This story started a long time ago, roughly 20 years in fact, so my memory is a little fuzzy in some cases. To the people involved and those mentioned below, am sure none of them will mind their inclusion in the story.
It all started with Xgurl. The origin of the name is lost in the mists of time and you'd have to ask Minx about that. There are however existing videos of her still...
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I can't remember exactly when I first met Minx or on what website, but it was a candid forum somewhere. Minx wasn't really a candid photographer but he did have an interest in the massively endowed ladies. I'd been shooting candids for a couple years at that point. In those days, there just wasn't the technology available that there was today, but by the standards of the time mine was cutting edge.
My setup was fairly simple really, a board camera module hidden in the strap of a sports bag / rucksack, being fed to a video recorder in the bottom of the bag. It worked really well but it was 'always on', both a blessing and a curse. Walking round a supermarket you could suddenly turn a corner and come across the biggest bust you've ever seen without warning. With my setup, you'd always capture it. The downside is it was always on, so it meant having to trawl through hours and hours of footage afterwards to cap a few minutes of good content, but it was worth it though.
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The other advantage of my setup was using a pinhole camera lens, so it was almost invisible. Not once in the entire time of using it had anyone ever suspected. It was risky of course using it in shopping malls and other covered areas, if I'd ever been stopped by store security or others it would have been found easily by a quick search of my bag.
What killed it in the end was islamic terrorism, of all things. At the time there were a lot of attacks going on, and the perpetrators were walking round with devices in rucksacks. Being a single guy with a rucksack meant you were followed everywhere by store security and everyone else looked at you with distrust, no matter who you were. It was too risky and I had a lot to lose so I had to give it up and moved to other methods. Although what I was doing wasn't illegal, and still isn't, it meant anyone with a reasonable suspicion could stop you and search your bag and it just wasn't worth it in the end.
The only time I ever came close to being caught was using another method. At one time I had a small digital camera that was about 2 inches square, I forget the model though it was a long time ago. This was in the very early days of digital cams so finding it was a near miracle in the first place. What I did was hang it round my neck on a lanyard, looking for all intents and purposes like a tourist. I had broken out the contacts for the shutter onto a socket on the back, and through a small hole in my shirt I led a couple of wires into a switch in my pocket so I could press the shutter remotely. That's the thing you see, you can point a camera at people all day long and no-one suspects anything. But as soon as you put your hands near the camera controls people become suspicious.
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It worked really well for a long time until one fateful day when I tried to take a snap of a busty chick inside a store. In a moment of madness I'd forgotten to switch off the flash with predictable results... All day long I'd been shooting outside in sunlight so it hadn't fired, but when I went into a mall the low light had been enough for the flash to auto trigger. I walked round an aisle and straight into a busty goddess and without thinking pressed the shutter and WHAM ! I think I near had a heart attack. I'm not sure the gal even noticed to be honest, she just looked sideways at me as I tried to look nonchalant, silently filling my pants. I made myself scarce though and quickly exited the store and went home. That night I took a 2mm drill and drilled out the flash bulb
To get back to the story though... I'd known Minx for a while, and also a couple of other guys who were into the same thing. We met up a few times IRL and one time we went on a joint venture, four of us altogether. That was great fun and it was interesting to see the same chick from different angles. Other times I went out with Minx alone, but doofus that he was he kept walking into shot. I now have tons of great candid content that I can't share as his ugly mug is in the background of each one lol.
I can't remember how we first came up with the idea of a website, or why it was even necessary (we'd met on an existing candid website). I think mostly it was because of Minx, he was a seriously good web dev and creative genius when it came to stuff like that. Also I think because of another guy, "CK" who was a fellow shooter but obsessed with always making a buck. He was the eternal entrepreneur and always looking to make money out of everything.
I never really clicked with CK for a couple reasons, one was his obsession with making everything about money which I was opposed to, and another was his methods of shooting candids. He just used a standard video camera / camcorder but he was really aggressive with it. While we were all subtle and shot from afar, he would get right up in the girls faces and not even try to hide it. A while ago I capped a lot of his original footage from some old DV tapes, and you can see the look on the girls faces that they weren't happy. I think he upset a lot of people with his 'method', and I'm surprised that no irate husbands every kicked his head in to be honest. For all that, he had some balls on him and he got some fantastic shots.
The pre-cursor to Sgurl was a site called UK Candids (2000-2001). Mostly it was by myself, CK, Minx and another guy we shall call "BS". Minx did all the work on the website and ran it, I only provided the occasional content. CK provided a lot of stuff, but on a couple of occasions it turned out he'd actually paid people to walk in front of him, ie his candids were 'staged' !. There were a couple of really famous snaps of his going round at the time and made him look like a candid god, but the truth was he'd actually paid the girls to be there.
