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Friday, June 27, 2008

[PlanetBears/bear-pics members - click here] When I first opened up TubeBear, I started featuring profiles of guys I thought were cute and had great photos. One of the very first gents I featured was a cute guy with the nickname Thudd (profile). His name is Ben Goodman and he lives in Ottawa with his equally cute partner Furry Fukker (profile)... fast forward a couple of months and Ben emails me, saying he's coming up my way for the opening of a new Bear bar in Montreal and would be interested in doing a photo shoot. It had been a long time since I've done a shoot (I mean, I've been taking photos of Roger for a year straight, but nobody else)... so let me rephrase, it's been awhile since I did a shoot with someone other than my partner, but luckily Ben and I worked really well, he's truly photogenic, cute, and we all had a good time over the weekend, especially when Ben's partner would crack jokes.

There's 2 sets added today in the Galleries - the 1st set is of Ben in Old Montreal, and the 2nd set is him in the hot tub at the Big Boys Guesthouse. I have one more set of photos left which I will add next week - it's him in (and out) of his business suit chatting on his webcam and laptop, and there's also Video that goes along with it.

I'm hoping that we'll all get together soon to repeat the process because I truly enjoyed working with Ben. He's a real good looking Bear, has a gentle smile, soft brown eyes, and all the while is funny, witty, energetic and intelligent.

Click here for a preview.

Read more here.

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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Here's 2 sets of photos that I took with Mjollnir (gallery) and Eric Zoonino (gallery) that used to be on bear-pics and someone pointed it out that they remembered seeing them on the old site but not on PlanetBears. Therefor I added them (they are #5 and #6 in Mjollnir's gallery). Set #5 has Eric giving Mjollnir a shave... shaving his head, that is... and in set #6, Eric ties Mjollnir to a chair.

Once we finished the photo shoot, I looked at my digital camera and noticed I had about 2-3 minutes left in my memory slot. At the time, I was only working on photos but the camera I was using did have video so I thought - why not. It's just a short clip of the 3 of us fooling around, with the very big Bear Mjollnir of 6'4'' and easily 350 pounds tied to a chair. We discovered he's quite ticklish. This footage never made it onto bear-pics so it's the 1st time on the net. You can see it here in the Video section, and here's a few previews (here, here and here).

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Thursday, May 8, 2008

Guess who is coming back to Montreal? It's the super cute Frank from New Jersey - the one that looks like he should belong on the Sopranos set however once you get to know him, he's the biggest teddy bear kind of guy around.

Frank came to Montreal back in April of 2003 so it's gonna be 5 years since I've seen him. However, we have been talking on the phone and now online using TubeBear's webcam chat room. Actually, Frank has started to stream live so make sure to check out the LiveStreaming page and you just might catch him on cam.

We plan on doing a photo and video shoot so it's going to be great to have some new material of Frank. He was very popular back in the day and he's done nothing more than gotten cuter over the years. He's aging very well.

Make sure to check out his PlanetBears' gallery as well as his TubeBear profile. And check out the PlanetBears Video page (click here for more descriptions about the 'Lost Video Files'). And lastly, click here to see some previews from the set of pics we worked on back in '03 - and click here for some more previews.

Read more here.

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Wednesday, May 7, 2008

[Members click here - become a member - previews here] If you've ever visited the bear-pics website I used to run before I closed it down, you just might recall of a shoot I had with Orlando aka Eito. Orlando was very popular and had a lot of online fans. He came up to my place from New York in September 2002 for a weekend and we had a great time, we took a lot of pics and I have a lot of fond memories of getting to know this handsome man. Once the weekend was over, we promised to keep in touch a lot and we even spoke about doing another shoot in the future. However... once he left, we really didn't keep in touch at all. I sent him the occasional email seeing how he was doing and how life was going, and his emails to me were just as scarce. The last email I got from him was March 2003 and he wrote "Hello Forrest, I never forget about you. Here for you" and with it he attached a set of photos he took so I could add to the site.

Exactly 3 years after that shoot we had, in September 2005, I get an email from a friend of his saying that Orlando is very sick and that he's in the hospital. I emailed this friend back asking if there was anyway to contact Orlando. I got a reply with a phone number. Unfortunately, I never called him, and 20 days after his friend initially emailed me, well he sent me another email, this time saying that Orlando had passed away. He was 42 years old.

At the time, I posted an article about Orlando on BearFoot (which at the time was a message board for guys into Bear feet), and holy smokes did I ever get a ton of email replies of guys sending in their condolences. It was really only then that I realized just how many people that Orlando had touched. He was truly a fantasy Bear for many many men.

Also at the time, I was torn - do I take his pics down out of respect or do I keep them up online...? I asked a few friends about this and they all said the same thing: Orlando is cute, he took great pics, he's turned on a lot of men so let him keep turning them on. What they said made sense, so I kept Orlando's pics alive.

However, I have a ton of pics Orlando sent me, and with his permission he told me to post these online. I kind of forgot about all of them (around 240 pics), but going through my archives I came across them and I decided to post these as well. So head on over to Orlando's gallery and check out the last 4 photo sets.

It's still sad to think that he's gone. Just like his pics, he was truly all what a Bear should be - nice on the outside and nice on the inside.

Click here to see some previews - there's some pics from the sets I added today plus there's a few pics that Orlando sent of when he was a younger Bear... and there's 3 quick pics of Orlando in handcuffs. Wish there was more but that's all that I got from him.