I've been mining my old photography archives and sharing some of the memorable ones as of late. Here is another, circa 2002

This image is why there is a TwistedMonk.Com

Back in the dark old days, those early days of digital photography when I made my first tentative steps away from my trusty film camera to the first clunky digital SLR cameras, printing was the bane of my existence. Getting good, rich black and white images from digital prints was nearly impossible. Most of us sent our images away to labs only to get images back weeks later that looked nothing like the images we had in our monitor's eye. Rich, velvety blacks were replaced by sickly greenish tones due to incompatible color maps and inconsistent color correction tools.

Out of frustration, and that I was egotistical enough to believe that if it was not in black and white it was not "art" photography. "Color is for holiday snapshots, not art", was what I told myself. Pardon me while I roll my eyes at myself. Anyways, I began experimenting with sepia tones and color replacement. My goal was to imitate the hand painted French post cards from the turn of the last century.

This image was my most striking and successful from that period. One of those magnificent flukes where you end up capturing an image that was unplanned and no matter how hard you attempt you can never re-create. It also inspired me to look for other things that I could photograph and do this process on. What about rope bondage? Having recently been given Midori's ground breaking book, The Seductive Art of Japanese Rope Bondage, by my mother in law I thought to myself. "Hmm, what if I took a photo of a girl tied up in colored rope?" Looking online for colored bondage rope found me a few sites, nothing interesting and nothing in my then limited budget.

Flipping through Midori's book I found her recipe for finishing hemp rope. I ordered a small spool from a local hippy store, cooked up a batch and tossed in a spare packet of RIT Purple dye that I had laying about from another project. Lo and behold, royal purple hemp rope.

The first of it's kind and little did I know then that it would be the first of many, many more batches of rope.

And so gentle reader, if you happen to have a hunk of TwistedMonk rope in your toy bag that you are fond of, raise it in salute to this image.

The one that started it all.