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Thursday, November 22, 2007

HOWTO: Be A Camgirl, Camboy, Camwhore, Or What Have You

filed under: HOW TO:, Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira

One from the vaults, to keep you warm while Sexerati HQ moves. Bless you all, and thanks for a year of smart sex.

Taking for granted that you’ve got a computer, an Internet connection, and a desire to be a (little) sexxxy in (sort of) public (hey, you’re reading this), here’s my quickest, dirtiest tutorial on how to be a camgirl, or camboy (how in need the world is!), camwhore, or what have you…

Choose your camera. Get as fancy as you can afford, or already have sitting around the house. Whether you’ve got a DV camera with USB or FireWire, or some lofi little wonder that came free with an old computer, plug it in and try it. Now most of your prefab ‘Runs on XP!’ PC numbers are going to come packaged with their drivers, and even if they aren’t, you can scoop up most of them online. On a Mac, your easiest options are the iSight or the third-party iMage (though I can’t say if the image quality is any good). Back in the days of OS 9, I was a big devotee of the 3Com HomeConnect (used above), but with OS X, its drivers no longer worked (ok thx bye Steve-o). Today, thanks to macam, it and many other fabulous ‘pc-only’ cameras are supported by this life (and hotness) saving driver. (On Ubuntu or whatever open source warrior flavor of Linux you might be running, you hardly need me to tell you to just dive in and get messy with cables until something works.)

Choose your cam capture software. No one is really developing great one-to-many webcam programs anymore — it seems usage has shifted more towards one-to-one videoconferencing. That’s all well and good for the shysters, but if you want to be a camstar, you’ve got to get very late 90’s on the problem. Webcam32 is the original, which is PC-only. Oculus and EvoCam for the Mac are well-tooled descendants of its first widely used cam program, CoolCam, and are what I still use, six years hence.

So once you’ve downloaded your software and plugged in your weapon of choice, you’ll need to do about five minutes of setup, letting the app know where to upload your images (your server), how often to upload an image (30 seconds is classic), and where on your local computer to archive them (don’t skip this step). The program window ought to give you at minimum a preview window so you can set up your shot, a progress bar to let you know how soon before upload, and a selection of filters and adjustments.

Choose to have a sense of style. What’s surprising about these seemingly low-powered apps is that they all give you, the artist (yes you are), the power to do the equivalent of Photoshop on the fly to yourself. Anyone can jack off to the pale blue light of their monitor, so why not have at the brightness/contrast, RGB, exposure, and (my old standby) customized gradient filters (you, too, can get that signature ’shakticam’ feeling with a spread of #FFFFFF and #330000). Layer on the previous image, or any old image, for an onion-skin like ghostly effect, or, just go classic French New Wave and keep it black, white, and hot.

Choose to break the rules with the REFRESH tag. This is where that one really sings, in all its noncompliant glory. If you already have a webpage for your cam ready to go, just add this bit of code:

or, make with my webcam template and forget all about messy markup entirely.

That’s it — that’s really all you need by way of the mechanics of the matter. What you choose to add with desklamps, fairy lights, Sharpies, thrifted lingerie, Amish costumes, birthday cakes, nerdcore glasses, mirrors, other people’s hands, and the like is all up to you. For more resources realtime, keep an eye on the webcam tag in my del.icio.us feed.

(And please send in your best cam captures and let me know if I can share them, yes? I’ve already put some of my favorites of my own from 2001 - 2003 up there at the top of the post, so do come [full] on.)

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