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This in fact led to an offshoot of theirs, where they managed to recruit a couple of girls with massive bangers, hired a studio and did some photoshoots with them. This is 'K', one of the girls.
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They were clothed as far as I recall, but the intention was to start a new website with busty amateurs, a UK version of TopHeavy.com. Minx knew the guy that ran it and I think he did the original design for Topheavy. Interestingly a few of the well known models you know of today had their start on Topheavy... Topheavy was an inspirational site, but rumours abounded that the guy who ran it was an asshole who didn't treat the girls very well, maybe co-erced them into doing photoshoots they weren't comfortable with. At the start he used original amateur models that he found himself, but later on he kinda sold out and just started buying photosets from other photographers, and the site lost it's appeal. Another site in the same stable was topheavyamateurs.com, although I'm not sure how much Minx had to do with that one.
It was a very small, close knit community in those days and pretty much all the webmasters knew each and shared content and links. There was a bit of a cameraderie that you just don't get these days, with everyone out to fuck everyone else over.
So UKCandids was born... and promptly died. I never really found out the reason but reading between the lines I think CK stiffed Minx over profits from the site. I seem to recall that CK managed to get his hands on the bank account and took the lot, leaving Minx with no reward for his work. The offshoot model project died a death as well, probably because of how pushy CK was with the models. He was a great salesman but couldn't take the hint when he was pushing it too far.
There was other bad blood between Minx and CK, from an episode in an Amsterdam hostel involving a rectally inserted beer bottle that seemed to have traumatized Minx (who was innocent in it, I might add), to CK fucking over Minx about rent and effectively making him homeless. Minx had a death in the family that really affected him and had a tough time, that saw him move in with CK at one point. There was disputes over money and rent, and Minx found himself in a bad way. For one thing and another, UKCandids never got off the ground and they went their separate ways.
Around about this time I suggested to Minx that we start Sgurl (2001). It was a site for me to post my candids on and Minx would do all the website side of things. It would be a small closed group for candid photographers to share their stuff and it was never intended to be a public site. At it's height we had about a couple dozen or so regular contributors and was an amazing place to be. At some point it was opened up to the public, and a comment system was implemented so non-contributors could at least thank the people who posted original candids. The original members were called 'Seniors', and anyone who contributed money for the site had the title of 'Patron' for their donations.
Sadly, all I have of the first versions of Sgurl, although I still have a lot of the original artwork PSD's
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At one point the site was opened up to 'ass' pictures in a section called 'Curves', so it was 'boobs and butt'. I'm not a fan of the gargantuan ass myself and it didn't interest me in the slightest, and I think it was a bad decision. It was very popular though and I'd say the ass part ended up more popular than the tits... :-( Another bad decision I think was to open the site up to 'web finds'. I know the idea was to get non-shooters involved in the site, but it ended up just being flooded with big tit models and morphs that had nothing to do with candids. I have to say something similar happened here, Tits in Tops morphed into "Send Nudes !" somewhere along the way. BEArchive had a similar problem, where it went from a breast enhancement website to a dumping ground for big tit pics. That's what the people wanted though, and if those decisions weren't made then I daresay the sites wouldn't have survived. At least here, off-topic stuff has it's own sections and seems to work well, while still maintaining the 'in tops' focus.
Minx was forever having a really hard time, never has a guy had so much bad luck in his personal life and didn't deserve it. Sgurl was turned into a paysite, so Minx could make a few bucks from it. He was suffering from really bad mental health and couldn't work a regular job, so it would be a nice little income to help him get back on his feet. This was the point that I graceful bowed out. I had a really good job and didn't need the money and only shot candids for fun, whereas Minx was in a bad place and desperately needed the help. So I effectively signed everything over to him and let him run the site in its entirety. I never once received a single cent from Sgurl, and neither did I want to. It just wasn't about the money for me, it was just about sharing original candids finds with other like-minded shooters.
Part of the deal was that people could still join for free, if they provided example images or videos to prove that they were candid photographers. It worked really well at the start and we met an awful lot of like-minded shooters, but I think after a few years it became impossible to separate the real guys from the scammers. Busty candid pics were becoming a lot more common and other sites were springing up all over, so all one had to do was a rip a few pics from someone else at one of the other sites and then pass them off as your own on Sgurl to get a free membership. This was 'fore-shadowing' and led to the death of Sgurl in a way.
Did you know that the 'S' in Sgurl is for 'Street' ? Yep, StreetGurl. It was a play on words from the original Xgurl, whoever she was ;-) The idea was to have a family of websites with busty candids in different catalogs, Bgurl for Beach, Tgurl for busty Teens, Cgurl for Club girls etc. At one point we did break up Sgurl into different sections with those headings, but decided trying to run a half dozen parallel websites would be too much hassle so kept it all on Sgurl.
