Please welcome the lovely (and very kinky) Honour May to Restrained Elegance! She brought this gorgeous vintage gown to our shoot and it

seemed just right to try photographing her with a vintage lens - there's something about her look which is quite classic, isn't there?

Hywel's note: Love the way the vintage lens gives a soft, diffuse look to the shots (they are the first ones in the series). You can still see all the detail

(zoom in on the full-size images if you don't believe me) at least in the centre of the lens, but it all goes kinda dreamy and romantic at the

same time. It's a bit of a pain to shoot with because the lens is manual focus, and it is quite a stylised look which is why I swapped to a modern

35 mm lens part way through. It's still a romantic look, but there's not that swirly out-of-focus effect away from the centre of the lens, and the

modern coatings give a much cleaner contrast between highlight and shadows.

The last three shots are an experiment too far- I tried using the strobe light mode on my new continuous lights to see if I could get some

good struggling pics with a feeling of motion. Too much motion, it turns out- and these are the only three which were even faintly interesting

from the 30 or so we quickly fired off. Next time I'll combine this with a studio flash at maybe a stop or two more intensity, with second

curtain sync. That should give the stop-motion trails of these struggling shots superimposed on a crisp, brighter image of a single instant.

Might try locking off the camera on a tripod too, although I'll have to watch for burning out the static background in that case. Still working on

this particular technique! But the vintage lens look and the 35mm modern lens wide open worked an absolute treat, loved them.