Hi Sablesword,

Let me know if Gametime can sort it for you. I temporarily stopped the annual option for new signups after the ATVOD tap on the shoulder. I HATE not delivering what I’ve promised; I didn’t want anyone signing up for a long-term membership in case I had to make big changes on the site right away.

I was just thinking I should reinstate the annual membership as it doesn’t seem like anything drastic is happening under the new regime at least for the moment. Let me know if you can’t get your existing membership renewed and I’ll bump up my plans.

Best regards,

Hywel

Hi,

Errrrrrrrr it was a couple of years ago now! As best I can remember, I used a single flash with reflector as the back light, at ceiling level, behind Tillie to produce the halo effect on her hair.

I turned off the lights which were usually pointed at the cove to burn it out, allowing shadows to fall where they liked.

Most of the fill actually came from the fact she was sitting in white infinity cove, but looking at the catch-lights in her eyes I also had one strip soft-box, intensity turned down to minimum, in front of her as well. This provided some fill but was mostly there to ensure her eyes didn’t go “dead”, which is a danger when relying on diffuse fill bouncing around the room.

As I often do, I deliberately courted light flare by shooting almost directly in to the back light, and taking off the lens hood. This often produces a lovely soft glow and some ghost images of the light. The Hasselblad lenses are very flare resistant, so the effect is subtle- as you’ll see from the “Hair-tied in her Master’s Study” set with Becky Perry recently you can run into trouble doing this with an older, crappier, dirtier lens like a twenty year old Canon 35 mm prime 🙂

Hope that helps!

Cheers, Hywel

I’d be very interested to know how people view images, too!

When I’m flicking through pics (my own or other people’s I’ve downloaded) usually look at stuff on my iPad, and physically rotate the screen for portrait format. That’s a squarer ratio than 16 x 9, too. But that’s the exception rather than the rule, most of the other screens I have are landscape and 16 x 9 ish.

Do people prefer to see things in the native aspect ratio of the screens- which are definitely settling on 16 x 9 as the default?

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

Very glad you’ve picked up a camera again and are having fun with photography!

Also very glad you like our work, and that you enjoyed the video Ariel made for you 🙂

We do find photoshoot days very tiring.

Ariel says that modelling days aren’t so bad- I think mostly because she plain loves modelling, but also because it is less demanding in terms of coming up with ideas and making decisions. The model makes lots of decisions for sure- constantly, in terms of finding poses and expressions and lots of other things. But it is generally under the direction of the photographer, rather than vice versa. I’ve definitely noticed that being on the crew takes more out of her- there’s the responsibility for rigging, for the model’s safety but most of all you just have to do a lot more thinking, and that takes mental energy.

At the end of several days of shooting we are good for nothing more than collapsing under a duvet and eating cake.

The inspiration issue can be a serious one when you’re making your living this way. Over the years I’ve evolved a few tricks which help with that- here are a few in case you are interested.

1) A new shooting space provides instant inspiration. It’s easy for me to come up with the first one or two “low hanging fruits”, storylines which immediately suggest themselves when we go to shoot at a new place. Finding the hundredth story in a space is much harder.

2) New people provide inspiration. It’s noticeable how much everyone perks up if we’re on a week-long location shoot and we have a changeover in model or crew part way through. The new person really helps lift everyone’s energy levels.

3) For me, it is absolutely crucial to be able to schedule in breaks from shooting in my calendar. Like at the moment- we did a ton of shoots in the run up to December, specifically so that I could have a couple of months at the start of this year to catch up on admin and other necessary stuff… but also so that my subconscious gets to work away at ideas while I am off climbing mountains or ordering new business cards.

4) I find looking at other people’s still photos can often spark inspiration. It’s occasionally of the “we must try that star chest harness it’s awesome” type, but more commonly it suggest a character or a storyline which may well be nothing to do with anything overt in the image- just something that catches my eye. I keep a notebook with me to jot these down. Interestingly, watching videos or films rarely does the same for me. I find stills more evocative.