I did have my own little website for a couple years, where I posted just my own candids. It was ok, was never meant to be successful or popular, just somewhere I could post shit and work on my coding skills. Minx did most of the artwork which still remains today on dozens of other sites. Alas, I have the attention span of a goldfish and lose interest in things easily and I let it go. It was a fun little project at the time though and used some cutting edge HTML as it was then.
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I still maintained the domain name for Sgurl right till the very end, and renewed it over the years, even during the periods when I lost touch with Minx. Every so often I'd go back on Sgurl and send him a PM just to let him know that the domain had been renewed, catch up and see that he was doing ok. The problem was Minx was never really that interested in candids, first and foremost he was a web developer and that interested him more than anything else, He went on to make video games, a few of which I was privy to as he was working on them. I still have some of the original versions which will probably be worth something some day. I'll give them back to Minx if he ever needs them
We still talked about candid stuff, but I had long stopped posting my candids there (or anywhere in fact). It was through some long conversations that I found out what had happened at Sgurl and what had eventually led to its demise. Unfortunately, it was the rise in sites like this, or more specifically people sharing stolen content.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not some moralfag who's opposed to the odd repost of stolen content. Some of the sites we see are multi-million dollar multinational corporations who can afford for a few photosets here and there to go missing. But Sgurl was a tiny site ran by one guy who was on his arse and living on the breadline. It was heart breaking to surf the web and find your content being reposted all over the place for free just so people could get 'props' by pretending it was their own work. In a lot of cases people didn't even bother to remove the Sgurl logo and just reposted videos and pics in full. The audiences didn't care, they just got to jerk off for free, they didn't care where it came from.
The rise of sites like Mega was the death of original content. Imagine the situation, you post an image on a site like Mega and for every 1000 views of that image, you get paid $5. For one image. Imagine now you rip the entire site and post it on Mega, and have a hundred thousand people viewing your hundred thousand images, you can do the maths.
The crunch is, who's going to pay $10 a month for a site subscription when you can view it all for free on Mega anyway ? It got to a point where searches for Sgurl returned results for entire site-rips above the actual site itself ! You can't imagine how devastating that is to a content creator. Sure, you can play whackamole and try to get all the stolen content taken down, but it just springs up somewhere else. To this day, I still see a lot of my own content being 'sold' on pay per view sites all over the web. It's one of the reasons why I'll never release any more videos of my content. Some asshole will just steal the video I've shared for free, cap it out into images and then make money off it. I take all the risk, they get all the money. Sad times.
I think candidarchive.com suffered the same fate. Just a single guy with an awesome site who just wanted to make a few bucks on the side. Now all his content is available for free elsewhere and he no longer shoots candids. Don't blame him, either. Show him some love and go check out his site >
http://candidarchive.com/
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Minx was struggling with all this, trying to keep the site running with a vastly decreased audience. People weren't visiting the site any more because they could get it all for free elsewhere. They certainly weren't paying for memberships and helping Minx in any way. Eventually all the good shooters left, as they were posting into a void. Most of us (myself included) are narcissists, and only post for feedback from our audience. When that audience stops saying thanks then there's no fun in posting. So most of the guys drifted away to more popular sites, where image theft was rife but it was the only way to find an audience.
At one point, an exploit in the site code was hacked and the site was filled with russian garbage that Minx had to try and recover from, a herculean task as it infected almost every code and script, a complete site rebuild. Minx was using a commonly available backend but it had been improved and modified beyond all recognition over the years, it wasn't something that could be easily rebuilt. But he did it anyway, even though he had no interest in candids, no interest in the site and wasn't making a single cent from it. What a true hero.
Later, the site was hacked again and redirected traffic to some scammy fake wrist-watch page and I think that was it, Minx had had enough. His interests lay elsewhere and it just wasn't worth it anymore. He wanted to move on with his life and do normie stuff, and I fully supported that.
When the domain came up for renewal a while ago we spoke about closing it and decided it was the best thing. I was having a few problems in my life as well at the time and just couldn't manage to take it on. I would have loved to, but it was just incredibly bad timing. We let the domain run out till the end and then it was gone forever. 20 years, one of the oldest candid sites on the web, older than some of the people reading this story. It was a very sad time. Before the end I FTP'd the entire site, so at least I still have all the content, and through time I'll start sharing some of the awesome material here, a lot of it unseen. I still have mountains of tapes to go through and cap off, some going back 15 or so years ! lol.
So what became of the original members ? I am here of course, sharing this sordid tale. I think I'll always be involved in huge tits in some way or another. Even my vanilla day job is related to large busts and I get to see them all day long so I can't complain. Minx I decided to let go. He needed to move on with his life and start being happy. I was just a sad reminder of bad times and I didn't think it fair to keep reminding him, so I stopped all contact after Sgurl closed. I think it was for the best. He was an awesome guy and if you're reading this my man, I wish all the best for you in your new life.
