SAO PAOLO, Brazil – Since 2005, LactationFantasy.com has been shooting and serving high-definition lactation porn featuring Latina performers. Prior to Thomas Andrews’ arrival on the scene, no one was shooting much in the genre at all, and certainly not in HD.

“Any videos you could find were all in standard definition, and you more of less had to take it on faith that there was actually any milk being extracted or expressed from the models’ breasts,” said Andrews, Lactation Fantasy’s self-described engineer, producer and general jack of all trades webmaster. “So I decided to create content worlds apart from anything that had ever been produced previously.”

YNOT: You’ve said you didn’t start out intending to produce a lactation porn site.

Thomas Andrews: I actually started off with the idea of creating an amateur Latinas site. As serendipity would have it, during my first serious month of shooting, something strange happened. A significant number of the models I worked with kept excusing themselves and running off to the bathroom.

Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked one of them what was going on. She looked half shy, half embarrassed, and told me that her breasts were filling up with milk, it was leaking out — “auto-dripping” or “hyper-active letdown,” as a doctor would call it — and she didn’t think I would want to see that in the pictures.

I found myself fascinated by the concept and asked her if she’d show me how that worked. She agreed, I started shooting and the rest is history.

And YNOT helped you with your new idea.

Yes. Coincidently, around this time a friend had loaned me a training DVD from YNOT explaining how to get into the porn industry. At the time, the common consensus was to start off by creating free sites and galleries. I knew this was of no interest at all to me, but on the last segment of the DVD the YNOT instructor indicated that when starting out, if one wanted to create their own content, then it was highly advisable to look for a niche. With the content of that DVD fresh in my mind, I decided — for better or worse, with absolutely no experience to back it up — that amateur Latinas was a genre of porn that was already pretty well-serviced but that lactation was still very much an under-serviced niche.

A few years later, I met the author of the YNOT DVD at a conference, and I believe his comment was something to the effect, “Wow, that’s incredibly focused. I’m not sure that is really what I had that in mind when I was writing the course material.”

How has your content evolved since 2005?

I originally thought Lactation Fantasy was going to be a photography site with a little bit of video. As an engineer with a great interest in technology and photography, I’d never been at all interested in video due to its extremely low resolution. Since standard definition is 720×480 at best, it had never seemed worth the effort to create this postage stamp-sized smudge where your imagination was at least as important as your eyes.

All that changed when Sony released the world’s first HD video camera. Overnight, video went from being this grainy, postage-stamp-sized smudge to a bold, clear image well worth putting serious effort into capturing.

The early Lactation Fantasy content reflected my initial fascination with the fact that boobs can squirt milk rather like a child’s water gun, under the right circumstances. Indeed, this is what most old-school lactation content is: squirting. I augmented squirting with manual and electric pumping videos, which are again very traditional lactation material. Early on, I had a couple of high-spirited sisters model for me, and they started squirting each other during a modeling session, which was the beginning of “milk wars” — having two lactation models battle it out using their boobs as squirt guns.

Around about 2008, maybe 2009, I started getting a lot of requests for adult breast feeding. This is where a grown man or woman sucks the milk of a lactating woman. By this time, I’d already decided that I didn’t really want to have male models on my site. Yes, I do have a few, but it’s just not my style. I have nothing against male models; it just wasn’t the look I wanted. So I started doing two-girl shoots where one woman was lactating and the other was doing the drinking.

About a year after that, maybe 2010, I had a member write to me with the suggestion that elevated heart rate, perhaps through exercise, will frequently cause auto-dripping. Now, for the uninitiated, auto-dripping — and the even rarer auto-streaming — is one of the most coveted types of lactation content. There’s just something about having the milk come out on its own that appeals to lactation fanatics.

Unfortunately, your average Latin American woman is almost as excited about exercise as she is about astrophysics, which is to say not at all. I tried getting lactating models to do some running and jumping before the sessions, and that went over like the proverbial lead balloon. Around the same time, I got a new video camera which had a very basic slow motion recording capability.

By sheer chance, I discovered that while Latinas don’t like exercise, they love to see themselves in slow motion, so I was able to get them to do the exercise I wanted by showing them the slow-motion playback of their activities. Ever since then, I’ve included the slow-motion warm-up exercise recordings in the member area videos. A surprisingly high percentage, around 80 percent, of the members really like the slow-motion content, so I kept doing it, and in 2012 upgraded to a camera that is capable of slow motion in full HD.