5) The power of the Rodriguez list. Coined by Stu Maschwitz but inspired by Robert Rodriguez- if you hve a guitar case (no guitar), a car and a girl, write a story about a girl who drives around carrying an empty guitar case. Who is she? Why does she have an empty guitar case? Soon, the story has written itself. It’s MUCH easier to start from the Rodriguez list than to stare at a blank sheet of paper and wait for inpspiration.

6) Be prepared. I always try to note down at least a list of vague ideas so I have somewhere to start.

7) When all else fails, fake it and just shoot something, even if you’re sure it is the most derivative, nonsensical idea. A few years later you won’t remember which sets felt like you were churning them out. (Although the ones you were really inspired for do still sparkle pretty brightly).

8) Last, but by no means least, I can thoroughly recommend marrying your in-house superstar. Without Ariel I doubt I’d be able to maintain five updates a week of ideas. A lot of the ideas we shoot are Ariel’s in the first place, but having both of us there on shoot days means we can “pass the creative buck” back and forth between us through the day. So I can get inspired to light the set by how Ariel’s rigging it if I’m feeling out of ideas, or I can suggest the starting point for a rig if Ariel is out of ideas, and so on.

As it happens, I am feeling pretty stale right now. After finding 4500-ish ideas to shoot, finding number 4501 can be tricky. But I’m not worried, because I’ve got a couple of months before we start the regular RE shoots again, I’ve ordered some new bondage gear, we’ve got a couple of location trips in the works, I’ve got some new models lined up to work with, we’ve just booked a shoot with Kate which is always super, we’ve got customs to shoot which often lead our brains to squirt out tangentially related ideas, and we’ve got more than a year of content on disk anyway so I don’t have to panic. The inspiration will be back and in the meantime I can do the more routine (but every bit as necessary) behind the scenes work on the site 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

I entirely agree with you, but the execution was largely out of our control as this was a custom photoshoot.

The customer paid for a whole day’s shoot covering the costs of Tillie, Ariel, me, and Michael Stamp (who helped out shooting some behind the scenes footage which he’s currently editing). They also bought all the costumes. So of course we did the best we could to satisfy their requirements, and they specified the shoes and the emphasis on the changing as well as the bondage.

I don’t propose to turn RE into a customs-funded site by any means but it is hard to turn down offers like that when they come along. The difference it makes to the economics of shoots can be considerable.

Cheers, Hywel

Oooh! Just discovered a fabulous resource for LED lighting:

http://www.gtc.org.uk/tlci-results/tlci-results-new-format.aspx

Downloading the result for the Rotolight Neo at 5600 K (daylight white balance) we get:

and for 3200 K (Tungsten) we get:

Background on these tests for the ultra-techie:
http://www.gtc.org.uk/media/fm/Zerb%20articles/TLCI_web.pdf

What are we looking at in these diagrams? First the colour swatches. There is an inner square and an outer square. The outer square is a reference light (either daylight on an actual tungsten light). The inner square in how that colour swatch looks when illustrated by the light being tested. In the ideal case there will be no difference.

The Rotolights are doing pretty well, actually. The most critical patches for us are the first two, which represent dark and pale skin tones. The differences are very minor. For 5600K we can see that the lights struggle with teal, which is always a weak spot of LED, and dark blue. They greys are nicely neutral.

At 3200K again the all important skin tones look good. Teal, blues, pink and purple look a bit off, but nothing to write home about. All in all that’s a very creditable performance. I’m impressed, LED lighting has come a long way in the last few years.

If you want a “colour quality” single number for a light, it is the TLCI-2012 number: 90 and 91 (out of a hundred). This is not to be confused with the CRI, which manufacturers are still quoting but which really doesn’t have much applicability to discontinuous spectrum lights like LED.

If you look at the curves you’ll be able to understand immediately what is causing these issues. The curve is a power spectrum of the light as a function of wavelength, from violet on the left hand side to deep red on the right hand side. The light blue curve is the reference illuminant (daylight for 5600K and tungsten for 3200K). The black curve is what the light is putting out.

You can see what I mean about LED lighting having a spiky spectrum. There’s a big peak in the blue, a gap in the teal, then a more modest broad peak in the green through to a second peak in the orange.

You can immediately see that light is lacking in the violet (there’s nothing in the black curve above 420 nm) and the deep red (below about 680 nm the black curve falls a long way short of the reference line).

That’s why teal, pink and violet cause problems and why deep red can also be a problem. But for most colours it looks like those lights are pretty decent.

There is one other factor that can cause trouble- the way the peaks in the LED spectrum can interact with the colours in the filter of your camera. There’s no real way of knowing that without trying a given light with your camera before you buy. Problems most commonly appear as magenta and green shifts which vary across the image, so you might find your reds have a very magenta tinge and but your skin tones have a green cast.

But nonetheless I’m impressed to see colour rendition this good from relatively cheap LED panels, very encouraging, and I think one should be able to get pretty good results with them. The size / power / softness issue would still cause me some concern, though.

Cheers, Hywel

Yeh, it’s bad luck that we’ve not been in the same place at the same time as Pling & Svampen for a while! I don’t know if we’re going to manage a trip to any of the conventions in 2016 (really need to see how this whole UK government censor thing shakes out before spending money on plane tickets etc.) but hopefully we can get together again soon. Loving your tweets in the meantime, Pling!

Cheers, Hywel

They look OK, but I’m very wary of any LED-based lighting that comes with filters. I know Rotolight are fairly well respected, but the LEDs have very “spiky” colour spectra and filtering only makes an already bad situation worse. At least they are bi-colour so have at least got something to fill in the skin-tone orange.

These ones also seem a bit in-between as size goes to me, too. 15 cm across is not big enough to produce a really good soft light without some sort of soft box or diffusion, but nor is it small enough to make nice sharp shadows like a Fresnel would. I think you’d probably lose a lot of oomph by the time you’ve put them through a softbox.

I don’t think LED lighting has really matured yet- I don’t think they are really a substitute for flash for stills work for the moment. When the “proper” six colour sort start filtering their way down from Arri premium prices to more reasonable alternatives I think it’ll be worth a look, though!

Cheers, Hywel

“All he needs is a wreath of oak leaves.” … and possibly a bit more hair on top! 🙂 🙂 🙂 or maybe that’s what the oak wreath is meant to conceal…

As I usually shoot with primes it is easier for me to compile a comparison of how often I use each focal length.

50 mm Hasselblad (~38 mm FF equivalent): 30%
80 mm Hasselblad (~60 mm FF equivalent): 60%
120 mm Hasselblad (~92 mm FF equivalent): 10%

I’d use the 120 mm much more if British houses had US-sized rooms; I stick with the 80 mm most of the time as it gives me the full-length shot when pressed against the back wall. Plus it is less of a beast to shoot with, the 120 mm weighs a ton.

Cheers, Hywel

Wrapturist, we’re very glad you liked Ariel’s video! We really do hope it inspires you to try some more photography!

I think the studio as an counsel of luxury is an interesting point- it probably depends where you are in the world. In most of the UK you’re never too far away from a local studio, and the studio’s rates are likely to be very reasonable given that they’ll usually have lights and other equipment for hire. The studio owners are usually very happy to help newbies set up the lights too.

We’re not talking here about huge photostudios for commercial advertising shoots which cost hundreds of dollars per hour and who have sound stages and vast infinity coves for shooting the latest formula one car. In the UK at least many local studios are friendly little set-ups in an outbuilding in the photographer’s garden or a little industrial unit, and the cost is commensurately lower.

They often run group days to share the cost of booking a model which is a very cost-effective way to dip your toe in and see if model photography is for you, too.

Obviously it adds to the newbie stress by having to deal with two new professional people instead of one, but from the model’s point of view knowing that she’s going to a studio rather than a first-time photographer’s house is very reassuring I think!

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

Yes, certainly… since a member kindly donated a big box of scarves, we’ve been having fun tying girls up with them! And of course we have more of Chloe coming soon too.

Best regards,

Hywel Phillips