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Very glad you liked it! It is one of my favourites too, I think because it is so pared back and visual. It’s great fun to shoot the more storyline-led films, but at heart I’m a still photographer. I love that sometimes we can manage to get the luminous quality of still photos into our movie images too.
Cheers, Hywel
It’s my observation that whilst some models are more popular than others, it’s not the main thing people are voting on when they rate sets.
All models who have been on the site enough will have some sets which are poorly rated, and some sets which are very highly rated. You can’t tell anything about this until you’ve got a decent number of sets to look at- typically this means that the model has worked with us many times, enough for us to have tried some ideas which worked brilliantly AND some ideas which didn’t work out so well with her, and start to see the overall effect of the model’s popularity coming through.
It’s only when you start looking at all of a models’ sets and averaging all the votes cast for all of them that you start to see that some models’ sets really do have a significantly higher average rating than some others.
But with small statistics, the effects of say shooting more nude in metal sets on the first shoot with one new model than with another new model will overpower the model effect.
Sets with nude girls and metal bondage remain statistically by far the most highly rated sets on the site: average rating is 4.3 vs average for all sets of 3.6, all nude sets of 4.0, and all metal sets of 3.8. (Nude in rope gets 4.0 – popular, but not devastatingly so). The Nude in Metal effect is clear, it shines out every time we look at the votes, and it can be stated with confidence as the numbers of sets involved are large. No other keyword or keyword combination comes close to the instant popularity that a nude in metal set generates.
There are other systematic effects- more recent sets have a higher rating. I’d like to think that’s because we’ve got better, but it might also be that people rate sets lower when they first see them in the archive than if they first see them as new sets.
It’s not a small effect: the average rating of Sophia Smith’s recent sets is a breathtaking 4.4 whereas the rating for all her sets is 3.9 and the rating for archived sets only is 3.7. Average ratings for individual sets range from a stellar 4.8 down to what one would think was a “they all hated it” 2.5 for the first shower scene video we did with her. But even that one had five people who loved it and gave it 5*- just many more people who hated it and gave it 1*.
The pattern is similar for the other models who’ve been working with us for a long time, although one has to note that only models who are great to work with get to work with us for a long time, so there’s a selection bias there too.
(I’ve always said I’d rather be shooting sets which were all rated 1* and 5* than stuff which no-one cares about and gives 3* to all the time- even if most people hate it, for the people who liked it, if they REALLY liked it, I think we did good.)
All of which is a very long winded way of re-iterating that I’ve learned not to place too much reliance on set ratings, because people are looking for and voting on different things. The best they can do is to guide us in some general directions when setting the overall balance and strategy for the year for the site.
Once one has pulled out the few very strong trends, it’s best to let go and not give in to the temptation to delve, big-data style, into the numbers too far 🙂 🙂 🙂 And I do get tempted, but I’m aware that despite the hundreds of thousands of votes cast, it isn’t really a big sample- it’s a few hundred people voting a thousand or so times each.
We don’t slavishly say “and then there must be the hogtie with a ball-gag and a satin blouse because that is what the members like 6th best, and then the nipple clamp frogtie that the members like 5th best”. That would drive me mad- after 15 years shooting bondage at a set a day, I’ve learned that inspiration is too delicate to squash flat with a check-list. By all means have a list of jumping-off points, sparks of inspiration for the shoot- but often the very best sets come from a synergy on set finding a story that we want to tell.
Cheers, Hywel
You may very well think that, I couldn’t possibly comment 😉 🙂 🙂 🙂
Hi,
I meant rim light, yes. I find particularly with brunettes it really helps to get some light in behind her pointing forwards to add life to her hair. I can see the light in the shot of Tori now.
It’s not always possible, of course. In the old house I had spigot plates on the ceilings so I could attach lights for that purpose. In the new place, with ceilings I’m not allowed to deface in that way, the best I’ve found is to put a boom pole on a C-stand, with a speedlight on the boom. Then extend it from the stand so it is behind the model. It’s a bit ungainly (and you have to sandbag the C-stand for stability which is a pain) but it is one way of getting some separation between subject and background.
