Ciao! No offence taken.. what you noticed is a fact!
There are several underlying reasons for that. I'll mention the key ones.
1) Finding nice girls who are genuinely into barefooting (even occasionally) is extremely difficult in Italy. And when you find them, shooting them
often requires a lot of time and money. Just consider that my "operations area" spans approximately in a radius of over 100 miles from my hometown.
I mean, Hal finds most of his models, and shoots them without moving from his hometown; the longest "move" he has to make is a quick bike ride.
When I have to meet with a new model in Venice, I have to get up at 5am, and travel for nearly 3 hours. If she does not show up (it happened.. not often,
luckily for me, but it happened), I must have lunch in Venice in any case (by myself), and "enjoy" another 3 hour train journey back to Mantova.
Result: 8-10 hours away from home, an expense of 50-100 Euros (depending on the trains I travel on), no shooting, and my balls rotating at high speed.
When a prospective TIA model does not show up for the shooting, in the worst scenario Hal has wasted 1-2 hours.
The risk of "no-shows" calls into question reason 2): finding RELIABLE nice girls who are into barefooting is even more extremely difficult in Italy.
By "reliable", I mean girls that will show up at the agreed meeting point with a delay of maximum 30 minutes, who will be in a decent enough shape
to deliver 4-5 hours of modelling (not counting lunch break), and who are good enough at posing (e.g. not systematically blinking their eyes when I shoot).
3) Girls who can successfully handle all-day shootings (often including train rides or car drives) for the "Barefoot Lifestyle" series are rare birds in Italy.
4) With age, I have become less and less patient in scouting, more and more risk-averse (when I smell that a girl may bring troubles, I NEVER shoot her),
and more and more selective about the girls' looks and "barefooting ability" (handling gravel, blazing hot pavement, super-filthy places etc.).
RESULT: of several girls (more than 20 for sure) I have been in talks with for BUG shootings since 2017, only CLEMENTINE and FAIRY made the grade.
Of course I agree with you that it would be great if I managed to launch a new model on BUG at least every 3-4 months.
I was indeed planning to launch more new models in 2019 and 2020, but my poor health conditions and the Covid-19 shit are very likely to force me
to postpone further the implementation of this strategy.. for how long, I cannot know, sadly.
That said.. OK, BUG isn't surely a newcomer cornucopia.. but differently from City Feet, and similar to old-style TIA,
many BUG models pose for multiple sessions, often spread over several years, and in a great variety of locations, situations and outfits.
I mean.. if you like encores.. you get plenty of them at BUG!
