The (New and Improved) Loving Dominant (32 page)

Sadly, BDSM doesn’t have that sort of history to fall back upon. The earliest still-existent organization is TES (The Eulenspiegel Society), and it dates only to the 1970s. Those that went before, like the loose confederation of gay motorcycle clubs that has become known as “The Old Guard” and social/sexual groups like Hellfire, weren’t big on producing policies and procedures manuals. People can guess, but often the guesses seem to be more based on wish fulfillment and projection rather than objective research. I’m so much more comfortable being told that, “These are our protocols, and we’re comfortable with them,” than, “This is going to be a genuine old guard induction ceremony.” But then, that’s just me.

Protocol doesn’t have to have the weight of history behind it. It needs only to touch the souls of those involved and speak to their needs.

Saving the Scene on Film

Head back, mouth open, every muscle standing out in bold relief, few things in this world are more beautiful than a submissive in the middle of a session. It is little wonder that most of us have dabbled in photography to make some of their beauty ours forever. The sad truth is we often manage to capture little of the reality and none of the fantasy. The pictures come out stiff and unreal or technically flawed, and they serve only as souvenirs to jog our memories.

What went wrong? Probably several things.

The most common errors start with too little preparation and expecting too much. We accept that the keys to a good BDSM session are preparation and control. Nothing will break a mood faster than the dominant digging through a set of drawers muttering imprecations while searching for a riding crop or discovering that that chain won’t reach this hook.

If you simply pick up a camera for a grab shot, that is what you will get – a grab shot with little to redeem it. Surprisingly for some, the more expensive the camera the more likely this will be true. Expensive camera are considerably more versatile than cheap ones, but they are more demanding and less tolerant of sloppy technique. My Nikon F has literally thousands of possibilities for wrong settings on the controls.

The key to good photos is planning.

You should set aside a session for photography, arrange the room for it and decide the activities that will yield the most photogenic results. Choreograph the activities so you know everything that will be happening when you take the picture. Photographers call this process pre-visualization.

Check what will be in the background. Remember you are creating a mood and don’t want distractions. I remember one shot a friend took showing his wife in full suspension. Truly lovely, except, in the background was a crayon sketch their child had made at school that they had stuck on the bedroom wall. It was so incongruous that, instead of appreciation, the picture produced giggles. Digital cameras are superior to conventional cameras in preventing this sort of thing because, presenting the image on a screen instead of a viewfinder, they invite you to look at the image as a whole rather than what you are focusing upon.

One of my pictures has a shelf that seems to be growing out of the side of the subject’s head. The impact of a picture can be spoiled by such a little thing as clutter on a bedside table. Even professionals forget to check the background in the heat of the moment, and we do expect these moments to be heated. This sort of thing can be dealt with using a program like PhotoShop, but how much easier it is to simply not to make the mistake in the first place?

After you have gotten rid of the distractions, consider what kind of background props you could use to enhance the mood. Whips and chains on the walls are nice, of course, but don’t forget the power of symbolism. One of my favorite shots shows one of my submissives, arms spread wide and chained to rings in opposite walls with horizontal chains.

Her back is toward the camera, and she is facing a blank wall on which a crucifix hangs.

I have a strong prejudice toward faces. My greatest turn-on is to watch the expression on my submissive’s face. Therefore my camera tends to dwell on that part of the anatomy rather than “where the action is.”

Don’t overlook lighting. It can add immensely to the impact. It helps a lot to have a good camera with manual controls or at least a manual override. However, good results can be had with automatic cameras if you put a little effort into tricking them. You don’t need an expensive set of lights, but it helps. You can get clip-on reflectors at the local discount store and photoflood bulbs at a photographic supply store. A note of warning: make sure the reflectors are solid metal. Photofloods are hot, and silver-coated plastic won’t stand it. For the same reason, handle them with care.

Silhouettes are dramatic, and thanks to apartment owners insisting on white walls, they are easy to obtain. Simply put the lights so they shine on the walls instead of the submissive. If you don’t have a white wall, tacking up a white sheet will do. Try putting a bare bulb, just an ordinary lamp without the shade, behind the subject. This will create a glow around the darkened body and highlight the hair.

Dramatic, contrasted lighting really sets the mood for bondage. Put your lights at right angles to the camera and outside the camera’s field of view. If you are using an automatic camera, put something between the lights and the camera. Some of the light sensors on automatics have a wider angle than the camera lens and can be confused by an off-camera “hot spot.” You can also get really dramatic lighting effects by using a focused source of light like a slide projector.

Another source of contrasted light is candles. Although they are relatively dim, you can use a tripod and the bulb setting on a manual camera to keep the shutter open. This takes experimentation, but it is well worth it. An advantage of bondage is, if you do it right, the subject isn’t going to move during the exposure.

To soften the effect of candle light without overpowering it completely, use an electronic flash and a slow shutter speed. By keeping the shutter open for a relatively long time, you capture the image of the candle flame, and the instantaneous blast of light from the flash fills in the shadows. Again, a bit of experimentation is needed, but the effects are well worth it.

Another interesting source of light is a strobe. I don’t mean the electronic flash unit that has replaced flashbulbs. I’m talking about the blink, blink, blink flasher that was made popular in the ’60s that is still sold by places like Radio Shack.

The beauty of this kind of dramatic lighting is that the flashes are so short that it is virtually impossible for the individual pictures to be blurred. Unlike candlelight, strobe light is most dramatic when the subject is in violent motion because one exposure can capture a number of images depending on how often the light flashes. Care should be used when employing strobe lights, although. They have been known to cause seizures.