Another way I’ve been using a lot since the move is simply having the background darker and out of focus, so I’ve been heading for shallower depth of field in the rooms where even a boom pole hair light is impractical. It’s all very tricky to do in small room as you say!
Here’s one done with the shallow depth of field technique:
And here’s one with the speedlight on a boom pole:
P.S. I also do all of this for shots taken for the site by other people, incidentally. So shots done by Steve or Alexander Lightspear I take as RAW and do all the post processing as if I’d shot them myself
Thanks… I think the process is already automated as far as it can be (I’ve had a BIG incentive to search out efficient workflows, given the volume of photos we shoot each month).
Most of it is automated inside Hasselblad Phocus and Apple Aperture, for the stuff that remains relatively constant over photos in a set. I make the adjustments to things like colour temperature, tone curves, sharpening, vingette, etc. on one “typical” photo from the set then paste over all the others in the set. I then do a quick scan though by eye to match exposure levels and to crop if necessary.
For example closeup shots are almost always a stop underexposed compared with the rest (it’s a function of the way the optics work, despite the nominal constant aperture). Shots from opposite sides of the model might look more consonant with a third of a stop difference, etc.. Again this is all automatable- find one prototype shot and paste the settings onto others.
The airbrushing has to be done shot by shot. Typically I smooth out skin blemishes aiming for the final shot looking like the model on a really good day. So I try not to remove moles and similar distinguishing features but would get rid of bruises, zits and scrapes. I do sometimes remove moles as well but usually only do so if the lighting is causing undue prominence. I try to be fair to one’s visual impression of the model- if the light is making a mole look like a mountain, but you wouldn’t even notice it to meet her in real life, I’ll try to tone it down a little in photos.
I run most photos through a very very light skin smoothing pass as well, using an automated plug-in with the settings turned pretty much down to minimum. This is really just to give a nicer basis for the airbrushing step, and to even out some of the unfairly harsh effect the lack of an anti-aliasing filter on the Hasselblad sensor can have on skin, especially in closeups. I don’t consider this to be cheating because most other cameras do the same effect optically with their low-pass filters, so I’m just reproducing the look in a more controlled fashion in post.
Keywording, selecting previews for sets etc. is all done in Aperture too, as is the final export step which includes all the resizing, adding logos, etc. – all automated already.
Cheers, Hywel.
I think it is more to do with my anal inability to let go of doing the final pass on all the photos myself, to make sure they look the way I want them to look. Although I sometimes let go of the airbrushing part of the job (indeed I have tried farming that out to other people in the past) the final colour correction and look-and-feel pass, the little adjustments to each shot and the overall look applied to the set… I just want to do myself.
Sadly no algorithm or instructions to anyone else can quite get over the “adjust so it looks RIGHT to Hywel’s eyes” process, I don’t think!
Cheers, Hywel
Nice shots, Sablesword! I think I’d try to get some backlight in somehow to produce a little separation between model and background, but overall these are a lot more consistent that some of your earlier ones.
We’re not coming to Fetishcon this year I’m afraid- we’re shooting with Natalia Forrest in Spain that week I think (it’s a hard life!) Hope you have lots of fun and I promise we’ll make it over again one of these years!
Cheers, Hywel
Fixed, thank you. (It was a simple typo: ‘ instead of = )
Cheers, Hywel
Indeed you do- from the very rolls you brought along to that tutorial, ages (and two studios/houses) ago!
We did the set in your honour 🙂
Cheers, Hywel
Hi Andrew,
Thank you so much for coming and for sharing some of your photos from the day. We’re glad you had a good time and we hope we were able to pass on some useful techniques for bondage photography. Please show us what you get up to!
And if anyone else fancies a tutorial, we’d be pleased to tailor something to your requirements. Drop me an email to webmaster@restrainedelegance.com.
Cheers, Hywel (& Ariel)
The large pictures are at the resolution they came off the camera.
In the very earliest days, the resolution of pics was limited by the scans you could get done of slide film as it was processed. People had limited size screens, bandwidth of internet connections was very limited, and storage space for the images was expensive.
