Sexy Sophia Smith fantasises about being tied up and taken in front of the fire!

This was actually the last set we shot on our North Wales location trip, the end of a very enjoyable, creative and productive week. Ayla Rose and I tried lighting the scene as Ariel was rigging Sophia, but soon decided that we were fighting a losing battle to make it look anything like as nice as it already did in natural light.

You'll see what we mean if you look at the first two shots in the set- the first is flash light, the second is just the available light from windows, fire and the room lights. The flash lit shot isn't bad or anything- as usual with flash it lets you shoot at a smaller aperture for more depth of field, and bit more detail because there's much better signal-to-noise- the test shot was at ISO 5000 vs ISO 100 for the flash, just to get an idea for how it looked on camera. For the meat of the set I swapped from a 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom to my favourite lens of the moment, an 85mm f/1.4 which let me reduce this to a more-reasonable ISO 800-ish.

I love the way the highlights register sharp but with a soft bloom of light on this lens- I think it is a really pretty look. And the available light lets the firelight come to life in a way which is hard to achieve when using flash. Sometimes even a complete detail-freak like me has to admit that less can be more: the available-light look was just so much more romantic and in-keeping with the feeling we wanted to create for the set. It was a fabulous high note on which to end a very successful and creative trip. We hope you enjoy looking at the results as much as we enjoyed shooting them!