Category Archives: Uncategorized

Porn I like and porn I don’t

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I’ve been surfing for porn. (In a good cause.) We’ve started shooting content for two potential new web site projects, one bondage, one foot fetish & striptease. The foot fetish one is mainstream glamour, just with lots of shots where the soles of the feet are visible. Hey, that’s what I like to see, maybe other people will too.

I thought I’d do my market research, hence the porn surfing. If it is close enough in style & content to be a competitor, I should find it hot, right? Bonus.

An evening or two later, I have some conclusions.

1) Mainstream porn is over-abundant, especially hard-core. If you just want to see fucking, you can get months of viewing content for free or nearly free. Even if you are into bondage or foot fetish, you’ll find plenty of content from the last 30+ years recycled as web content for next to nothing. The content’s lame on the BDSM/foot front because it degenerates into hard-core at which point the makers seem to have forgotten the theme of their film and fall into “porno shoot” mode. So… finding porn, easy. Finding good niche porn- not so easy.

2) 99% of it is shockingly badly lit. Net result is pretty uglifying on all the stars and the locations. Even where they’ve got a gorgeous cast and have sourced a nice place to shoot, they rarely make the most of it. I want everything to look beautiful; crap lighting means it never will. I want everything to look like it was lit by Wally Pfister (it is a bit dated now but check out his early work on softcore “thrillers” like Secret Games).

3) Mainstream porn is primarily video, with stills as a afterthought if at all. The honourable exceptions are sites run by ex-stills-photographers. (Turns out these are the ones I like). I like video but have a preference for really evocative, sharp stills. I can make my own story in my head to the pictures, whereas a video needs to be much more skilfully presented to do that. Which leads to:

4) Mainstream porn is badly edited. Stills are either auto-airbrushed to plastic fantastic, or not retouched at all. In an ideal world that wouldn’t matter, but models have to be on their feet all day and so blisters and dry skin are an occupational hazard- which I don’t find sexy in the photos. I found myself importing some of the photos into Aperture to retouch them myself from frustration!

5) Mainstream porn videos are even more badly edited. I don’t claim to be far up the learning curve as a film-maker myself. But I know that one rolling take with vertiginous hand-held camerawork and shoddy zooming in and out does not make for compelling viewing. Which leads to the cardinal sin:

6) I found most of it boring as hell. Wading though screens full of confusing pop-up special offer crap to see badly resized thumbnails of muddily lit videos of badly-dubbed grunt and groan. Holding a single dull shot for upwards of ten minutes. Cutting between two static cameras every few minutes. All the action played out in real time sounds like a selling point, but actually is yawn inducing.

Do what the movies do- cut out all the dull bits and show me the bits that are either critical to the progression of the scene, or achingly beautiful to have my eyes linger over.

Did I find some good stuff? Yes. Hot Legs and Feet has lovely stills. Their videos still look muddy and a bit slow, hope we can do something different here. The content is more hardcore than my usual taste, but nicely shot if that’s your thing. The solo girl sets are sometimes exquisite. We’re going to have our job cut out to compete. Hooray! Seriously, it will mean we can’t be lazy or complacent – having a high quality competitor out there will force us to do good work.

Femjoy is lovely as always, and their videos at least have nice lighting. But DAMN, they’re boring to watch. The content is only co-incidentally foot fetish- it is really about open-leg nude poses, but happens to have a lot of barefoot girls on it. And their website layout is great. Might pinch a few ideas. Memo to self, though- try to have something happening in videos, especially if shooting slow-mo.

APD Nudes is photographer Iain T’s site. I like his work so much I got him to shoot some stuff for Restrained Elegance. Love his set design (I know I don’t have the knack, which is why we hire locations rather than build them). It is more stockings and shoes than barefoot, but I’d love to get something of the same classy look-and-feel.

There were others that looked interesting, but SOOOOO many more that just made me shudder. So it turns out I’m quite a fussy consumer when it comes to porn. I hope that’ll make me a more discerning producer, too. Sod following the crowd, incidentally. If I can’t make stuff I’d like to see myself, I might as well go and shoot corporate videos and weddings.

Early test shot

An early test shot to see if we can use video lighting to shoot stills. Unfortunately, the answer is no, not reliably. Camera shake and subject motion, high ISO noise and shallow depth of field make it too hard to achieve critical sharpness.

