Okay, I changed my mind...

Yes, I finally posted some of the pictures that we took last weekend. I've only done the ones of me so far. I don't want to post anything of Cheryl until she's had a chance to look them over and decide what she wants on her page.

...And I know I said there was absolutely no chance that I would post any of the pictures of me in my posing suit, but I was going through the pictures and two of the better ones of me were while I was wearing that suit. So...I posted them. They are near the bottom of the page with the other silly flexing shots.

Here's the address again: http://www.geocities.com/tomncheryl/bfltprog.html Go see them now before I change my mind and remove them.

Before you ask, yes, we did use some oil in some of the pictures to highlight the contours and add some reflectivity (you'll see it in some of Cheryl's pictures too). Body builders and the occasional country music performer (Kenny Chesney) use it all the time, and many of the Body for Life "after" pictures employ it. We thought we would try it out now and get some idea of how to use it. It actually was a huge mess, but the results were pretty good in places. Keep in mind that both of us were handling the camera during the shoot, so we had to keep wiping oil off our hands and had to be super careful about getting it on any of the optics.

A few technical notes about the shoot: the backdrop is so wide that it would only fit in our exercise space at an extreme angle to the rest of the room, which forced us to place the camera much closer to us than in previous pictures. This caused some parallax distortion in some of the pictures. We used only the on-camera flash for these shots, which left some hard shadows on the right side of all the photos. The one exception is the profile shot of me in my speedo, where the shadow is on the left. Um...that's because we shot it with me facing the wrong way and I had to flip it when I created the image file so that it would match the others. I had a devil of a time matching these pictures with the ones that were already on the page since I didn't have the doorway to give it scale.

"But Tom, we don't care about that. How do these pictures make you feel?" Hmmm...well okay Dr. Freud and company, that's a legitimate question. When I first saw them, I was not thrilled. I didn't think they had turned out very good and I wasn't too keen on my lack of visible changes since the last pictures. But...well, once I posted them side by side with the previous ones, I started to feel pretty good about them. Heck, I felt really good about them. Actually, "great" might be a better word. I felt great! I look at that first picture of me in my biking shorts nine weeks ago and compare it to the one of me flexing in my posing suit this past weekend and I have to say that those are two different people. That's the reason I finally decided to put the posing suit pictures on the web site, even though it's not something I'm completely comfortable having people see. It's not just the extra muscle or the changes in the contours that you can see in my face (look, I actually have muscles showing in my neck...and a jawline...and only one chin!!!). What really strikes me about those two pictures is my expression. I seem confident and comfortable. I look like I'm having fun...which I am.

I teach women's self defense (although I'm not doing so currently). I always end my class by telling my students that one of the big keys to not becoming a victim is to appear confident. The bad guys stay away from someone who has their chin up and a bounce in their walk. So, as I tell my students, anything you can do to inhabit your body more fully and comfortably, be it martial arts, rock climbing, ballet, yoga, soccer, roller derby, or whatever, will benefit you in a self-defense situation and in many other aspects of life as well. And now, I find myself taking my own advice.

After all, any guy who would put oil all over his body, be photographed in a microscopic swim suit and then post those pictures on a web site for all to see is a person to be reckoned with!