That's a Wartenberg Pinwheel (click the pic for a better view). A medical instrument, believe it or not. Maybe neurologists use them? I don't know. That sharp spur thingy pricks and stimulates nerve endings. Maybe it's related to acupuncture? I do know that Angela loved having Cynnamon use it on her. She relaxed and seemed to get lost in the sensation.

The first time I saw one of those used was at a fetish party I was photographing for the promoter. Used by a woman on another woman it seemed a careful process. No screams of pain, just an immersion in the senses.

I learned a lot this trip. I doubt I'll ever put any of it to use personally, but it's all good to know. There's no such thing as bad knowledge, as long as it's true.

Hope you're not tired of the Newfound- land photoshoot week yet, because there is a whole lot of film yet to be developed.

The week sort of went like this:

First day - getting acquainted, some easy pictures, running all over to find a bottle of wine - lots of talking. The girls played dress-up with Cynn's fetish gear (she had two full, heavy suitcases of mostly fetish stuff.

Second day - this was a play day and Cynn was exploring Angela to see what she responded to, what she liked, and what made her completely out-of-body freaky. This was also the day the routine began of the girls taking off their pants when they came into the hotel room - I don't know why they did it, but I liked it. Most of the film so far has been from the play day.

Third day was the scene. This was an unscripted sensual and sexual BDSM interaction between the girls with Cynn topping or dominating Angela in order to give her pleasure. The pictures here are from that day - it was a quiet, elegant seduction, unlike anything I'd expected. The photographs are also quiet tender photographs.

Fourth day we all unwound and made some snapshots and solo pictures and talked. There were some tears shed and promises made and it was all sweet.

Cynn stayed at Angela's house and I stayed in the hotel. We'd be all together from noonish until 2 or 3 AM-ish.

I'll talk more about each of these days in later posts. That will give me a lot of grist for the blog mill, but it will also give me the room to expand on what I think happened there and give it the attention it should have. I think we all learned some profound things about people and I in particular now understand much of what I'd been missing about BDSM.

Fetish Queen Cynnamon topping the lovely Angela in my hotel room in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada a few short weeks ago.

P.S. It entirely escaped me that this is April Fools Day. If I'd been paying attention there would be an elaborate and clever spoof here instead. Sorry - another indicator of my gross inadequacies.

Lovely Angela with Fetish Queen Cynnamon bringing up the rear. This was play prior to the day we shot the scene. The water glass required Angela to concentrate and be still while being played with - I don't know if the idea is original with Cynn, but it's brilliant. Her hand outside the frame has a paddle you'll see later on. In some of the color Angela's butt is bright red, but I don't know exactly how it will render in the B&W. I guess we'll all have to wait and see as I'm done scanning for the weekend and won't get more done until tomorrow or Tuesday.

Back to the dayjob tomorrow, but I'm looking forward to being in the office for a bit before the next trip. I never know how long that will be, but for now there's no travel scheduled so I can get back to scanning and developing film. Speaking of which, a friend came over tonight to learn film development. He's been a digital shooter and is "exploring the roots" of photography. I don't know what he'll end up using, but the more one knows the more prepared he'll be, so I'm happy to teach him the rudiments of film. Any time, Bill.

OK, it's late for me and I've got a book on Tamerlane to make some progress on yet tonight and an open bottle of a Washington state merlot to assess, so that's it for now.

On Monday I fly to St. John's, Newfoundland to photograph Angela again with another model, Cynnamon. Angela told me to bring rope. I'll probably do that, as the rope I bought there last time was a little thinner than optimum for photography. It should show texture and be a significant part of the picture, and should be of a tone that neither blows out the highlights nor gets lost in the shadows. You laugh, but it took me quite a while to decide that 3/8ths manila line is the right thing for me to use for pictures. What rope for real bondage play? I have no idea.

Some other lessons learned that apply to my bondage photography. Knots are important. Former Boy and maybe Girl Scouts can spot a granny knot across the room. It's not really a knot as it pulls out. Backsplice, tape or whip the ends so the cords don't unwind and look messy. Tuck the bitter ends out of sight on the far side from the camera. Knots too if possible. I splice loops on one end of the lengths used so I can slip and tighten loops on the wrists and ankles, etc. If the rope's not taught, it's not bondage. Make it look real - the idea is that the person bound cannot get up, away, or avoid her (tasty) just desserts.

It seems to me that as bondage is a sexual thing, it should allow access for sex, while allowing the sub to dodge any guilt about enjoying it and to relish her humiliation and helplessness. Thus the use of spread-eagled positions and pillows under the hips and upturned butts and such.

