We just got back from a week shooting on location in sunny Spain, at one of our very favourite places: private naturist retreat Finca Los Etera

As always, hostess Nikki made us very welcome. One of the best things about shooting at the Finca is that we don’t have to do the catering. I love my job, but location shoots involve long days to get the nice light in morning and evening, followed by a strict schedule of data management tasks to clear off all the cards, back up everything three times and clear up ready for the next day.

So adding cooking for the group on top of that can actually run us a bit ragged! Hooray for the Finca, and for hostess Nikki’s new chef (conveniently also called Nikki). We were treated to scrumptious home cooked lasagne, vegetable stuff rolled chicken breasts, Adalusian tray baked Mediterranean delights and melting chocolate fondants to die for.

I wish I’d taken photos of the week’s best culinary triumph though- an experimental attempt to combine pavlova with banoffie pie that was so good I had four slices! (It is OK, running up and down stairs in 40 degree heat carrying 20 kg lighting rigs burns calories aplenty. Honest.)

Of course, we didn’t really go for the food.

Well, not ONLY for the food.

What we really went for was a playground of dusty spanish hills, a gorgeous swimming pool, the Finca itself, the light at sunset and the freedom to roam around in the private grounds to our heart’s content.

We’d packed the car full of ropes, whips, chains, shackles, leg irons, yokes, cameras, tripods, reflectors, flash packs, heads, umbrellas, stands, microphones and the rest and took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander, then drove down the length of Spain. It is a long way, but we tried doing it by air and the baggage restrictions were too serious.

This time it was a delight to be able to take a lot more metalwork. In fact I think about half the sets were metal, which made a pleasant change- location trips are usually a bit rope-heavy by necessity, because rope heavy means packing light.

We also shot the vast majority of sets as nude ones (or nude plus accessories- I don’t think a pearl necklace really counts?)

That was very pleasing- it is rare to be shooting somewhere where the models are happy to be nude all day!

Many kudos and thanks to Ariel and Katy for being such troopers this week- bright sunlight brings its own challenges, especially when I decided that what the light really needed was a huge 2x2m gold reflector bouncing sunlight directly into the eyes. The glare is appalling, but the quality of light it gives is absolutely magical. I love it. The girls hated it, but of course being seasoned pros they were happy to work with it to get the best results. We ended up doing a lot of counting-in “3 2 1 shoot” so they could open their eyes just at the last moment.

Many kudos also to the wonderful Kate, who stepped in at the last minute to shoot and rig on the shoot. There’s no way we could have got half what we did without her- you can see her rigging away on some of the samples and behind the scenes shots below!

As always, the full sets will take a while to process. (In fact I’m still backing them up- a Hasselblad and a RED generate a hell of lot of data, typically 1 TB or so from a week). But in the meantime I’ve processed a few samples and behind the scenes shots.

RestrainedElegance.com members can view these as a bonus set today (including the full sized JPEGs). If you’re not a member, here are a few samples to give you a taste of some of the things we got up to: