Overview:
SF Bay Models was started a few years ago by Andrew Slater, a photographer from Oakland who decided that his hometown hotties weren’t represented strongly enough online. With a camera in hand, Slater set out to snap sexy shots of the most gorgeous girls in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and surrounding areas. He seems like a pretty laid back guy and insists that the models only show as much skin as they feel comfortable showing. With a number of other projects on his plate, I’m somewhat surprised that Slater’s able to devote so much time and attention to SF Bay Models. His casting tendencies lean towards girls aged 18 to 25, most of whom are of Asian descent, but you’ll find the occasional All-American Cali Girl on the site, too. The tour page promises members over 2000 photo galleries and almost 100 hours of HD 1080p video footage. All content is supposedly 100% exclusive and new updates arrive on the site multiple times every day. Those seem like some pretty audacious claims to make, so let’s hope they’re all true. Members don’t get any bonus website access or anything like that and can expect to pay $14.95 a month for access to SF Bay Models. Damn, that’s affordable! Even at such a low price, we better find out if the site is worth every penny.

Once you’ve logged yourself in and landed in the main members’ area of SF Bay Models, you’ll find a page design that’s fairly tacky but an enormous improvement on what was previously online here. The site opens with three main link options – Latest Updates, The Models, and Support & FAQ. Checking out the FAQ, we find out that SF Bay Models is one of the few sites that pays models on a sliding scale based upon their popularity. If more people enjoy the work of one particular young lady, she’s going to see more money than someone who doesn’t attract much interest. Fair enough (although I hope the girls are paid a base rate per shoot as well). Not all of the models get nude, but all of them are required to pose in underwear/lingerie (with a few exceptions). Many are comfortable baring their breasts or going totally nude, though. One aspect of SF Bay Models that I immediately found off-putting is the way new content is uploaded in high quality for 40 days only. After that period, it remains on the site in a lower quality format and you’re forced to purchase individual zip archives and HD videos from The Zip Store. Slater says this is to cut down on hosting and bandwidth costs and ensure members don’t commit the dreaded fuck-and-run (join for a month, download everything on the site and disappear), instead sticking around month after month. He also claims that this ensures the models more money, but I’m not sure how fully I believe that rationalization.

On the Latest Updates page, you’ll find a text-based list of Videos, Galleries, and Retouched Photos (single shots, slightly cleaned-up). Updates do arrive multiple times a day, but it’s not as great as you might think. With so many links to follow, all of which are just lines of red text featuring the models’ names, it looks like a chaotic, impenetrable bunch of Matrix-style computer gibberish. Surely it can’t be that difficult to make the updates more attractive with a graphic display. The Downloads section of the updates list gives you links to downloadable High Definition (1920x1080p) videos and zip archives of modeling galleries that feature very high-resolution images. (These are the downloads that only stay online for 40 days before moving to the Zip Store.) As confusing and hard to navigate as the updates section of the site is, there sure is a ton of activity there.

The Models page offers a pictorial display of each and every girl featured on SF Bay Models. There are currently 224 different young women who have posed in front of Slater’s camera and made it onto the site. Slater definitely seems to prefer girls with Asian backgrounds, as most of the preview images show. Each preview thumbnail gives you a very good look at the young women’s faces and a little insight into their personalities – assuming, of course, they’re not one of the ones that froze and stood there with a blank expression on their face as soon as the lens cap came off. After selecting your favored model, you’ll be shown to her content display page, where you’ll find links to every gallery and video she is featured in. The number of images in each shoot can vary from 100 to 500, depending largely on the mood of Slater and the model and exactly how hot he thinks she is. Some girls that aren’t as attractive as others end up with densely packed galleries purely because they’re more willing to get naked. The galleries themselves hold only thumbnail and high-res images, not the zip files and the super-high-res images that they contain. So how high is high-res? 666x1000 pixels is a pretty safe average for the gallery pages, but the zips contain resolutions up to 3888x2592, which produce stunning images with an incredible attention to detail. Your eyes will explore every pore of these girls’ bodies. The only downside to the otherwise incredibly impressive images is the presence of obnoxiously large watermarks that often infringe on the viewers’ enjoyment of the shots.

