Category Archives: SilkSoles.com

Where are we on customs?

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Apologies to the ten or so people waiting on me for a reply on custom video commissions. Just wanted to post a general note as to where we are with them.

All 2021 Restrained Elegance custom slots were filled, the customs have all been shot, edited and have now been delivered. If you’re still waiting on something from me, get in touch because I’ve sent out the links to you and they should already be with you.

We have a small number of custom slots with Ariel (and me) still left available for shoots in December which she is producing. Contact her via AskArielStudio.com if you want to grab one for 2021.

We’re due to do the last big shoot of the year this week with a visiting star model but I don’t want to jinx it by saying who or taking custom requests.

I prefer to work with someone a couple of times to learn their comfort zones and limits before I accept customs with them anyway, and I’ve got MORE than enough ideas of my own to shoot with her.

This is the last in a run of shoots over the last few months trying to squeeze a year’s worth of shoots into 3 months, which we’ve succeeded at really well- we’ve shot over a hundred photosets and 70+ videos (some of which are an hour long) since the summer and I’m blown away by how spectacular some of the performances have been. A lot of us have missed working with creative collaborators. I haven’t shot this many sets in this short a space of time since the very early days of the site, when everything was quicker to shoot because I didn’t know what I was doing and had neither the skill nor the equipment to do it properly.

This shooting schedule has been hectic, which is one of the reasons I’ve been putting off thinking about 2022 customs. The other is that we don’t know what the COVID situation is going to be like over the winter. I’ve booked the first big shoots of 2022 for April and May because I’m reasonably confident they will happen unless the situation deteriorates drastically. It’s a lot easier to schedule one model coming here for three or four days or a location shoot with two or three models for a week in a controlled environment where we can get food delivered and function as a unit than it is to figure out the usual custom-friendly one day here, one day there shoots with lots of different models.

Since I’ve got BIG plans of my own for those first two big shoots in the calendar for 2022, I don’t have many free timeslots for them. I’ll offer some “lucky dip: five elements you choose, the rest we improvise around it” timeslots for the first big location shoot nearer the time when I am more confident that we’ll be able to do it.

What I hope and plan is to do some smaller shoots with other models sooner than that, COVID situation permitting.These shoots with other models will either work on the lucky dip customs, or on the basis that you will have to cover at least half a day’s filming with the model you want, more if she is coming from a long way away. Natalia Forrest might be able to get here for an afternoon, but Penny Lee needs to come for at least two shoot days to make the drive worth her time.

So once I’ve got through this week’s big shoot and caught up a bit, I’ll start to put together the 2022 schedule and post requests for customs with particular models. The more requests we get, the sooner I’ll be able to schedule them to come and shoot. I will reply to everyone waiting for me to get back to them once this big shoot is done, too.

Cheers, Hywel

A quick taste of 2022… and we’re on TV again!

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Hi Everyone

With the COVID situation here being much improved because of the vaccines, we’ve been powering through trying to shoot as much of next year’s content as we can in the last month or so. Here are a few quick tasters plucked from the back of the camera to hint at some of the awesome bondage videos and photosets you’ll be able to enjoy as a Restrained Elegance member in 2022.

As always, thank you for your continuing support. For the last 20 years we’ve been able to build a dream and a place to share that dream – the only reason we can do it is your kind support.

Ariel and I are in the very fortunate position that we are both professional BDSM performers and producers, we don’t have kids in school or day jobs and our friends and families are very liberal and supportive. So when the call comes around to represent the BDSM community in various TV shows and so forth, my feeling is “If not us, then who?” (Ariel’s feeling is “Pick meeeeeeeeee! I want to be famous!” of course!)

Which means we’re on TV again tonight: “Sex Actually” with Alice Levine, UK channel 4, 10 pm. It’ll doubtless be available on-demand too. You may have to use a VPN to pretend to be in the UK to stream it from other countries. I’m going to be peeking out at the TV from behind the sofa, hoping the program makers have been kind to us… and I dare say Ariel will be live-tweeting along to it. Join us!

Cheers, Hywel

Limited Number Of Lucky Dip Custom Slots Available

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Hi All

Unless the COVID situation here changes drastically, we have our first multi-model location shoot since lockdown in two weeks’ time.

We have decided to offer a limited number of “Lucky Dip” custom slots. These are customs where you get to specify five elements, and leave the rest to us. For example a two-girl(1) video where the girls start off dressed as secretaries(2) then get kidnapped made to strip naked(3) and locked in metal bondage(4) for gag training(5). Or a clip where the model plays a fantasy sorcerer(1) who tries to summon a demon(2) but it goes wrong and the demon ends up tying her in a hogtie(3). We get to see lots of close-up shots of her bare feet(4) and she should be ballgagged(5).

