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Model: Bound Light (Instagram | Fetlife)

We made these images at a large group shoot where a large and blooming cherry blossom tree was the centerpiece. We got a few different looks out of the location, and had a great time working with others at the shoot.

On a more serious and safety-related note: the first shot (with all the pink) is the first time that Bound Light experienced wrist drop. As you can tell from the image, she’s hanging from only an arms-behind chest harness (“takatekote”). Though her ankle is also tied, it’s not taking any of the weight … the weight is entirely in the chest harness (and, more precisely, the arms). It’s a difficult and high-risk position, but we wanted the shot.

Thankfully, we had worked up to this level of risk together over the past year-and-a-half, so that she was able to recognized the signs of radial nerve compression early, alert me so that I could bring her down, and the resulting wrist-drop from the compression lasted only about an hour. In fact, the other shots in this gallery all were taken later that day, after the initial compression.

This is a story we tell often as a way to stress the importance of responsible progression in rope and reinforce that bottoms should slowly build their risks so that they are able to identify small problems before they become larger ones.

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