Same room, but lit with strobe and shot with the Hasselblad. Much more control in general, and much easier to achieve sharpness where one wants it.

It is the lighting, not the camera in this case. Canon shot, but in daylight (with diffused on camera flash stills). Lovely!

One other observation: porn is not just badly lit, it is overwhelmingly brightly lit. I guess that’s in the belief that the customer wants to see everything (and probably by the end of the film/photoset we do). But there’s not much allure or tease when everything is lit up like a searchlight.

Wedded Joy Part Two

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Here’s a wedding-themed picture by our friend AP Sheep who made the metal dress!! He is brilliant.

In an unprecedented move, I’m blogging very soon after my last post.  I feel like a proper blogger, but obviously, never in the league of Pandora Blake .  I have hopes that one day I’ll grow up and blog like her.  By the way, thank you so much to everyone who posted comments to my last post (especially Michael – that’s a very interesting subject that you brought up, I’d like to blog about it some time).

Anyway, the reason I’m blogging is because everything was too darned exciting to not talk about over the last couple of weeks for me.  So I’m writing it all down (actually, I wrote this on honeymoon, so I’m just copy typing now, in the manner of a sexy 1950’s secretary.  Except that I’m wearing a massive orange polar fleece and drinking hot Ribena.)

Right, here’s the actual post. It’s about my honeymoon with the BDM, who is now the HDM.  I wanted to drop the ‘M’ for master to give him the same initials as ‘High Definition’, but he wouldn’t let me. Oh well.

‘This is what happened after we got married;-

We went back to work for a couple of days.  I know this sounds odd, but we’re in the middle of creating some new projects as well as improving our work on RE so we needed the time.  A lovely commentary ran through my head as I worked;-  ‘I’m just editing a video for my husband’s website.’  ‘Mrs HDM is stopping work for a cup of tea with her husband.‘  Awfully grandiose of me, but lovely one-off fun.

We held our reception on the Sunday three days after our wedding.  And it was really rather a kinky affair, at least according to the guest list.  A number of the people I think of as the British spanking aristocracy came (less than we’d have liked due to the small space we loved so much we chose it for the party) and the first one we saw that day was the tremendous Lucy the Matron of Northern Spanking along with her brilliant husband Paul Kennedy and lovely child.  Lucy had kindly volunteered to do my hair, and as is her multi-skilled way, she did a beautiful job of making me look all vintage-y and elegant.

Of the lovely kinkies we were able to fit onto the guest list were Amy Hunter of Northern Spanking fame, Stephen Lewis (also of Northern Spanking), my beloved friend Katy Cee from Restrained Elegance, brilliant Temptress Kate, RE’s publicist, model and location photographer, RE photographer Steve and his lovely wife, RE model Sammie B, the wonderful Leigh and Zena from gorgeous boudoir photography service Mighty Aphrodite and my favourite non-gay best friend Ben Davies

In retrospective, it seems silly of me but before our wedding party I’d been a bit worried about how our vanilla and kinky guests would all get on.  Of course, the HDM and I had family members in attendance, and while they all know exactly what we do for a living, I wondered whether anyone would end up in awkward conversations.  But midway through the party, I looked round and saw Stephen Lewis and Paul Kennedy talking to my sister and her family, Lucy-the-Matron sitting with one of the HDM’s university friends, and Temptress Kate and Katy Cee deep in conversation with my super-cool fashion writer friend and her husband.  I felt so happy, and so proud of our friends, the vanilla ones who are liberal enough to cope with people making unconventional career choices and having varied sexual identities, and the kinky friends who were able to understand that you don’t need to dress in PVC and wield canes around at all times. All this seems very obvious now, but it was a lovely discovery nevertheless.

Since the HDM’s not over-keen on public speaking, having possibly burnt out from his previous life as a lecturer, we decided the main speech would be my responsibility.  I’d been worried about it, but on the advice of a friend I decided to be honest rather than trying to be clever, so I mostly just thanked people.  My (our!) niece who’d decorated our wedding cake with a cascade of autumn leaves, Lucy for my lovely hair, the HDM’s parents’ for bringing up to have the confidence to abandon one career in favour of being a bondage photographer.  And Hywel himself, for everything, really.

