After many years of thinking about it, I finally got around to implementing global Hide / Show Nudes toggle on here. It involved messing around with PHP, CSS, Javascript and eventually, jQuery. There was much swearing too. But now it works.

The surprisingly difficult part was going through all of my images and deciding which ones I should filter. After my last post about corporate filtering, I found myself in the position of being The Man. How much is too much? It’s all done with image tags, so it’s easy to change. I guess it’s going to be a Not Safe For Work In Progress thing.

The Man has passed judgement on my work… I can live with that.

Making this post has just highlighted that the tag cloud is missing.

Hopefully it’ll continue to evolve. Time to learn more JavaScript.

So I’m doing a thing in November at The Gray Room in Bridgeton with Rebecca Wyman Modelling. Should be a fun day.

A year ago my friend John Gray opened his studio, The Gray Room, in Bridgeton. On the 29th of July the studio is having an open day. Come along for nibbles, good bants and a studio demo. The images I’ve taken there are shown below.

Show NudesHide Nudes

Press Show Nudes to see these images.

Nothing else was suitable, and then Fancybox 3 turned up. But nobody had written a WordPress plugin for it. So I sharpened my pencil.

Lots of swearing and wrestling with JQuery and RegEx later and it works. It took 14 lines of code. They just took some finding.

It should have 12 tables. Just 12. And the wp_options table should have a few hundred rows in it. Many plugins merrily create new tables that get left behind when you delete them. This is a bit untidy, but usually not too much of a problem.

What is a problem is the wp_options table. Orphaned records get left in there too, and it turns out that WordPress really doesn’t like it having thousands of rows (mine had over 5000). The only option is to delete everything with an option_name containing %transient% and then work through the table deleting groups of entries that aren’t used any more. I suppose you could change the indexing, but that’s really just brushing the problem under the carpet and ignoring the big lump in the middle of the room.

I got mine down to under 1000 rows fairly easily, and got a lot of performance back.

Jetpack is also a bit of a dog. I ditched that too.

This weekend Mayhem came to pose for me and the results were spectacular. It’s amazing what you can do with a £10 torch, a glow stick, a funny hat and a great model. We’re already planning more shots. You can see the rest of her images in her gallery.

The studio has four Bowens Gemini flash heads as well as great daylight from windows on two walls, that can be controlled with both normal and blackout blinds. There are Colorama paper backgrounds on two walls in a variety of colours, as well as seating, makeup table, editing, printing and coffee facilities. A great space.

We shot for a couple of hours, resulting in these images from me.

It’s going to be a regular shoot space for me. John can be contacted via his website: The Gray Room.

DaveMc, June 16