For CK, I've no idea where he is or what he's doing. I've seen him pop up on the radar a few times over the years, once with his own candid website. Whether it succeeded or not I don't know, but I actually wish him all the best. Whatever problems he had was really with Minx, and I shouldn't have taken Minx side in everything. He didn't personally do me any wrongs, and I'm sorry for the way I treated him. I suspect he's still in the game and making money from something somewhere, and I genuinely wish him well. I judged him badly at the time but since being in the same situation myself I can understand the way he was and probably still is.
Classic CK imagery.
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BS I've not seen in an eternity. He was always the silent partner at the start and I never really knew him that well other than some online exchanges. He didn't play much of a part in the story but he was instrumental in the beginning. Without him and people like him the sites would never have got off the ground. I get the impression he was a nice, quiet guy, who just had an obsession with massive black tits. I like to think he's out there somewhere, still stalking the streets trying to get the ultimate candid shot of busty goodness.
That's the end of it really, I could go on with lots more anecdotes but I think you get the general gist of what happened. This probably won't be of much interest to more than a handful of people, most of you probably don't even remember a site that was started before half of you were born ;-) I just wanted to put it out there for all the old-timer busty candid shooters, searchable for anyone wanting to know what happened.
It was a brilliant concept, get together a few guys with similar interests to share content that was legal but morally frowned upon. Something that most normies would love to do when they're walking down a street and see a nice chick with a huge rack thinking to themselves "god, I wish I had a camera !". Well we did, so you don't have to.
It ended because of greed, become some low life assholes took other people's labour and tried to make a quick buck out of it. These same people kill every site of original content now. A new busty model comes on the scene with her own website ? within days the whole thing will be on a torrent, or a pay per click, and someone else will end up making a fortune from it. It's changed the whole way that we share content now. Enough to please the audience and get the warm glow of praise, but not enough that someone else will just take it and make money from it. It's the ultimate 'fuck you' and it kills all creativity.
I'm glad to say that TiT isn't one of these sites, with their ban on pay per click links. No-one objects to the odd content being shared and even this site is littered with old Sgurl pics, even mine. We were never bothered about that and still aren't, it's only the people that steal your work and pass it off as their own, or even worse monetise it.
I have tens of thousands of original busty candid videos, from street candids that have never been published, to busty amateur model photoshoots, to my extensive (500+ Gigs) of busty security footage alone. And none of it will likely every be seen by anyone else.
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Maybe at some point I'll start posting it on pay per click site myself as that's the only way it's even worth it these days. If I do though, I promise I'll still post here for free first with exclusive content. I'm actually an oldfag member of TiT under another name and been a member since almost the beginning, I was just never a huge poster before and I've just lurked over the years. Like all things, I had breaks from the internet and someday I'll just put the entire content in an open drive somewhere and share the link. Until that time though...
If anyone has any more information they'd like to share about Sgurl then please do, I took long extended breaks from the site when real life got in the way, so I missed a lot of the drama and only got it second hand from Minx. If any of the other candid shooters from that era want to get in touch that would be fantastic ! I never got a chance to speak to some of them enough and they are what made the site. People like El Lepero, Ebonikat, Rocket and OlderWomanAdmirer are true legends in the candid community, as are the dozens of others who started this stuff and made it popular in the beginning, too many to mention here.
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The moral of this story is an obvious one, don't steal content (much), and always credit the original poster. For candid photographers especially, people don't understand the amount of work and often risks that go into getting these images. From countless hours trawling the streets, sifting through and editing videos, daring to publish them. A lot of people do this in secrecy from their partners, and risk their jobs, relationships and families just so you can whack off for free. Don't steal their content and pass it off as your own.
The same can often be said for people who share pictures of their wives and girlfriends. Often their partners are unsuspecting and would be horrified if they knew. And considering it's a criminal offence under revenge porn laws in most places now, the fact people still do it is amazing. So give them proper props for their contribution, and enjoy them, just don't go spreading them about on every other site under the sun. And always thank them for their efforts so they know the risks are worthwhile.
And if you must post content that you didn't create, please don't cut off site logos, often sites are ran by a single person just trying to get by and really do need the little money they get. Not every site makes millions per year and can afford the loss. You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to get a payment processor that will deal with this kind of material, on account of the fringe legality. Straight legal porno is actually easier to sell
Lastly, the sucky up part, thanks go to TiT's that allows people to post their original content while also moderating the worst people out, so that it remains a nice place to share. I know earlier I said Sgurls death was caused by 'sites like this' but I didn't mean here specifically. In fact, this place has a huge DNP list that's strongly moderated, unlike most other places. I just hope pay per view and click sites aren't the death of everyone in the end.
So that's it, the almost non-story of what happened to Sgurl, just thought it might be of interest to older members that were around in those days and wondered what happened to it.