Do you shoot your own content?

I’ve always shot my own content. In 2005, I was the third person in the world shooting porn in HD. In the fall of 2005, even the venerable Adobe Premiere Pro was not able to edit HD content, so I was forced to start out with another program that was literally the world’s first editing program for HD content.

Even as the years have gone by, I find it impossible to buy content that lives up to what I consider the absolute minimum standards of quality. Part of the problem is that there are very few other pro-level content producers interested in producing lactation content. While there are always a number of willing models with a webcam, or a cell phone, this simply does not create the level of quality I’d be willing to foist off on people visiting my site. After all, they can get dark, grainy, under-lit lactation shows on several well-known webcam sites.

What camera equipment do you use?

I’ve always used a pro-level DSLR to shoot photos and a steady progression of pro-level HD video cameras that have offered ever-increasing video quality. Even today, many producers do not realize their cameras are less than half the equation. Without some professional lighting products and the skill to use them well, the content will still be rubbish, even with the most expensive and awesome cameras available.

One thing I studiously avoid is using a DSLR for video. Nobody wants to try to beat off to an artsy video where only a fraction of an inch of the model is in focus at a time. By using a real video camera, you get sharp, clear, highly stabilized footage with as much depth of field as possible. This is what customers want, not art.

Where do you find your models?

I live in South America. Due to anti-abortion laws, and a frankly disturbing state of laissez-faire about birth control, there is never a shortage of models.

I consider it very important to treat the models well and make sure they have a good time doing the shoots. This way, they will pass the word on to other women who are lactating, which considerably simplifies the process of finding more models. I call it the “six degrees of lactation,” except that down here, you usually don’t need six steps to find the next lactating model. If the model herself doesn’t know someone who is lactating, then usually one of her friends does — and if not, then one of her friend’s friends will. It’s more like three degrees of separation.

What kind of content do your customers want?

Auto-streaming is quite an amazing sight, regardless of what your feelings about lactation are. In a recent poll regarding how many minutes of auto-dripping I should film, the vast majority of responses were “film auto-dripping until it stops, no matter how long,” which sort of gives you an idea what a big deal this is for lactation aficionados.

If auto-dripping occurs under clothing, it’s called leak-through. This happens often enough in the real world that your local supermarket carries round pads that lactating women can stick in their bras to prevent the milk from creating a visible wet spot on the front of their clothing. Guys like seeing this as well, so I will film leak-through whenever the opportunity arises.

The above types of content are completely dependent on luck. After luck-based content, the next most requested thing is adult breast feeding. This has turned out to be quite popular — even more so when mixed with breast play and breast massage.

While people always join for the lactation content, more than half of them discover they really like the slow-motion footage and end up requesting more of that, as well.

How easy a sell is lactation content, given the world’s fascination with boobs in general?

People tend to have this preconceived notion that lactation is disgusting, that it’s something that other people’s wives do in private in order to feed a baby. This is frequently reflected in the American news, with arguments breaking out over women’s rights to breast-feed outside the family home. In porn, you even have webcam sites that ban it, presumably out of a misguided fear that lactation falls under U.S. obscenity laws about “bodily fluids”. Ridiculous. Milk, including human milk, is food. Period.

Most guys are going to avoid lactation, but every now and then I end up having an email conversation with guys who’ve stumbled across lactation content by accident and discovered they enjoyed it. For the breast man, lactation has all the good stuff he likes about breast play. The only key difference is that milk will come out during the breast play.

The short answer is that due to cultural bias and preconception, lactation is a very small niche and a very hard sell to anyone who is not already an aficionado. If I was younger, cuter and could go back in time, I’d just open a hardcore POV site detailing my debauchery. The guys I’ve met who did that in the early 2000s are all millionaires now.

Lactation won’t even make you a thousand-aire. I more or less do this as a hobby, although I take all aspects of content creation and quality seriously. From what I’ve seen, the technical quality of my content frequently exceeds sites that are supposedly doing porn as a full-time business. Fortunately, lactation is not my only source of income. Otherwise, I’d be in big trouble.