Maybe, on balance, she should have worn panties to the game this evening. If she had, maybe she wouldn't have kept flashing everyone as she did her cheerleading moves. And if she hadn't, maybe the players would have kept their concentration on the game. Maybe the quarterback wouldn't have been carted off in an ambulance after that really nasty hit when his eyes were on her cartwheels rather than the charging linebackers. Maybe if she had worn panties, they wouldn't have lost the game 67-6. And maybe the coach wouldn't have gotten mad with her, and wouldn't have tied her up in her own team-colours cheerleading ribbons in the locker room after the game!

CD's idea!

If you've been around the RE forum for a while, you'll certainly have encountered long-standing member Cavalier Driver (CD). Ariel was extremely excited that we'd finally managed to tempt him along to a tutorial session! He was joined by another long-standing forum poster, Fogane, and new members Teddy B and Dresda, who owns a local fetish venue who had come along to brush up on his lighting skills.

As we always do, we asked each of them to come along with one idea for a set to shoot. This monster of a set was CD's idea. As you might have gathered, it involved tying ariel with lots of ribbons, in a colour-coordingated cross-over way that looked lovely on paper. Here's the idea CD sent:

I don't know if you have ever tried doing bondage with ribbons. It looks lovely, but at a price. Ribbon only looks good if it is lying flat, and preferably without too many knots to pull it out of shape. But... it is very slippery and slidy. So I did my best (with assistance from the others!) to get Ariel tied up as CD had shown. We did reasonably well- she couldn't free herself from the knots at wrists or ankles and we did have to cut her out at the end. But the decorative stuff slid down very easily from arms and legs. It looks super, though, so it's something we will experiment with again! Ariel had the idea of rubbing baby oil all over herself to helpo the ribbon stick, which we will definitely try next time.

Light

With a fairly tricky rig, we wanted to play safe with the light, so this is familiar three-point lighting with a key light, a fill light and a hair light. When we started off, we thought the light looked OK, although we'd underexposed by just a touch: DSC_1996.jpg. As we'd found at the previous tutorial, Nikons do love to make skin tones come out a bit orange, if you get the exposure a touch wrong. DSC_1996.jpg shows that it looks better if you get the expsoure spot on. (I could have rescued the earlier shot in photoshop, but I wanted to show it more or less as it came out of the camera).

We thought the light was fine, but maybe a little flat. The usual way you get rid of that problem is to change the intensity of the fill light, to give more shadow. But there's another way to do it which I thought might be more in keeping with this set, and that's to subtly change the colour of the fill. I put a mild colour-correction warmup gel over the fill light and bingo! DSC_2007.jpg. Now the shadows are warm, but the highlights and hairlight are still white so Ariel doesn't look jaundiced. (Critically, you've got to make sure the whites of her eyes stay white or it looks wrong).

So with this addition, making the set look a lot warmer and deeper and more intimate, we were good to go. The warmer tone helps tie the whole shot together and looks great with the two-tone ribbons and matching two-tone eye makeup that Ariel did for the set.