Hi,

They were from

https://www.top-to-bottom-leathers.co.uk

But they don’t do them in those colours as standard. They kindly made them for me as a custom order years ago!

Cheers, Hywel

Hi Viktor,

I just scheduled this for 1st April (which is the 16th birthday of RestrainedElegance.com)

Cheers, hywel

HI Andrew,

Glad you liked the set! I’ll try to reconstruct from memory… IIRC this one required quite a bit of fiddling around to get the lighting right, so I’ll have to try to distinguish between what I remember setting up first and what I finally ended up with!

I had warm fill from LED panels down on the floor, and a cooler light coming in from over Lauren’s shoulder to camera right (her left). I wanted the candles to register and I wanted the light to stay looking very warm, so I set the white balance to daylight. That’s why the bedside lamps have gone very yellow (they are warm white LED’s- about the same colour temperature as Tungsten, but with a green spike which means they register as yellow rather than orange, intensified by the yellow lightshades).

I shot wide open with f/1.4 lenses for the shallow depth of field, at ISO100 to keep a silky smooth look without grain or noise in the shadows. That required a shutter speed of 1/40th of a second which would normally be out of my ability to hand-hold… but the lens and sensor stabilisation of the Sony A7RII and 85mm/35mm lenses dealt with that fine.

I *think* this was before my new Arri lights arrived, so I probably used the old Kelvin tile LED panels. Probably two together to give the warm fill. And I think I used a flash as the “white” key light off camera right, which will have encouraged me to be brave with 1/40th shutter as it would at least freeze some detail. For the later shots I turned the flash off, turned the ISO up, and the shutter speed a bit shorter because I couldn’t rely on that flash to freeze any detail.

To answer your specific questions:
1) Nope, no tripod. I hate them. They are necessary for astrophotography, I barely tolerate them for landscape photography, and I totally cannot be doing with them for people photography. They slow me down too much and slow the photo taking down as well, which is in general a bad thing when the clock is running with a tied up model. I probably should have used one for the later shots without flash.

In the days of film the rule of thumb was shutter=1/focal length, so with a 50mm lens you can hand hold at 1/50th of a second. In theory one can do much better with modern image stabilisation systems, but that’s counteracted by the MUCH higher detail recorded by a 42 megapixel sensor compared with fuzzy, grainy, forgiving film. So I try to stick to 1/125th where I can or even 1/200th in the ideal case. But the IS is really good on the 85MM GM 1.4 so I felt brave and it seems to have worked OK, especially with the bit of flash to freeze some crisp detail. One still needs really good technique to hand hold, and you have to beware of subject movement as well.

2) Autofocus was OK-ish. Fast lens and reasonable amount of light from the LED panels. It would lock on reasonably well, but not always lock on to the correct thing- one flaw of the Sony (and in all honesty all camera systems I’ve tried except the latest Canons with dual pixel focussing in live view) is that if the camera does pick the wrong thing to focus on, it’s very difficult to override.

Tips: only use f/1.4 if you want a headache and are willing to shoot more than you need and throw shots away. The eye focus feature of the A7RII works well when it works at all- I have it set up for the “AF/MF” button on the back of the camera. I use AF-C rather than AF-S in really challenging situations too as it shows you exactly which PDAF point on the sensor it is using to focus. Overall though I’d say my number one complaint with the A7RII is the difficulty of nailing focus when shooting wide open.

3) The colour was adjusted afterwards because I shot in RAW as I always do. I will have dragged the colour temperature slider around to get a nice warm look without losing the “Correct” white of the flash- which I know from memory is around 5000K. Then I will have set the tone curve to a more S-shaped curve to lighten highlights and darken blacks, probably upped the constrast a bit too. Perceptually that will increase apparent saturation but I probably dialled in a bit more saturation and possibly vibrancy. I always do a little dance between colour temp, saturation, tone curve, and vibrancy to get it where I want it.