Then we struggled home under the weight of all the cookbooks we’d asked for as wedding presents, stumbled to bed, and were awoken at 3.45am in order to go off on honeymoon.

I’d kept my beautiful wedding hair-style overnight – since it was a gift from Lucy, destroying it prematurely felt vile and wrong.  It wasn’t until we were sitting in a lakeside cafe in Italy that afternoon that I realised the silver star-shaped hair ornament was still in my hair too.  It felt like a good omen or something (I’ve become very sentimental temporarily, do forgive me).

Our honeymoon (on Lake Maggiore – its beautiful in the extreme) has been mainly spent sleeping, eating enormous ice-creams, going on cable-cars, sharing pasta dishes (Like in Lady and the Tramp) and attempting to speak Italian.  And of course, there’s been plenty of time for all sorts of splendid kinkiness.

Now we’re about to go home again (I’m writing this from our hotel’s lounge while Hywel sleeps next door) and launch into our lives as a married bondage producer couple.  I expect it’ll be similar to before in lots of ways – I find myself reaching for something profound to say, but can come up with nothing.  Except that, as always, when I think about my life with Hywel, the chances we have to engage in activities we both thought we’d never get to do, and the way we don’t have to sacrifice ‘normal’ romantic love in order to do so; I want to send a postcard back in time and tell my younger self that in 2012 everything turned out ok for me.’

We’re back home now (sorry for the jumping around in time through this blogpost) and we just went out and shot a two part photo-set for Restrained Elegance as a thank you to our Members for joining the site, which allowed us to meet in the first place.  The first part of the set is in my wedding dress, the second part is at home without it on 🙂  Here’s a sample shot – we’re editing the second half now and it’ll be live on Restrained Elegance tomorrow!

Thanks to you all as always for visiting, I’m very happy and hoping things are well with you all too.

You May Kiss The Bride!

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Oh my goodness, I need to be a better writer than I am to tell you all the things I’m thinking and feeling today.  I’m writing this in the brief, 2 day gap between getting married to Hywel (the BDM is the HDM now) and holding our reception, which is a tea party for our family and closest friends.
Our wedding day was absolutely perfect for me (I don’t want to speak for Hywel, who I’m sure will blog about it himself, but he certainly seemed very happy too).  We just had our two witnesses there, since we really wanted the smallest wedding possible.  I’ve done a fair number of bridal shoots in my career as a model (and plenty of bridle ones, of course) and I didn’t want our wedding day to feel like a performance, or like a modelling job.  Hywel was in agreement, so we just had my lovely sister, and our wonderful friend Steve, who shoots for Restrained Elegance as well.
The wedding itself was extraordinarily lovely to me, but possibly a bit boring to read about so I’ll be brief.  I was barefoot at Hywel’s request (brilliant, I thought I’d be horrifically embarrassed but actually it felt perfectly natural), I wore a dress I’d made myself, and the vows were beautiful.  I cried a bit, but not in a horrific embarrassing manner, as far as I know.  Here’s a picture Steve took right after we signed the register. 
And once it was over, we headed to a gorgeous hotel that we eat at a lot but have never stayed in.  We’d booked a suite with a four poster bed and some fabulous, usefully shaped furniture in it.  And that’s all I have to say about that 😉
So now, I’m Mrs Phillips, and I’m stupidly, impossibly happy about it.  And it’s made me think back about how we first met, so I’m going to give you a brief history in pictures;-
Here’s a shot from our first set, at my first Restrained Elegance shoot.  I’d had to pester a bit in order to shoot for RE at all, and I was determined that Hywel would like me.  At the time, I’d only done a couple of bondage shoots, and had been modelling for less than a year; hence the schoolgirl hair and the minimal approach to makeup.  I was so sorry when the shoot was over (it had passed with me in a lather of excitement, trying not to show that the whole thing was hopelessly erotic for me) and so glad when Hywel re-booked me almost immediately…
After a year or so of working together, in which we got to know each other well enough for me to confess that I really was into BDSM (I don’t think it was a great surprise to Hywel) Hywel took me, Hannah, Sabrina and Temptress Kate to France for a week’s shoot.  The pleasure of modelling for Hywel every day for an extended period was absolute heaven for me; I remember rushing my hair and makeup dreadfully, in order to be the next model in line whenever Hywel was ready for one.  Consequently, he ended up with more sets of me than anyone else, which was a bad business move for me, since in theory it meant that he wouldn’t have to re-book me for ages.  But I couldn’t help it, just as I couldn’t help fantasising about him coming to my bedroom to tie me up and spank me at night.  He didn’t, he behaved like a consummate professional.  But by now, he’d become my absolute favourite person to work with.
Later that year, Hywel booked me to work with Chanta Rose as the rigger.