My first digital camera had 3.1 megapixels: 2160 x 1440 pixels.
At the time, screen resolutions were generally 800 x 600 pixels, maybe 1024 x 768.
So I down-sampled the images to what felt like a good compromise between resolution and file size.In the following decade, digital SLR sensors rocketed up in resolution by a factor of 10 or more. So a modern Canon dSLR, the equivalent of my original D30, now has more like 20 megapixels: 5472 x 3648 pixels or so.
In the same time, bandwidth has gone up and storage speed has gone down. Screen resolutions have gone up a bit- a more routine screen size would now be 1600 x 1200 or 1920 x 1080 or so. A few high-res screens are getting up to 3840 x 2160 (the new iMac is even higher). But people are also viewing the site on mobiles and tablets whose resolution is still more like 800 x 600 pixels.
So in the modern era, it is worth me putting up full resolution pictures (6496 x 4872 for the Hasselblad) for people with “4K” or “UHD” screens and people who like to zoom in to see every little detail. But the download times are still significant for those, and it is overkill for anyone looking at the site on a mobile phone, so the regular size images (we settled on 1600×1200 pixels) are still right for a lot of people.
In the middle of all these huge technological changes, there was a point where some people had higher resolution screens or the desire to zoom in, or the desire to print out in high resolution for their own enjoyment. But connection speeds and the cost of storage space on the web server had not reached the point where it was a sensible or cost-effective proposition for me to put up ALL the shots from every set in full size and well as regular size.
So as a “treat” or bonus, I put up large versions of a few of the images from each set, the ones I thought were the best and the most striking.
When connection speeds and storage costs reached the stage that putting all the full-size versions up for each set was a sensible proposition, we started doing that.
So it is a historical accident of a point in time where it wasn’t possible to put up the full res versions of everything but people had expressed interest in having them for at least some photos in each set.
If time or money were in greater supply, I’d probably go back over all the old sets and reprocess them to get full-sized versions of all the archive sets done as well. Unfortunately that’s very time consuming and the returns on doing so would probably not be a sensible business proposition. I might do that if I ever retire from shooting new stuff, but until then, the new stuff has to take priority!
Cheers, Hywel.
… what Sablesword said! Perfectly put 🙂 thank you!
Cheers, Hywel
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This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by
Hywel.
🙂 Glad you liked it! Ariel was not convinced that it was a good idea at the time…
Cheers, Hywel.
Oh no. Did I really put that Hammerlock set up before? Are you sure it wasn’t as part of the lexicon of bondage positions? A few shots from it will have appeared before in the lexicon, but it certainly wasn’t my intention to put a previously-seen set up as if it were new.
If I did that please accept my apologies, it was a mistake and should not have happened. There’s a video with a similar name, it isn’t that you’re thinking of?
I’ve looked through and it doesn’t SEEM like I’ve put that set up before. Just some shots from it as part of the lexicon.
My filing system isn’t foolproof- could anyone else confirm? If I have posted it before I’ll put up a bonus set ASAP to make up for it… and please accept my apologies!
In theory (assuming I don’t cock it up), all sets not marked as archive are new. Sometimes, I will have posted a few shots from a new set in advance of the full set being published- either as off-the-camera previews on forum, twitter or blog, or very occasionally where a whole bunch of sets form part of a larger feature like the lexicon.
Once a set has had its initial run on the site (they stay up for six months after they are first posted), it goes into the rotation for the archives.
I queue up the old sets for a new run on the site in the archives section.
When they go up on the archives section, they again have a six-month run on the site.
They’ll come up again in the archives at a later date, with the more popular sets appearing again sooner than less popular sets.
The other thing which I know causes confusion is that sets often go up a long time after they were shot- sometimes years after. So the date stamps on the photo meta-data are not a good guide to when the set first appeared on the site.
We do this purely for the sake of variety. If we didn’t do that the sets would be very monotonous- so after we shot the lexicon, there would have been nothing but sets of Ariel on a white backdrop for three months on the site. When we do a location trip, there would be nothing but shots of (say) Sophia Smith and Ariel in a country house for two months. Personally, I prefer greater variety, so I only put up one or two sets from a given shoot each month- so instead you’ll see a set of Hannah Claydon then a set of Katy then a set of Ariel then a set of Natalia Forrest, etc.. But it does mean that sometimes stuff shot eg in Norway with Ariel and Katy still hasn’t been on the site years after the shoot date, and potentially years after a preview pic or two was posted.
It’s a balance. I sometimes have a clear-out to try to make sure I don’t have too many old sets left to process.
I hope that makes sense?
If you are filing your personal collection according to shoot date, file creation date etc. it might look very different from the dates the sets went up on the site?
One thing I wished I’d done when designing the database for the site was keep track of the date the set first appeared. We didn’t think of it, so there’s 14 years worth of updates which don’t have that information. We’ve got a related datum- the date the set was first added to the database, usually a month or two in advance of the date it went “live” on the site.
Unfortunately even that only works for sets added since 2007, when we started using the current database. For older sets I’d have to go through by hand and figure it out- since even the camera metadata is lacking from the older sets, so you can’t even necessarily figure it out from the metadata or the file creation dates.
And nothing would work for the sets shot on slide film other than seeing if I can go all the way back to the earliest update schedules of the site to figure out when sets first went up, or find my 13-year-old diary to find out when I shot something.
With over 4100 sets shot over the years it would be a huge task, so I’ve never attempted it.
Best regards,
Hywel
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This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by
Hi Sablesword,
These are really nice 🙂 🙂
I think the lighting is very pretty- softer than I remember from your previous shots, which I think works well with Pling and her lovely cascade of hair!
Hope you all had fun a Fetishcon, sorry we couldn’t be there this year!
Cheers, Hywel.
It’s on http://www.silksoles.com, Doug.
The colour differences come from a lot of contributions.
1) The lighting is different. The video was lit with LED panels. These are discontinuous sources, and one of the parts of the spectrum they are relatively lacking in is the deep reds. So these colours are hard to reproduce under that lighting without messing up skin tones. I always prioritise the girls’ skin tones, of course. The stills were shot with studio flash, which is much closer to a full spectrum, and a somewhat different colour temperature to boot.
I’d like to use the same lighting for both, but it isn’t practical on my budget. Video can cope with dimmer light as one generally shoots at 1/50th of a second, which isn’t enough to freeze motion or camera shake on stills, which I like to shoot at 1/400th of a second. Plus the native ISO of the RED is around 400, whereas the native ISO of the Hasselblad is around 80. So stills need a LOT more light- which fortunately one can generate in very short synchronised bursts using flash. I’d love to be able to use powerful HMI lights for video and use similar softboxes etc. but they cost a lot and as of yet I’ve not been able to afford them.
The cove is also very differently lit as for stills it has a TON of flash into it from the ceiling mounted units. The house lights do not create the same effect for stills!
The colour temperature of the lights was different too. The stills generally come in around 5000 K whereas I *think* the video would have been around 3200 K to match the house lights and modelling light in the stills flash. So the actual initial light spectrum coming off the scene is different.
Actually I tried to recreate the shadowless lighting scheme on video by using a barrage of LED panels, but it doesn’t really work so in the end I just opted for lighting from the up-camera side, which is the usual cinema default.
So you’re right, I’ve gone for the most familiar convention for each lighting pattern: shadowless with the cove for stills, up-camera lighting for the video. I wouldn’t have been technically able to achieve doing it the other way around, so might as well go with the more normal convention for each!
An HMI with softboxes is on my shopping list for if the recession ever ends 🙂
2) They were shot through different lenses. The colour rendition of the Hasselblad lenses (stills) and Canon lenses (video, static shoots) and GoPro lenses (video, moving shots) is a little different.
3) The colour dyes on each camera’s sensor are a bit different, and the capabilities of the camera to handle over and under exposure varies a bit too.
4) The post processing chain is very different for each camera, and each manufacturer characterises their camera differently. The best results are usually obtained with a the manufacturers’ own “special sauce” colour processing- for example the Hasselblad shots processed through Phocus look radically different from the default look that Aperture prefers. Either can be morph to the other without too much trouble if all you need is a vague resemblance- but getting an exact match can be almost impossible as there are so many variables to play with.