SF Bay Models’ video content must be accessed from either the Latest Updates page or the models’ content pages. You’re limited to downloading only one video at a time, and if you click a download link but cancel before any data is transmitted you’re still forced to wait 60 seconds until your next attempt. I understand that Slater’s trying to minimize costs and maximize profits, but these restrictions really hinder the potential for complete enjoyment of SF Bay Models. The standard videos reach resolutions of 720x405 and come in downloadable Flash video format. The HD videos look much better than their standard definition brethren and give you more definition at resolutions of 1920x1080 pixels. The colors in both videos tend to look a bit dull and lifeless and, worst of all, there’s no sound. None at all. Not even a hiss. Slater tells us that he and the model usually listen to copyright protected music during the photoshoot, forcing him to either replace said music with cheesy copyright-free tunes or ditch the audio altogether – he obviously went for the latter option. What really sucks about the absence of sound in these vids is that it’s really the only chance you have to learn about the models. We see their gums flapping and you know you’d be interested in hearing what they have to say on pretty much any topic from chai lattes and Gavin Newsom to what they’re studying at SF State and what they order at Super Taqueria. Just in case I wasn’t making myself clear, the lack of audio really, really sucks.

As I mentioned earlier, some girls choose to pose in their underwear, while some go all out and allow their nubile, naked bodies to be tied up in chains or latex strips for the whole world to see. Many of the models are very cute and a few are even very beautiful, but there were only a handful that I’d revisit the site for. Perhaps I’m too picky; I don’t know. There’s some fetish play involved in the photo shoots, but it never gets overly explicit and always comes off as a fairly dispassionate display from the model’s end. The videos, by the way, only provide behind-the-scenes footage, nothing more. You’ll see the girls posing for photos in Slater’s studio, usually just standing in front of a white curtain backdrop; since you can’t hear them speak, this gets very dull very quickly. If you’re a devoted fan of a particular model, however, you’ll definitely enjoy watching their bodies in motion, just perhaps not for too long.

Look, I know this is a pretty long review and I really want to let you all still reading that I appreciate your attention. SF Bay Models is a very interesting site that warrants a close inspection. The main reason for this is the availability of the downloadable content. I reiterate: new HD videos and zipped photo sets are available online for all members for 40 days only, after which time they must be bought from The Zip Store at roughly 1/10th of a cent per image. Members can only download one item at a time - what with the slow transfers and between-download waiting time that’s imposed on them – and, heaven forbid you attempt to download a file and either cancel it or have it stop responding, you’re often hit with an error telling you that you must wait 20 hours until you’re able to “reset the count” on that particular file and attempt to download it one more time. Slater says that this is a way of preventing those who “steal or trade or post passwords from benefiting”, but his reasons are definitely losing credibility the more he uses them. Well, that just about sums it up, folks. Be sure to hang around just a minute or two longer (four or five if you’re drinking) and check out the Pros and Cons of a SF Bay Models membership. I guarantee they’ll be worth sticking around for.

Pros:
- Super high-resolution photos and videos are available (for 40 days, at least) and, man, do they look fantastic!

- Many of the models shown here on SF Bay Models are adorable young women with a sweet, flirty attitude.

- $14.95 for a monthly membership is very affordable.

- There’s a ton of content here, folks - over 200 models featured in more than 2000 galleries!

Cons:
- New HD videos and highest-resolution zip files are removed from the site after 40 days and paying members are forced to shell out extra to download them from an online store.

- Downloaders are forced to wait anywhere from 60 seconds and 20 hours between download attempts. Ridiculous!

- Some of the models don’t even get down to their underwear. Slater tells us that’s because these girls are exceptionally beautiful, but I’m inclined to disagree.

- The model roster is also nowhere close to an accurate representation of Bay Area girls.

- The site recently had a makeover, but it unfortunately needs yet another one… badly!

- The videos merely show behind-the-scenes photo shoot footage and are rather dull to watch, especially due to their complete lack of any audio!

Conclusion:
The Bay Area might have some of the most enticing women in the country, but SF Bay Models isn’t doing a very good job of representing for Nor Cal. Webmaster and photographer Andrew Slater might have some of the highest resolution content I’ve seen in quite a while, a bevy of cute girls willing to (partially) undress in his studio, and an obvious dedication to his hometown area, but that can’t save his customers (that’s you guys) from the navigational nightmare that is browsing SF Bay Models. You’re forced to wait for downloads which then disappear, effectively bullying you into a multi-month membership, and when you do manage to make a selection from the text-only Latest Updates page the galleries that remain on the site are nowhere near as impressive as those now in The Zip Store costing a $1.50 extra. Images are often almost ruined by thoughtless placement of oversized watermarks and Slater’s handful of arguments for the unappealing way his site is run end up sounding like obvious sob stories about the high cost of server space and bandwidth. If you can’t afford to put content online, why do it then retract it 40 days later? If SF Bay Models cost $19.95 or even $22.95 a month, instead of $14.95, perhaps Slater would have enough money coming in that he could loosen his attitude toward his precious content and allow his customers to actually enjoy what ends up being an extremely frustrating site.