But I committed to the very warm look deliberately at shoot time, choosing very warm light (probably 2800K or so) for the fill panels, plus the candles, and really the post-processing was just applying my usual “stock look” and fine tuning it- it wasn’t anything unusual, most of the look was right there in the in-camera JPEGs. I find it useful to shoot RAW + JPEG with the Sony as it gives me a starting point for the look and reminds me what I was thinking of when I shot it originally.

The one tip I have for colour on the Sony is that red tone curve greatly benefits from pulling up the reds in the mid-tones just a little. I usually add a point in the middle of the curve and drag it up a few percent. That just seems to give nicer skin tones to me with my default RAW processing software (Aperture). Other RAW processors will have different default renditions, but I like to pull the red mid tones up a bit in Capture One on the Sony too.

So basically I built the look on set, fine tuning the light using the JPEGs on the back of the camera at the time, and just fine tuned it in post.

Hope that’s of interest!

Cheers, Hywel

Consider them a teaser 🙂

Hywel

Absolutely agree, very good advice!

We bulk-bought padlocks which use the same key. Doesn’t help with the sundry metal bondage gear which comes with built-in-locks but is a brilliant simplification and safety measure for everything else. Should have done it years sooner than I did.

Cheers, Hywel

I noticed the change going from the 13 megapixels of the Canon 5D mark I up to the 31 megapixel Hasselblad, as you’d damn well expect from a system that cost that much.

The step up to the Canon 7D at 18 megapixels was much less marked, especially as those pixels were smaller and so the noise performance wasn’t so great.

The difference between the 5DI (13 megapixels) and 5DII (21 megapixels) was very noticeable. The difference between the 7D (18) and 5DIi (21) was negligible so long as you had enough light and decent lenses.

So to be honest I doubt you’d notice the difference between 21 and 24 megapixels. My guess is that you’re more likely to start noticing the limitations of the lenses and the rest of the system rather than the pure pixel count. The D500 is very well-regarded as far as I can see (although I admit my ignorance to matters Nikon is almost total, it’s well-spoken of).

I’d be wary of camera with no AA filter (which I believe the D7200 lacks, is that right?). I find it a bit of a pain with the Hasselblad- it gives bad Moire on some fabrics. It’s not such an issue on the Sony because of the slightly higher resolution (and the fact that I often shoot the Sony with shallower depth of field, which limits the Moire just to those bits of fabric which happen to be in focus). People I know with higher res medium format say it’s largely a non-problem for them. So I think there may be a particular “sour spot” around 31 megapixels MF, which is quite close to the pixel pitch of the D7200.

I’d take 21 sharply-focussed megapixels from a camera with good ergoonmics over a 24 megapixel image from a camera with lesser focussing and ergonomic niceness, myself.

Of course I’m incapable of actually making that choice when there’s 42 megapixel IBIS monsters like the A7RII around (despite atrocious ergonomics). But of course this is my business- I’d probably make very different choices if it was still my hobby.

Cheers, Hywel

Don’t feel bad! It is undoubtedly true that what happened reads very like the storylines we shoot here on RE. It would be disingenuous to pretend there is no link between these things happening in reality and the storylines we write- clearly, the two are connected.

One of the things Ariel and I have in common is that when we were growing up, we didn’t have access to any sort of BDSM erotica or even know that such things existed. We therefore fixated on scenes in mainstream media- including real-life events on the news.

The very best thing about the internet for me is that it has made it unnecessary to do that. We can now access romantic fiction (whether written or visual or auditory) which lets us enjoy and even act out these fantasies without having to have the confusing and conflicting guilt about finding a story that we know intellectually was horrible for the real people involved kinda hot.

It’s that that lies behind my determination to keep RE going even if the UK censors try to shut us down (they’re on to the next phase now BTW: mandatory age verification. Which sounds fine until you realise that that means handing over your identity every time you want to even browse something 18-rated. A government mandated list of all the porn everyone in the country has ever watched? What could possibly go wrong?)

I don’t want to go back to the dark days of having to find stories like this hot, because there’s no longer a source of cheery, romantic bondage fantasies online.

It’s an important point, I think, so don’t feel bad about having pointed it out!

