This is one of my favourite sets from the early days. Properly early, I shot it in Los Angeles a few weeks before Restrained Elegance

opened, courtesy of Lorelei from Bedroom Bondage who arranged for me to

shoot Andrea Neal at her studio, just before Andrea retired from modelling.

When I was thinking what to do to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the site, it realised that I'd never seen these early sets in their

full glory. They were shot on slide film, and at the time I could only afford to have them batch scanned by the processing lab when the

slides were developed. Even so, the cost of the film, development and scanning made up fully half the cost of the trip (which is why I bought

a digital camera as soon as I got back, and why I have been shooting digitally ever since). The lab scans were, frankly, pretty crappy. An

automatic scanning machine cannot tell that a photo is meant to have a black or white background. It tries to average everything to mid-grey, which works OK for landscapes and snapshots but does not do a great job for studio shots like these. The resolution also left a lot to be desired.

I knew from viewing the slides on a projector that there was more in these shots than I'd ever been able to show on the website

Thus was the idea born of celebrating ten years by having the slides professionally scanned, to show some of these earliest sets in their

fully glory. Unfortunately, professional scanning hasn't got any cheaper in the intervening decade. I clearly wasn't going to be able to scan

in all the slide-shot films without taking out a second mortgage and probably selling a kidney. I settled on the plan- I'd have the sets of

Andrea Neal scanned, plus a couple of sets shot on black and white negative film that even I'd never seen. Andrea Neal had been my favourite

model in the days when I was getting started, and it felt like something special to have been lucky enough to grab just the one shoot with

her while I could.

So I drove halfway across the country with a big storage box of precious slides, and entrusted them to fellow-pro photographer Nick,

who was taking a break from writing a book about his time as a sports photographer and fancied a few weeks of careful but fairly routine

work scanning the slides. And here they are, in their full 20 megaxpixel glory. If you download the huge full versions and zoom right in, you'll

see how different the character of images shot on film was- the grain is clearly there, even on these sumptuous slow slide films. It gives the shots a very different character from the crisp cleanliness of our modern Hasselblad shots, but a very attractive soft and slightly retro look. Which I guess is perfect for a ten-year retrospective!

Check back later this month for more of the scanned sets and a BRAND NEW set of Andrea Neal which has never been seen before!

And here's the original storyline:

It had been a hard day at work, and she really was hungry! But he was determined to tease her for a while. He moved her seat just a little away from the table, added an extra loop of rope between the one at her wrists and the one around her waist. She couldn't quite reach the table, and that was the way her wanted it.

He walked out of the kitchen.

"I'll be back in an hour or so. I have other things to arrange."

She shot a look of pure venom at his departing back. A whole hour! She started to struggle to reach the table. Maybe she could win a little victory by getting a strawberry before he came back. That would probably make him a little mad at her, and that had to be a good thing!! He was so much more inventive with punishments when he was a little mad!

There was no way he was going to give her a whole hour to get free. The ropes weren't that well tied! Instead he waiting just around the corner, hoping to be able to catch her in the act of scoffing a strawberry against his orders. His own self discipline, unusually, failed first. He came back into the kitchen before she had really managed to make any progress towards the feast. Since he'd already miscalculated, he thought he'd better brazen it out. Don't want to spoil the fantasy or puncture the illusion of total mastery!

"You haven't got very far in an hour, have you? You'd think you weren't hungry? Don't you like strawberries?"

"Oh YES sir but..."

"No buts! Open your mouth right now! You'll eat all the fruit I have carefully prepared for you, or you'll feel my riding crop across your backside!"

She lowered her eyes and opened her mouth. She had almost managed to make him angry enough to crop her. But there were going to be plenty more opportunities to provoke him into giving her what she longed for this weekend. And she was hungry, and she did love strawberries, and round red grapes, and melon slices... and this was so much more fun that eating a TV dinner in front of some boring old film!