These customs are great for us because it lets us know what elements of the story really matter to you whilst letting us improvise and get inspiration from the location and bounce off each others’ performances without having a totally rigid script to stick to.

They’re great for you as you make sure you get the important bits exactly as you want them, and get to be pleasantly surprised by lots of extra hot action as well.

As an added bonus, they’re cheaper than usual customs because they are easier and quicker and more fun for us to produce!

COVID permitting the models we have available are Ariel Anderssen, Chloe Toy and Faye Taylor. If you want one of them specifically, or you want a multi-model custom, be sure to specify that as one of your five elements. Otherwise let us decide who plays which role in your film and see what we come up with. If for some reason we can’t fulfil it (eg your chosen model tests positive for COVID and can’t make the shoot) you will be refunded of course.

Customs will run to their natural length – we promise at least 10 minutes but usually ends up longer if we are having fun improvising the storyline on the day. Photosets will be at least 100 photos. Choosing photos or videos doesn’t count as one of your five elements.

Price is just 250 UK pounds per custom… for sure the cheapest way to get a multi-girl custom with some of the world’s top bondage models. Payment in advance by bank transfer only, email webmaster@restrainedelegance.com for payment details with the five-element description of your custom and secure your space now. We have very limited spaces, don’t delay or you’ll miss out.

Give us your inspiration, tell us the details you really want to see, and let us surprise and delight you!

Cheers, Hywel

Ariel’s Blues Reinstated and General News

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Hi Everyone

Ariel’s Blues

Somehow I managed to create a duplicate of the “Ariel’s Blues” set in the RE archives last week when I added the link to the shopping cart page for the set. this resulted in a php error trying to access the set. Should now be fixed, apologies, many thanks to John for drawing it to my attention!

The first cake Ariel even ate in my presence. Far from the last, it turned out.

OnlyFans

In general news, you may be aware of an upheaval going on in the internet adult industry at the moment. Mastercard, under pressure from various less-than-honest “anti-trafficking” groups, have put in place restrictive new rules. Fortunately, this should not affect us here on Restrained Elegance and Silk Soles – as luck would have it our record-keeping and model release system is already largely compliant, and we don’t have the issue with third-party posted content that platforms like Clips4Sale and OnlyFans have.

(On a strict reading of the rules, they would have to employ human beings to check EVERY bit of content and in particular EVERY live stream to make sure it was not in violation of the rules – something that’s obviously impossible unless they are going to hire 10% of the population as full-time porn watchers. This is a standard not demanded of any other platform – YouTube or Facebook can’t manage it with some of the biggest businesses in the world, so sites like Clips4Sale and OnlyFans clearly cannot.)

Clips4Sale have behaved pretty well during this. PLENTY of information, lots of support, clear guidance for producers and performers and reassurance on things like privacy policies (because we don’t want to be uploading the full ID’s of every performer we’ve ever worked with without some assurances that their data security is up to it- in fact if producers in some countries do that they’ll probably be in violation of their local data protection laws). I’m spending this week uploading all the recent content to Clips4Sale before the deadline to file ID and model releases for each new clip, so that I will have a sensible workflow going forward without a huge overhead for legacy stuff.

OnlyFans on the other hand have catastrophically blown it in terms of their handling of the situation. Creators found out about it from OnlyFans announcing stuff to the press, not to them. They then issued some contradictory statements, finishing with an amazingly gas-lighting tweet about how they value sex workers – which is pretty hypocritical given that they have NEVER promoted any sex workers on their twitter feed, ever. Their new rules are also much more stringent when in comes to sexual content – masturbation will be out, for example. Needless to say, that nukes a hell of a lot of models’ OnlyFans content. So there’s a huge upheaval going on – Ariel is deciding which platforms to transition to whilst making sure she delivers everything she promised to her current OF subscribers. I know many of our other regular models are doing likewise.

Please support the models while they make these transitions- if you subscribe to their OnlyFans, please stay as a subscriber until they know what platforms they will be transferring to, then follow them there.

One thing that IS positive about this is that I think MasterCard, OnlyFans, and the dishonest evangelicals pushing the “trafficked women” narrative have been taken by surprise by the fact that 95% of the press coverage is supportive of the sex workers. That’s not what happened when they pulled the plug on PornHub’s billing and I don’t think they were expecting it. There are a few differences this time around. The first is that PornHub facilitated piracy on an industrial scale with notorously poor standards for getting it taken down, no requirement for verification for uploads (because they pretended we were all coolz uploading our own personal sex lives, rather than it mostly being pirated stuff). OnlyFans on the other hand has been requiring proper verification for all content uploaders since day one. Second, PornHub was rightly synonymous with the tackiest uploaded pirated porn, whereas OnlyFans is all about empowered sex workers sharing their own content – and everybody knows it. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the journalists writing about this stuff made contacts with sex workers during the PornHub push, and so have people to talk to to get our side of the story. The evangelicals are not getting it all their own way this time, because everyone can see that what they are doing is nuking the safe space that sex workers have built into a multi-BILLION dollar platform. OnlyFans is famous for girls getting their tits out and getting paid for it, frankly, which is VERY different from the cesspit of PornHub. Let’s hope we can fight back this time.

