Hi All,
The archive updates for SilkSoles run out on 17th August when all the sets from the first incarnation of the site will be have been added. So… no extra archive updates after that, there’s nothing to update with! 🙂
Cheers, Hywel.
We just finished a very fun few days of shooting. First we had feisty Faye Taylor visit us then a return visit of the gorgeous Penny Lee. Here’s a few sample shots and video grabs hot off the camera.
Disappointingly, Dave the Hasselblad decided to go on strike towards the end of the day shooting with Faye (his shutter release button stopped focussing, then stopped working entirely). Another rest cure in sunny Elstree is in his future I think. So we boldly carried on shooting with the backup Canon 7D, a camera which I’ve never really grown to love but which really saved my bacon this time! 🙂
I’ve just sold the last two old Panasonic video cameras on eBay and am wonderful what to buy next. Very, very tempted by a gimbal rig for video. Also tempted by a Panasonic GH4, mostly for video but also as a lightweight backup stills camera.
Shooting with the 7D again has certainly made me appreciate the need for a backup stills camera, and also reminded me how flexible a photographic tool something like a 7D plus 18-135 mm STM IS lens is for general shooting.
I love the images from the Hasselblad and the RED, but they are specialist tools. There’s a lot to be said for owning one camera which you can just turn on and shoot in almost any conditions shy of total darkness and get SOMETHING useable out…
Instead of buying a super-sexu new anything, what I actually bought was £2400 worth of Synology boxes and 4 TB hard drives, because Dave and Lady Scarlet have filled up my current 32 TB of data store already. This is not a very exciting thing to have to buy!
Hywel.
Oh and in case you missed them here are some shots of Hannah Claydon from last week:
Fortunately (given that I’ve now filled up all my 32 TB of data store!) we now have a break from shooting for a few weeks, which will give us time to prep the photos and edit the videos. So RE and SS members will be seeing the results very soon!
Hi Everyone!
Our house move went well, finally! It was well worth the wait (and worth the dings and dents the over-enthusiastic removal guys put into the plaster on the stairs) as we now have a splendid Georgian mansion to play in!
Well, it isn’t really a mansion, but owing the bizarrely distorted nature of property prices in this country, even though it cost LESS than the house we moved from, it has almost twice the floor area… including some pretty interesting spaces for shooting in. A mini-mansion, maybe?
Apologies if you’ve been waiting for email replied from me. We only got broadband a few days ago. I’ve been keeping up with the most urgent customer service emails on my phone, but people needing long answers please bear with me- I’ve got a backlog of 50 flagged emails each of which probably need 30+ minutes to compose a reply. I promise I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!
I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have a new home for ourselves and for the site. Although Ariel has a go on her blog.
It is in a quieter bit of the country so we may be able to shoot outdoors more- we might even be able to use our back garden if we plant a few more things to block the view from the canal towpath.
The old house was nice- big for the price in the area we were in, but the rooms didn’t have all that much personality. Not something that can be said of the new place.
We’re looking forward to our first run of shoots in July with some of RE’s fave models, but we couldn’t resist doing our first shoot already… we had a long custom video shoot from a member who had not only asked us to produce a 30+ minute epic, but had kindly paid for a custom fitted pony-girl harness and lots of other interesting bondage gear for Ariel to wear, including blackout contact lenses (much more effective than a blindfold, according to Ariel).
We shot the film with the help of our new kinky neighbour, Michael Stamp from Bars and Stripes– they bought a house nearby after learning that we were moving to the area, and because theirs wasn’t quite such a crazy place, they actually moved a few weeks before we did.
Anyway, the video is nearly ready, and it turned out to be almost an hour long, so we’ve decided it will be the first Elegance Studios video from the new house. Watch this space… and here are a few teaser stills to give you an idea what we’ve been up to!
Cheers, Hywel
Hi Everyone,
Whee! It has taken months, but we just exchanged contracts on our new house today, and will be moving at the end of next week!
We’ll be saying goodbye to the crowded south east of England and moving to mid-Wales. The crazy property prices mean that we’re able to afford a weird old house with lots of character which we love but which we also think will make a fabulous film studio for Restrained Elegance, Silk Soles and Elegance Studios.
Although this has been in the works for ages, the actual move is now pretty rushed and last-minute. We will likely not have internet access at the new house for some while, and mobile phone reception is a bit dodgy there too. So please bear with us if we take longer getting back to you for a while. The sites are all queued up with updates, of course, we just may take a while to get back to emails etc..
Wish us luck!
Hywel & Ariel
Hi All!
We’re proud to announce the launch of our new project: Mean Girls!
This is quite a departure for us. As you’ll probably know, this site is run by me, Hywel Phillips, and by Ariel Anderssen, my lovely wife. We met shooting for the sites and we are a lifestyle male-dom and female-sub couple as well as being a professional bondage producer/photographer and fetish/spanking model.
Neither of us is a switch. For Ariel, professionally, this is actually a bit of an issue. As a six foot one leggy blonde with icy blue eyes and a patrician received-pronunciation English accent, people keep trying to hire her to be the domme.
Unfortunately (from a professional point of view), she is SO not a switch that she can’t even turn it on and act it. The dom is generally the one who controls the scene and all she wants to do is to stop it and go back to being the sub and say “Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!” a lot.
When she’s had to be the dom in scenes unexpectedly at shoots I’ve sometimes had to put her back together again when she gets back home.
It turns out that there’s one exception, and it involves talking. As I frequently tease her, Ariel’s quite fond of talking. Actually, she has a passion for conversation, analysing the nuances and finer points of conversation etiquette.
It turns out that so long as she doesn’t actually have to do the things she is talking about, her passion for talking can get the better of her deep-seated instinct to submit.
She found this out when a photographer asked her to shoot a domly monologue to camera one day. With only the camera to dominate, suddenly the flood-gates were unleashed and out came a whole bunch of mean girl characters- snooty countesses, stern headmistresses, strict bosses.
Because of the aforementioned passion for conversation, allied with classical training as an actor, her height and her accent, suddenly she transformed into a fem domme diva. It’s not totally without precedent, some of these characters have come out in RE videos before. It’s just that they usually get their just desserts and get tied up in the video!
Bizarrely, I find these domly monologues very sexy.
I think because I’m secure enough in my dominance that I hear the verbal humiliation she’s pouring out on the poor camera, and think “That’s cute. I think I’ll take my time to really savour breaking you and making you my sex slave. All these terrible things you are saying are going to happen to you, and many more besides.” It’s like cat-and-mouse foreplay.
The net upshot of which is that when she got home from these shoots I was very interested. The photographer was not intending them for publication, at least for the moment, but I thought Ariel’s Mean Girl monologues were far too sexy to leave undiscovered. So we decided to record some ourselves… and here they are!
So if fem-domme intrigues you, or you already know you love dominant icy blondes, or if (like me) you think it is sexy to see Ariel strutting her stuff before the inevitable takedown… why not have a look?
I’ve uploaded the first three with trailers and framegrabs to the new Elegance Studios Mean Girls Monologues section.
We’d LOVE to know what you think!
