Touwtjes@Budapest

A few notes on the “Touwtjes@Budapest”  shoot (august 2009). Pictures (c) Touwtjes.tk. For the full gallery, please visit our website.

Outdoor

The area near Budapest where we spent most of our vacation is nearly ideal for fotoshoots. The Hungarian people go on vacation themselves elsewhere so most of the Pilisz mountains area is rather quiet. If you go hiking, there’s a good chance you only run into other people a few times if you stay on the marked paths. If you go cross country, it gets even more quiet. So the main worries are ticks and the heat. And of course the fact that you don’t want to hike with a full rope set, a shibari ring and a nikon DSLR for too many miles.

So, what did we do. For starters, for those who haven’t noticed yet, we brought our synthetic rope set, which is much lighter than real hemp or jute. As I always have to take loads of food with me on vacation due to food allergies and intolerances, every kg we save on luggage is welcome. Second, we decided to pick a path into the mountains that started close to our holiday cottage and to go there by bike. Good plan, except that the path didn’t exist anymore. Visegrad and surroundings are expanding, building more and more new houses for the richer people in the Budapest area. So it took a while to find another path. Fortunately we did, really close to our cottage.

Fortunately, about a mile after the last house, we felt sure enough that it was a quiet enough path for our purposes. It was the semi-circle of stone immediately next to the path (as seen in the standing bondage pictures at about 2/3rd of the shoot) that drew our attention first. But we decided to do some other stuff on the hill above first so, we went off road and uphill for some 50 or 60 meters. We started with the suspension pics. Bad idea. I wasn’t warmed up, and the rigging was pretty hard work on the sloping hillside. And when finished, it was even harder to get some really good shots. Difficult to find the right angles, and damn hard to get lighting right. Until then I usually had to struggle with ” not enough light, even at F/1.8″, now I had to struggle with ” way too much light at F/10″  for the first time (in the end, quite a lot of pics had overexposed parts, I really have to get more outdoor practice).

After that we continued with the floorwork, which went much better, though the lighting remained problematic. This resulted in some of the best shots of the day. The opening shots with pluu leaning forward with her legs on the ground play weird tricks with the perspective that worked out great. I love the shots of pluu crosslegged between the trees – though my foot shouldn’t have been there… After that, we went back to the path and took the final shots of the standing position in the semi-circle of stone. Tired, hungry, and way to hot. Although the setting was great, these turned out the sloppiest pics. I’d forgotten to cinch the chest harnas and waist straps, so it looks rather sloppy and not-very-tight, and it was sloppy and not-very-tight. We did get a few nice close ups thought. But looking back I wish we had done some more positions down there.

For the record: N47 47.824 E19 00.222 and N47 47.803 E19 00.262

Indoor

The indoor shoot was taken in our hotel room somewehere in the outskirts of Budapest.  There were two three  reasons to do it. First, it looked like the ultimate hotel room, with the furniture and the weird patterns on the floor and the bathroom tiles. Second, it wasn’t really a hotel room, but a small appartment in a hotel. So it looked like a hotel, but it was much bigger and had a living room with plenty of space to shoot (and without beds standing in the way). The third was that is was a really cool idea to call the shoots “outdoor”  and ” indoor”.

Although the circumstances were much easier (bless your deity of choice for inventing airco), it was as difficult to get great pics. Again, we were tired, so we couldn’t spend too much time on the shoot. The position were rather static, so it was rather difficult to shoot enough different pictures from each tie. So there’s why this gallery has way less pics than the outdoor gallery. Still, it was fun to do a hotel-shoot, and the pics in the tub turned out great (thanks to some funky editing by pluu).

For the record: N47 31.267 E18 58.410