Anyway, those are the guidelines I use to shoot these pictures. But what do I know? I'm vanilla.

This is Candy, linked on the right, tied up in a motel room in West Hollywood awhile back. I think she enjoyed it. I did - there's nothing quite like having to handle girlflesh in order to make the photographs.

Well, this one's kind of explicit. Candy said I could use them all, so here's a view of her you probably haven't seen before, all tied up with her butt elevated for ease of access. As a vanilla I figure bondage is about two things. Three things, really - in my case it means mandatory handling of girlflesh in the process of the photoshoot.

But the other two things are the presumed innocence of the sub who simply can't do anything about it and is therefore blameless of her circumstances. Some mind games are necessary to convince herself to separate the assent to be bound from the potential results of that assent, I'd suspect. And the other thing is access for the Top. Seems to me that if the poor sub is tied up in such a way that the Top can't access the necessary bits, the whole thing is somehow a step removed from bondage and has become something else. While I think that makes bondage a practice distinct from other BDSM, where pain, tease and balance play a role, they can be combined with the Top bringing the sub to the brink and beyond without ever availing himself of the access.

But what do I know? I just shoot the stuff.

I'll be traveling on Monday, so there probably won't be a post. Feel free to come back and read this one twice.

This was a hilarious attempt to shoot suspension bondage. I guess everyone that does bondage photography, including the models, think that having the model suspended would be really neat. So Chloe came over and we went into the warehouse next door where there were all kinds girders and beams and such and I got out the rope and we proceeded as follows:

Chloe undressed while I attemtped to toss the rope through one of the girder beams two stories up. We laid out a clean drop cloth for her to stay clean on. I got the rope through the beam and had her lay on her belly while I, using my old Boy Scout skills, figured out how to distribute her weight over a bunch of wraps so that circulation wouldn't be actually cut off and she'd be relatively comfortable.

I found a place to tie the loose end of the rope. Now I had to lift her into the air. The beam was hardly a pulley, so I had to lift her with one arm and take up slack with the other hand, all the while assuring that this tied up package didn't crash to the concrete floor, padded only by that drop cloth. Wasn't easy. When I got her high enough and tied off the rope, the damned rope stretched and she was back near the floor again. After messing with it for awhile I got her high enough, tied off the rope and pulled out the camera.

While she started spinning. So I stabilized her and spun her a little in the opposite direction so I had a little time to compose. As you can see, that wasn't real successful either. And I was shooting into a sky light, so the incident metering I did in such a hurry gave me blown out results lit from above.

During all this she started lurching head down as the knots and rope and such started shifting. So I put down the camera, put her over my shoulder, untied the rope and let her down.

At some point, when I get over the trauma of this shoot three years back, I may try again. But before then I'll study how others do the tying, I'll plan better light and it will be shot in my studio, which now has a usable beam.

Just got told I'm going to Korea next week. It's cold in Korea in January. More news as it breaks.

Ouchie!

That Chloe had a mean streak. Notice that she's got Robin's nipples firmly grasped while tugging. I'm a guy and have no idea what that might feel like. Actually I'm not even keen on having mine pinched or bit, so I'm guessing it must hurt a lot. My Ex told me that after a kid's chewed on them awhile they get somewhat desensitized, but I know Robin wasn't a mommy. Nevertheless, she's stoically closing her eyes and internalizing it. And she's enjoying it. Or we'd have stopped the process.

The election results are mostly in and some bastards have been thrown out on their asses. And new bastards have taken their places. But the new bastards haven't had the necessary time to become effectively corrupted yet. Next - we throw those bastards out. Isn't democracy wonderful?

Chloe and Robin, photographed in my studio in San Diego around December 2004.

Back when I was shooting mostly bondage, my studio setup was pretty spare. The stage was a homemade workbench padded by a folded Pendleton blanket, which was all covered by duvatine. The background was black paper mounted on a Bogen holder with the sides and wall covered by more hung duvatine. There's nothing fancy there. No contraptions for suspension or custom-made spanking chairs or any of that.

So a few days before I was scheduled to shoot Little Robin for the third or fourth time I figured I needed something new or it would just be a rerun of an earlier shoot. I went down to Home Depot and bought one of the tall sawhorses. Brought it to the studio, painted it grey and put some ring bolts through the feet.

It fit nicely on the stage and was stable, though there wasn't a lot of manuever room left. This new prop gave me a few more options. The model could be belly-down longitudinally or laterally, facing the camera or facing away.