Which was interesting in many ways.  Chanta is very experienced, both as a professional and as a lifestyle player.  And she’s totally comfortable with talking frankly about BDSM.  Which meant that the shoot with her made me feel more relaxed talking about my fantasies in front of other people.  I think this is what led to Hywel and me deciding to do a series called ‘Restrained Elegance Nights’ in which we explored the harder side of BDSM, which I’d not actually experienced, but was desperate to try.  We shot our ‘Long Term Bondage’ project as a result, followed by ‘Bondage Driving Test’ by which point I was struggling to keep our relationship fully professional – basically I’d begun to tell Hywel all my fantasies, and we’d play them out in front of the cameras as a way to justify what we were doing since we hadn’t negotiated an actual relationship yet.  As a result, parts of those videos make me pretty embarrassed – they’re still available to watch on Restrained Elegance but I’m uncomfortable watching something that exposes my feelings so clearly.
And then Hywel invited me to be the model for his first bondage photography tutorial.  I flew back from New York and took a taxi straight to his studio (my flight had been delayed) but once I got there, the lack of sleep made no difference whatsoever to my excitement.  Here’s a shot from a set that Merlin (who we met that day for the first time, and who’s since become a very valued member of the RE crew) directed;-
And which Steve, who we also met for the first time that day shot.  I’m afraid I behaved in a rather sluttish manner that day; being tied up and photographed by 4 people while Hywel told me what to do, stepped in to gag me, and generally took control of the whole thing, was very sexy for me indeed!
And finally, after at least 3 years of shooting together (and probably more, my maths is hideous) we made the decision to play together as well as work together.  This picture’s from the first time we shot together after we’d made that decision.
Hmmm, I don’t think my facial expression was put on for the camera.  I’m rather ashamed to say that our new arrangement made for some rather excessively sexual photo sets…
And after playing together for a few months, neither of us were happy with the parameters we’d set for ourselves, and we became a proper, real-life couple.  
And photosets of me from around that time seem to me to have a pervasive sense of happiness!
We moved out of the studio, and into a house we bought together…
And things got better and better.  Of course, our lives aren’t magically charmed, and we’re as effected by ill health, work stress, and all the real life problems as any other couple.  But I’m so happy with Hywel, and being married to him feels so perfectly right.  
And of course, being married won’t stop me also being Hywel’s slavegirl.  That’s too important to lose – we’re in the middle of working out what our new rules will be and we’ll be figuring it all out properly on honeymoon.  I’m very excited about that – the rule Hywel’s already put in place for the new married me is perfect 🙂
Here’s a picture to finish with, of the dress I made as a practice wedding dress earlier this year, just in time for our shoot in Scotland.  We’ll be shooting a set for Restrained Elegance in my real wedding dress as soon as we’re properly back at work.
So for now, thank you to our friends and supporters, who joined RE and made it possible for us to meet in the first place.  I’m sorry this wasn’t a very edgy post, I’m just full of happiness and wanted to talk about it.  Thank you for reading!

September Half-Price Sale!

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Hi All,

We’re having a half-price sale for three of our older movies this month:

Acquiesce

Normally $29.95, reduced to $14.95 for September only!

A torrid tale of metal bondage, kidnapping and naked girls held captive in outdoor prison cells for pleasure! Starring Katy Cee, Sammie B and Sophia Smith.

View Trailer,
View Stills
or download the movie now!

Amelia’s Sunday Spanking

Normally $44.95, reduced to $22.50 for September only!

Domestic discipline with a month’s worth of Amelia Jane Rutherford’s Sunday spankings recorded for posterity… Amelia has to record her misdeeds in a diary, and once a week gets spanked (and caned and punished with strap, belt and hairbrush) to modify her
behaviour and make her mend her ways.

(For those not familiar with her spanking work, Amelia Jane is Ariel’s bratty spanking alter-ego!)

