First of all before I start I’d like to give a massive thankyou to everyone who has supported us over the years. You’re awesome!
Our Backstory
I started Superhero Academy back in 2020 as an experiment. I’ve always had an interest in photography, an wanted to branch out into shooting glamour, to combine my love of comic book superheroines with beautiful real life ladies. As I was inexperienced I sought the partnership of a professional photographer. Mike Fieldhouse was my choice as he has photographed glamour girls for popular lads mags such as Loaded, Maxim, FHM and Nuts, most of those are now defunct. I also collected glamour pictures from the OnlyAllSites glamour group, of which Mike was a freelance contractor as a photographer. Getting in touch and chatting to him I reaised he was a really nice down to earth guy. We clicked.
Sadly things havent worked out the way I hoped, for too many reasons. Family deaths, mental health, time constraints, expense. Add to that Mike himself has been struggling with his health and workload.
Site struggles
As you might have noticed, things were going great here, we released updates on a regular basis. But issues with our webhost meant I couldn’t release videos. I then switched hosts, we still had problems. But picsets were easy to do, I got them done and out no issues. But with this site not being my main job, life got in the way. COVID hit, I lost family members. I got into a bad relationship with a girl at work who had Borderline Personality Disorder, she was really abusive and screwed me up, after seeming to support me. I just didn’t have the energy, and went into depression. I’ve been fighting it ever since and just not had the strength to do things I liked. I work nights at Amazon, it’s a really unsociable job, so I stopped having time to work on the site as much, being tired out.
I built the site from the ground up. The design, coding and branding. No AI, no automation, no other developers, just me. I learnt a lot doing it! I have a massive backlog. I WANT to face it, but I’m struggling.
Expense has been another main driver of me slowing down. It costs upwards of £300 to shoot photosets and videos with one glamour babe. They are expensive. I wasn’t making it back, I was using my personal funds to finance the shoots. Now I’m saving for a mortgage so spending has had to be cut massively. Then Mike hit me with a big bombshell two weeks ago.
Mike’s struggles
Mike used to work for OnlyAllSites as a freelance photographer. He was also running his own sites, StrictlyGlamour.com, UpskirtGlamour.com, GlossTightsGlamour.com and Glamour-VR.com. He struggled too, with his health, paying his mortgage. I noticed him struggling with workload as he made a few mistakes on some of our shoots, even forgetting to shoot a couple. So I left things with him for a while, to ease his workload, we didn’t shoot anything in that time.
Meanwhile I tried booking some Instagram models to practise shoots on, but they let me down, after I’d paid their expenses. Travel, hotel, childcare, that sort of thing. It’s customary and polite for photographers to do this for models, as they’re more likely to work with you. That was more wasted money as a lot of it couldn’t be refunded. It happened to Mike with some of our customs, models let him down, messing our shoots up.
Now he has decided to give it up, as like Superhero Academy, it is costing him more to run than the sites are bringing in. He’s also had health issues with his heart. We all know health comes first. He’s such a nice guy, I want him to rest and get better, go buy some sets from his sites to help out if you like glamour babes!
I myself recently started having heart palpitations probably due to stress, I’m having tests done at the moment. So I’m without a photographer, and the site is in limbo, with a backlog, for now. The site isn’t dead, it’s resting!
The Future
I am working on getting videos out, working on encoding them as HEVC to bring the file sizes down to stop the corruption, but I can’t say how long, if or when releases will happen. I’m tired, depressed and fed up with life at the moment. The cost of living, and all the depressing shit going on in the world is making everyone miserable. I just don’t have the energy. As an introvert, it’s all exteremely draining. I’m not giving up though, so don’t worry about that 🙂