Sexy Nicole Rayner's reading leads her to fantasies of being a seventies-style super spy, subjugating with her wiles and crushing her enemies under her bare soles...

Hywel's note: this was an experiment in using old lenses to create a feeling, in this case the feeling of 1970's diffused porn and spy thrillers. I created the look with an old Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, which I originally bought as a sharp lens, because it was sharper than the kit lenses that came with the film Canons of the era. And sharp it was, for the time, and when stopped down to say f/5.6. Wide open, it has a dreamy, drifting quality due to a ton of uncorrected lens aberrations, and I made that worse by using a warm-up filter with olive oil carefully smeared around the edges and a clear centre spot. That leaves a bit of sharpness in the image (not that there was a lot with that lens wide open) but also produces a soft halo.

It is a dramatically different look from the usual Silk Soles ultra-clean and crisp modern lens on high res digital sensor, more akin to old film. I guess it kinda reminds me why I went in the sharper-digital-new-lenses direction! I like the look for a specific effect, invoking a feeling or an era, and would use it like that in video in particular. I think it works well with the romantic sexuality of this set, but overall I prefer to add diffusion and skin softening much more precisely in post production, starting from the sharpest and cleanest original I can. Organic and nice to do in camera, but a bit unpredictable, which I guess is a lot of the appeal of using vintage lenses.

Blonde, barefoot, jeans, striptease, nude, fantasy, foot fetish, soles, feet