https://onlyfans.com/arielanderssen

Hasselblads plural

For the last decade or more, my Hasselblad has been the workhorse camera for the site. It perfected the “RE look” with very clean, crisp images, studio lighting, and bold colours. For the last five years or more I’ve been experimenting with adding other looks to my armoury, but the core aesthetic of the site is definitely the one that culminated in the Hasselblad (after 15 years of trying to perfect it with Canon dSLRs).

A couple of weeks ago I did a REALLY STUPID THING: I shouldered the Hasselblad’s rucksack without having done the zips up first. The camera landed nose-first on a concrete floor, and the 120 mm macro lens BOUNCED. Shudder. This kit originally cost me more than my car. Amazingly, it seems to have survived apart from a badly bent metal lens hood which took most of the impact.

But it made me realise that I no longer had a backup for the core RE look: I’ve sold all the old Canon dSLRs, and the Sonys excel at stuff like available light and shallow depth of field but just never quite achieve the crispness and purity of colour that the Hasselblad manages effortlessly. Realising this properly gave me the shakes – if that had happened on day one of a location trip, I might have really been in trouble.

Fortunately, there’s a happy ending. Hasselblad kit lasts forever (even if you drop it onto a concrete floor, seemingly) but its value does not. So I was able to acquire second-hand an H3Dii-50 (50 megapixels to complement Dave the Hasselblad’s 31 but with a faster sensor because of microlenses) and 80 mm and 120 mm lenses. It cost me £4000 which is a lot – the same as a new Sony mirrorless body- but which suddenly seems like an absolute BARGAIN compared with the original retail cost, which would have been ten times that! I must say, if you are a photographer and you like the crisp-clean-saturated look for studio work, go buy a second-hand Hasselblad kit. It won’t do what your modern mirrorless will do (eg Autofocus is really slow by comparison and you need to use focus-and-recompose – no fancy face recognition here) but for this one job, it still reigns supreme. I’m very much happier writing my kit list for our next location shoot knowing that this time I will have a proper spare.

First shots with the backup Hasselblad

Shoots!

Amidst all this upheaval, we’ve also tentatively resumed shoots with external models. We’ve just shot with Charlie Ten and Kitty Quinzell, and have more shoots coming up, COVID permitting.

Site revamp delayed

One thing I must apologise for is that all of this has delayed RE’s much-needed site revamp. I have a working version of the members’ home page in a new layout, but to be honest I’m not happy with it. It solves some of the current issues but to my mind introduces some new ones, and I stalled, not knowing how to solve those.

So plan B, once the current upheaval calms down a bit: I’m going update the current layout to remove some of the most egregious problems like the limited full-width display where content gets lost in the middle on a really big screen, and streamline and simplify some of the menu options. That will give me time to experiment with other layouts and see if I can come up with something that feels like an all-around improvement, rather than something which swaps current limitations for a bunch of new ones.

Right. Back to work uploading stuff to Clips4Sale before the deadline there.

Cheers, Hywel

Not restarting custom video commissions just yet

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Hi Everyone

Just a quick message to explain why I’m not restarting custom video commissions just yet.

One thing I really hate is not delivering something I have promised. It stresses me out to have money in my account for a shoot that hasn’t happened, even worse if the shoot then has to be postponed.

Therefore I don’t want to take on even the most relaxed of custom video commissions until I’m more confident that I will
be able to deliver them. The COVID situation in the UK is still uncertain. England is due to open up completely
next week, but if the experience of the Netherlands is anything to go by, they might be forced to reconsider in short
order. Welsh regulations are remain more cautious.

Many models are in the partially-vaccinated age group, and even in double-vaccinated people if you get COVID you can be ill for a while. All of which means that I think it is wiser not to take on the additional stress of custom videos until we have the general production shoots running smoothly.

In the meantime, most of the models are taking on customs themselves – they may not be able to do full Restrained Elegance bondage videos, but you might be able to commission something fun directly with them.

I’d like to be able to welcome the new commissions with open arms and get back to shooting fabulous stuff for you. (It does feel daft to be turning down money!) But it is more sensible to concentrate on shooting regular RE and Silk Soles content while the situation remains so unpredictable and will save me stress if shoots do have to get rearranged.

We are of course happy to shoot customs with me and Ariel, as we have been doing throughout the pandemic. Please contact us via https://www.askarielstudio.com to commission something!

Cheers, Hywel