So I used the sawhorse for five or six models, then when it became a problem to store with the growing stable of motorcycles and I was backing away from bondage, I pulled the ring bolts off and set it outside for some lucky scavenger to take.

Models are Tyler, top, and Little Robin, bottom. Well, they're both bottoms...

A fresh photograph of Jackie. Most of the earlier ones I've shown of her have been bondage, which we shot toward the end of the photoshoot. While it's way fun to handle girl-flesh while tying them up and all, I prefer to photograph women enjoying themselves. It fits with the body of work I'm making right now. And it's fun to watch. And it's nice to be trusted as much as they must trust me to allow that. Damn, she's beautiful!

OK, that print for the private buyer. I saw it and rejected it. Communications problem. I want the image size to be 11x14 with cropping rather than a full-frame printed onto 11x14 paper so Gene will re-print for me. I may not have mentioned it, but I'm also going to use that image in my 16x20 art folio. The prints are fine - stunning. Beautiful. Gene Nocon does outstanding work; if he didn't he wouldn't have been Bailey's and Beaton's and Sieff's (among others) printer back in the day. Anyway, I'll be picking up the revised prints on Friday. Because I've always priced my prints to keep people from actually ordering them, the price, regardless of print size, is now $500. Don't everyone start emailing me now...

Jackie, playing with herself in my motel room in Minneapolis about three or four weeks back. Lovely girl.

Awhile back I put up a profile at Bondage.Com. At that time my entire profile consisted of a to link here. So many of the models I've worked with are members there - particularly the ones who want to be tied up. So I figured I'd go read the forums and see what it was all about. What I found was that it was the typical online experience where everyone was competing for primacy, including the submissives who wanted nothing less than to be the top submissives. I didn't find anything that showed any insight into the "BDSM community" at all. Maybe I didn't read enough, but as with all online communities, the writing was done in shorthand and buzzwords and was abrupt and without nuance.

Last night I put up some pictures of myself and filled out a bunch of questionnaires and profiles and such, being as honest as I could. In doing that the line blurred between what I like sexually and what I photograph. Sometimes that was because the questions were leading and sometimes it was because fantasy and reality overlapped and fuzzed. I guess if anyone wants to know how kinky I am, they could go read that stuff. I've got the free account, and they put a lot of pressure on to sign up for $20 a month by withholding things like emails and viewing of dirty pictures, but I can't see paying $20 to see dirty pictures when I can just go make my own, you know?

So, what happens next? Am I gonna get innundated by pretty women asking me to spank them or tie them up? I'm not sure if I see the point of tying up anyone I'm not going to photograph. We'll see what happens and I'll let you know.

This picture of Chloe was done after she saw the picture of Robin with clothespins (somewhere down below). I use clothespins to hang film to dry, so they're all over the place (you can't buy just eight clothespins). Chloe seems stoic in this picture, but I think she enjoyed it as a game. She wouldn't let me take them off until she couldn't stand it anymore.

Back when I was getting referral after referral and local bondage girls were coming out of the woodwork, Chloe contacted me. Little Robin had sent her. We set up a shoot, then another. I think we worked four or five times and she dropped in just to hang out pretty often as well. Often during a shoot with Chloe, Robin would drop in, strip down and join in. This was one of those times.

Chloe was 21 but had a 17-yr-old boyfriend whose main talent was that he could choke her just right. She liked that. And I wanted to photograph it as it was a kink I didn't understand. First we set up the camera (Pentax LX) on a tripod (TiltAll) and I had Robin handle the shutter release button. I reached into the frame from the left side with my right hand and arm and grasped Chloe's throat. Oh man was that awful! I had no idea what to look for in the way of feedback and am well aware that I'm very strong and I simply wouldn't squeeze. My hands are calibrated to "caress" and "break" with no continuum in between. Every nerve in my body told me to back off. And Robin botched the shutter release button task by bumping the camera, so the image wasn't framed right and was blurry anyway. Imagine - screwing up a job that consisted of pushing a button when I said "now."

I was not going to do that again. Chloe said it was all just fine and I wasn't even getting close, but ... I just couldn't do it again. Anyway, the belt was there on the table along with the rest of her clothes so we put it around her neck and Robin simply stood outside the frame holding the end. Not pulling, just holding. Chloe had to pull against the fixed belt, and I did have Robin back up to get the posture right. And this is the result.

Chloe, photographed in my studio several years back. Little Robin assisting naked (there's something about a nude female assistant...). But the whole thing freaked me out even more than fishhook suspension.

Down below somewhere are pictures of Robin spanking Chloe and the two of them taking a smoke break outside the studio.