I hate following people and honestly I don’t like being followed. Facebook even tries the follower thing but it’s not well defined and it comes off as sketchy. They can keep it. They all can just keep it…..

Exit.

WHAT IVE BEEN DOING ON SUNDAYS II

I haven’t been watching football on Sundays this year.

Why?

Who knows?

I have been shooting aspiring models and friends though.

 

The Weak End of Summer…

There were no 100 degree days this summer.

I’m not saying global warming is wrong, but back in the 90’s I recall consecutive summers in Baltimore and Georgia where the thermometer read 100 degrees or above.

The current/past summer was muggy yes. Hot? Not really to me.

I switched companies that I shoot sports for. (If you want to know to whom I switched check my Facebook page or something) Shooting sports is fun but the money is drying up pretty quickly. Fewer and fewer parents are willing to buy prints of their kid once he or she (the parent) leaves an event, and those photo tents you see at tournaments aren’t as lucrative as they once may have been. Couple that with newspapers and magazines dying slowly, and there really isn’t a major demand for sports photos. I see parents and high school students with semi-pro gear on the sidelines now all the time. They may not have the passion and skill to produce high level sports compositions, but that camera and lens they now hold represents the money they would have spent on professional photos perhaps…..

Sports are in full swing though. I’m booked to shoot every weekday afternoon (after my main job) up till probably the first week of November. I’m also shooting models now until kingdom come, and will probably miss many Sundays in front of the tube watching the Redzone channel because of it. Sundays are great to shoot models for that reason however. It’s a dead day in the city for foot traffic and that’s a perfect environment to shoot in….

MICROSTRUGGLER is nearly a year old. I mainly like to shoot women and that’s what this blog will be about moving forward: photos and women…..

Exit.

Model on Instagram is @myrlanis_

She only accepts followers who follow me first….

My IG is @rickyray73

Tee shirt available here.