We’re all really good friends and we can’t wait for the day when COVID recedes and we can book our next location shoot together. Two of the photographers from that day became regulars on location shoots and you have seen reams of their work on the site: Merlin and Steve. I’m very proud of that, five out of five! UPDATE: I hadn’t realised because I’d lost contact, but Ariel says she still shoots with the other participant from the workshop as well. I gather his studio is a technological marvel!) One is a regular photographic client of Ariel’s, who swaps techie nerdy info with me on a regular basis (the last time I saw him he came to the house so we could use his new colour meter on all my LED lights, so we could investigate what sort of spectrum each variety was putting out. So I ran a bondage tutorial workshop, and four out of the five participants are people still very much around. And despite quitting my job as a lecturer, the urge to learn and teach and swap skills is very strong. I’ve always preferred collaborating, working in a collegiate manner with models, photographers, riggers, make-up artists and fans. And she remains the undefeated queen of hairties). The habit of making sure we’ve got all the closeups and detail shots at the end of the set is hers. “Kate shots” entered our vocabulary (a “Kate shot” is one shot through things. She set the pattern for the very best of the collaborations that are the reason Restrained Elegance is still around. Two decades on and she is one of the unsung heroes of the UK fetish production scene, collaborating widely, rigging and photographing and appearing on camera regularly despite the ups and downs of life. I remember driving her back across town and talking about what was happening. I remember 9/11 not just for the horrific attack on the twin towers, but also for the fact that I was shooting that day with Temptress Kate. The little website I’d launched to fund my expensive models-and-bondage-gear-and-lighting-and-lenses hobby, that I thought might possibly pay for a little holiday on top of costs some day, was making twice as much money as my day job as a lecturer. In the next couple of years, sales exploded. Sitting here twenty years later with a fifty-something-year-old’s cynicism, it is tempted to snark “and it was never going to be so easy to sell a membership again”. And I’d sold a membership before I’d even known it had gone live. But the processing company had got everything done a bit earlier, and the site was open. Sitting in there in the sunshine with one of the mega-stars of the bondage industry, I showed off the site design to her and got a surprise – there was an active membership! The site hadn’t been due to go live until the 4th, when I would have been back home. The motel had an internet cafe of sorts, and I’d just told Stacy about the little website I was launching that month for which the photos I’d just shot of her were intended. After the shoot we stepped outside and were sitting at the pool in the cheap motel (with vast rooms) I’d booked near LAX. On that particular day I was using the holiday to do a bondage photoshoot with Stacy Burke. I was at the end of a professional trip to the USA as a particle physicist, and I had tacked on a few days holiday at the end of the trip before I flew home. I’ve got a terrible memory, but I remember where I was on 1st April 2001 very clearly.
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