Cheers, Hywel

P.S. just found this, UK prices and they say they’ll ship world-wide. Not quite as nice a range of colours (raspberry in particular is missing) but still pretty good:

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/213199816/mfp-bondage-rope-14-6mm-for-shibari-or?ref=listing-shop-header-3

Just ordered a roll of orange, I’ll report back on how it is to tie with etc. once it arrives.

Cheers, Hywel

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by  Hywel.

Hi,

Yes, we favour the 6 mm rope. or 1/4″. The stuff I have from Rainbow rope was described as MFP solid braid rope.

Lengths… I usually have 3 m, 4.5 m, 6 m, 9 m, 12 m in most of the colours. We have a few longer ropes, maybe one in each colour, for elaborate rope webs etc.. I’d guess they are in the range 15 – 20 m, but they get progressively more and more annoying to tie with. So the 12 m is my longest standard length.

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

To post pics here you either need to have them hosted on some web-space already, so you can post by giving the URL of the JPEG file itself.

Otherwise, please feel free to email pics to me at webmaster@restrainedelegance.com and I can post them on your behalf.

Cheers, Hywel Phillips

Hi,

I’ve scheduled the Hannah WPC sets for you later on this week.

Cheers, Hywel

F-stops and depth of field … duly noted. Sounds like a great idea for a tutorial.

Short answer:

The is no such thing as the “right” depth of field for a shot. The mood changes considerably as depth of field shifts, so it is often a case of finding what works.

I have three starting points:
1) Shallow depth of field. I’m going to intentionally focus on selected parts of the image and using depth of field to throw the rest out of focus to de-emphasise. One achieves this with an open aperture, but don’t necessarily rush straight to the lens being wide open. You might end up with the fabled “eyelash in focus, eyeball out of focus” problem. Anything wider than F/4 is shallow on medium format, f/2.8 on full frame, f/2 on crop sensors. I think I shot this set around f/2.8 for the most part, on medium format, with a slightly telephone lens. Hence the nice background blur- helped by a decent physical separation between Cobie and the bushes behind her.

2) Girl in focus, background mildly out of focus. This is my default setting because I think often people would like to see most of the girl and the bondage in full length shots and for it to be mostly sharp. I aim for f/8 on medium format, f/5.6 on full frame, f/5 ish on crop sensors. Most of what I shoot is traditionally from f/5.6 to f/11.

3) Deep staging, where for some reason I want a much greater depth of field. Can be very effective to place the girl into the background setting rather than separating her from it. Anything wider than f/11 MF, f/8 FF, f/5.6 ish on crop sensors. Some smaller sensors eg GoPro, phone sensors can ONLY do deep staging- with wide angle lenses on small sensors, effective focus is like 1m to infinity. (Which is why there’s no focus ring on a GoPro).

To achieve shallow depth of field you may need to cut down the light- this set was shot under trees in daylight, if I’d wanted the same thing in direct sunlight I’d have needed a neutral density filter to achieve it.

Cheers, Hywel

I really wish I got on with Adobe products. They are one of the few companies actually in the software business, they release a constant stream of updates and they’re much less prone to suddenly drop a product than hardware companies like Apple.

BUT… I just can’t get on with their user interfaces. A gnomic, microscopic icon in light grey on medium grey, stranded in the corner of a huge monitor with an even smaller disclosure triangle to click to access even more mystifying icons.

And in Lightroom the unforgivable software sin of exposed modality- organising images and editing images is done in a different mode, essentially a completely different bit of software, WITH DIFFERENT KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS. (And different image development tools which don’t carry over to the develop module properly).

I honestly don’t think anyone at Adobe has tried editing a thousand images in their products. They’re great for editing single images, but for mass production they suck so much.

I know I’m at one extreme end of the Adobe vs Apple interface design philosophy, but I just don’t think there’s any justification for modal keyboard shortcuts.

It’s a shame, because Lightroom is the obvious successor to Aperture, on paper. But in practice I can get better results, more quickly and in batch using Capture One.

And Aperture is so good that I’ll likely keep all my current Mac production hardware on Yosemite just to keep using it.

Cheers, Hywel

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by  Hywel.