We all want to be part of the action, but leaving the camera and entering the picture has its own set of problems. Ideally, you can leave the camera in another’s hands. This will yield incalculably better pictures as the camera is being controlled by a conscious eye and an aware brain. Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of thing you can ask of the helpful next-door neighbor (unless your neighbor is infinitely more fun than mine). Lacking a third body, most people turn to some sort of remote triggering device, and they are deeply disappointed in the results.

It seems too simple to set the camera on a tripod, step into the action, and produce an erotic masterpiece. In reality, using a remote-triggered camera for anything more complex than a simple, “OK, everybody, look at the camera and scream” calls for considerable thought and planning if the result is even to approach acceptable standards. While it is difficult to mix a real BDSM session with photography, it is almost impossible to mix a session with remote photography. If you want to use a remote camera, plan a photo session which will include BDSM rather than a BDSM session which will include photography.

There are several ways to trigger a camera indirectly, like self-timers, air releases and wireless releases. The selftimer is the most common and the most difficult to get good pictures with. You set the timer, actuate it, run around into the action and wait for the timer to run out. This is a bigger mood wrecker than dead batteries in a vibrator.

There is simply no way to maintain the rhythm of a session while fiddling with a camera, running around and posing. To make this worse, you can’t really know when the timer will run out. This makes shooting anything other than a frozen tableau an exercise in frustration. Take a whipping; out of the five seconds it takes to take a stroke, only one shot or less is of any photographic value. Factor in Murphy’s Law, and you might as well be playing poker with a guy named “Doc.”

An air release is a squeeze bulb connected by a thin, flexible tube to a plunger on the camera. Squeezing the bulb causes the plunger to trigger the camera. Some electronic cameras have replaced the air-operated plunger with a solenoid fired by a button you can hold in your hand, but the principle is the same. This has the advantage that you know exactly when the camera is going to go off. The disadvantage is that the tube or wire may show up in the picture. Wireless releases work in a similar fashion, except that radio waves or infrared light replace the wire.

As important as planning is in a conventional photo session, it is an order of magnitude more important when you are using a remote camera. One of the most common errors is to cut your own head off or lose an arm to a picture border.

Use the submissive as a registration point and plan what you are going to do around that point. Don’t forget to allow for perspective. If you are going to be in front of the registration point, you will be larger and more likely to be cut off. This problem is heightened if you are using a wide angle lens, which amplifies perspective. The easiest thing is to stay in the same plane, the same distance from the camera, as the submissive or to get behind him or her.

I also block out the frame. Before the session I set up several camera locations and mark where the tripod touches the floor with masking tape. Then, sighting through the camera, I have the submissive mark the floor at the edges of the camera’s frame (what it can “see”) with strips of tape. That way, when I have set up the camera at one of the marked locations, I can just look down at the floor to see if I am in the horizontal part of the frame.

Blocking the vertical parts are more difficult. This is why I suggest you remain in the same plane with the submissive. By remembering where his or her head is in reference to the edge of the frame, you can judge how you are fitting. I also use a spare light stand. By putting it where I intend to stand with the top of the lamp where my head will be, I can adjust the camera so I will be completely in the frame when I take my position replacing the light stand.

Whether we are part of the picture or our camera dwells on the magnificence of submission, the beauty we create in our submissives can be ours forever. The camera is a natural adjunct to chains, whips and the erotic stimulation we lavish on those we control.

Once the pictures have been taken, there is the temptation to show them around. There is an old saying, “Don’t write anything or take a picture of anything you don’t want shown in open court.” I’m not that paranoid, but I respect the sentiment.

This is where being part of a group can be valuable. You can bring prints to a meeting or a munch (if the rules allow it), pass them around, bask in the admiration and retrieve them for safe storage.

Online is a whole different matter. There is no such thing as “sharing” electronically. It’s always “giving away.” Once you have sent an electronic image to anyone you have effectively lost all control of it. From a legal point of view, you still retain the copyright and theoretically have complete control over how the picture is used. You also have a complete right to go through an intersection when the light is green, not that it does you much good if the other car doesn’t feel like respecting that right. Depending unthinkingly on either right, can leave your life a pile of smoking wreckage.

To make things worse, as I said, in the section about going from online to face-to-face, you don’t really know someone until you’ve met them face-to-face. The “best friend” you have online might be quite different from how you imagine him or her. About the best “bad news” you can get is to discover that your photo is now on someone else’s website or in an advertisement with another person’s name attached to it.

That’s the best news.

What happens if your name is attached to the photo?

Sadly, there isn’t much you can do. Oh, you can sue. That’s expensive, and worse, it requires an explicit admission from you in public that this, indeed, is your photograph. Newspapers and television news programs provide a valuable service to the community, but they also have a ravenous appetite for trivial scandal. In the late 196/, Andy Warhol promised everyone fifteen minutes of fame. Do you want this to be yours?

The best way to prevent it is to be careful with what you do with photographs, particularly in this digital age.

A graphics designer friend of mine suggested a unique approach that has the added fillip of embarrassing the person who’s trying to embarrass you. I’m not certain of how well it would really work, but I’ll pass it on with a chuckle. Before she sends out any pictures of herself, she runs them through her computer, carefully cuts off the head and pastes it back on, a pixel or two out of register. It’s her plan that, should any of the pictures come back to haunt her, she’ll announce it’s a fake and point out that the head was “obviously” grafted on from another picture.

Making Leather Toys

Naked, except for leather cuffs and collar, the submissive stands before the master. Clad from head to toe in leather, the mistress enters the dungeon. Cool leather against the throat and the touch of a leather glove sliding possessively along the small of the back.

There is something about leather, its texture, its color, even its smell. It calls to us. Unfortunately, that call has a price tag. Leather goods are not cheap, and the very special items we use in the scene are even more expensive than the semi-vanilla coats, dresses and gloves we admire in the display windows of such paragons of the status quo as Saks and Bergdorf Goodman.