View Trailer, View Stills,
or download the movie now!

Haunted

Normally $29.95, reduced to $14.95 for September only!

Holiday reunion turns into a bondage nightmare for three damsels in distress in a haunted house!

View Trailer, View Stills
or download the movie now!

(Sex) Life Doesn’t Finish At 30

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The very glamourous Micki. It is a testament to trickiness that I was wondering whose image to post, because I didn’t want a model saying “Oi are you saying I look old?”

We’ve got a few ideas in the air for new projects. Some will develop into RE updates, some into ES movies, and one or two might even end up as new websites.

One idea Ariel suggested a while back is a website featuring older women in bondage, because eventually she is going to be one and she still wants to enjoy bondage and modelling.

This is something I could really get behind, and after a flurry of fun discussions on Twitter I thought I’d mutter a few thoughts.

In the entertainment industry attractive women are generally written as aged 30 or less. There is a serious under-representation of older women unless they are playing someone’s mother. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/apr/30/julie-walters-older-actors.

Erotica and porn is no different. Most of the attractive women in mainstream porn are represented as under thirty, and if your physical age is older than that, you might have to fib to get cast. I know many models whose profile age stopped incrementing at some point, because they were worried that the work would dry up.

There are certainly sites featuring women older than 30, but they’re no longer described as “women” (without qualifier). In porn, “women” means “women below the age of 30”.

Porn sites do feature older women, but they are described with various terms which seem to me to be a bit derogatory and unsatisfying.

There’s MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck) which has a certain enthusiastic gusto but which has that same “someone’s mother” stereotype and also defines the person solely by their relationship to other people (their offspring, and the person who wants to fuck them). There’s cougar, which implies a rather predatory older woman making out with younger men, and her cousins the fox and the vixen (not to mention the Black Widow). Then there’s the granny stereotype, the trophy wife- again defining in terms of other people!

Sadly a lot of the sites which use these words are not respectful, sex positive or celebratory in tone.

I don’t think “STILL looking good for her AGE“. I think “Looking Good“.

So can we just celebrate all women? (Please let’s leave aside issues of conflation of attractiveness with value for now, OK? I’m already over-analyzing myself into a tizzy). In an ideal world we should just celebrate everyone’s sexuality equally and every sexuality should co-exist. But individual people have individual preferences, and that’s OK, too.

To build a business, you need to be tightly enough defined to be able to offer value for money to your members. So a certain degree of focus is essential to getting anywhere. It is fine to pick one thing and go for it.

Why not just broaden the model pool for Restrained Elegance?

Good question. We have worked with models from ages ranging from twenties to fifties, but the average age is solidly in the mid-twenties. RE already features a broader range of BDSM activities than many bondage websites.

Frankly in a recession I am wary of mucking about with Restrained Elegance. I know that’s a bit timid. RE does a good job of what it does right now. So let’s spare my worry beads and not muck around with it, let’s do something new.

I’d like to run a website which glories in how awesome and fun BDSM is for women outside the default porn age range. To do so will necessarily mean confronting and contradicting the “sexy leading lady = younger than 30” stereotype. Which probably means positive discrimination in favour of models whose physical age is 30+.

I hope our prospective models will not regard it as insulting if we invite them to model for a new site where the average age of the characters, and hence of the models we book to play those characters, is 30+.

(It will not preclude their appearing on RE too).

I hope prospective customers will agree that the sexiness of women in their thirties or more is well worth celebrating and that it sounds like a fun thing to watch and be part of.

My personal taste has always been for elegance and sophistication rather than wide eyed innocence and ingenue-ness. Power exchange seems much more interesting when there’s plenty of power to be exchanged, and what 18-year-old innocent has power?

So writing roles for older characters would be right up my street. My photographic style is glowing and flattering because of the way I like to light. The way we approach photoshopping is not intended to make the models look younger, which in the circumstances would be nothing short of insulting. It is just intended to make her look like herself on a good day, so there’s truthfulness there. And I hope it is something the models would find fun to do.

I hope I’m not letting go of trade secrets by saying that the lady I find sexiest in the world is not in her twenties either 🙂

All of which is why I think the idea could be an exciting one for me, because I think I could do it WELL. For me that’s the most important thing.

Is it something you’d like to see?