For video, the main task was to match the RED and the GoPro footage, which I did by shooting in a flat profile on the GoPro then using a filter called FilmConvert to interpret that as if it were Fujichrome Provia film, which gives a close rendition to the RED with my preferred settings. It isn’t exact- even having balanced the skin tones, there’s a warm/magenta cast to the RED footage and a green cast to the whites of the cove for the GoPro. There’s a limit to how much colour correction it is possible for me to do given that we have to produce one video a week for RE and SS 🙁 I could probably also tune it closer to the stills in post.
5) The output format is different, and again handles over and underexposure differently. For stills, its RAW -> 16 bit TIFFs in Prophoto RGB -> 8 bit JPEGS. The stills software is very smart at avoiding clipping highlights or creating bad colour artefacts, and very good at getting the colour balance spot on. For video, its REDcode RAW -> 10 bit ProRes 422 HQ in REC709 colour space -> highly compressed MP4 (and also in parallel to JPEGs for the framegrabs). On video, the clipping isn’t handled as well, and suffers from being stuffed into a restricted colour space at the first export step. REC709, the HD TV colour space standard, is a smaller colour space than Prophoto RGB and plays merry hell with highly saturated colours. It also has something called “superwhites”: values of white greater than 100% intensity. This makes no sense from a stills point of view, or really from a digital imaging point of view. It is a hold-older from analogue TV and from the way video signals are traditionally encoded into luminosity and two colour signals at lower resolution. Technically one isn’t supposed to exceed 100% white (“broadcast legal” signal) which doesn’t matter when one sees the video in isolation. Your eyes adjust to a dimmer white. But by comparison with the stills, where 100% white is likely to be driving your monitor as bright as it can go, the image is likely to look washed out.
So when one exports from this restricted colour space to JPEGs to get the framegrabs, all manner of monkey business has already been applied to the images. I put in a “one size fits all” correction when I make the JPEGs to remove the worst of the effect, but it never gets there exactly- it leaves some headroom, which is also a hold-over from the superwhites thing.
I’d love it if we could get rid of these hangovers from crappy analogue SD TV and just use a nice clean RGB full-range wide gamut colour space for video.
The colour differences and different lighting renditions bother me, but generally it is only an issue if you look at the images side to side comparing stills and video. I’d still love to shoot something in motion that really looks like an RE still. Generally the limiting factor is just the amount of light needed to get there- so I think I’ve probably got closest with golden hour daylight.
Cheers, Hywel.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by
Yes, that’s about the size of it. It’s happened often enough that I always take a backup camera with me.
It does have spin off benefits if the second camera has somewhat different strengths and weaknesses. The 7D has much (much much) better low light performance than the Hasselblad. That’s let me shoot available light sets in some circumstances where lighting for the Hasselblad would have been impractical or ruined the mood:
would have been tricky to shoot with Dave.
I also have a long-range zoom for the Canon which makes shooting in cramped or dirty conditions a lot easier than with the primes which are all I have for Dave. The Canon speedlight with a diffuser over the flash is a useful option to have around for fill in shots like the sunset ones of Penny Lee where we had to move fast, too. I’ve just never got around to getting the Hasselblad/Metz equivalent for Dave.
So generally I like to have a backup camera that complements the main camera… but failing that, I’d definitely keep hold of the old camera when you finally upgrade.
Cheers, Hywel.
Hi Sablesword,
It hasn’t happened that often. My original film Canon SLR died on a shoot and I had to cycle into town to buy a replacement (wife had the car), wasting a couple of hours of model’s shoot time.
The shutter mechanism gave up the ghost on one of the Canon dSLRs, 10D or something like that, but I was wise to it by that time and had kept the previous generation dSLR so just switched back to that. Those cameras were only rated to 100,000 shutter actuations or something so it was a fair cop, I had the shutter changed then flogged it and bought a new next-generation one. I think the same thing happened to a subsequent generation 10/20/30D camera too, which is when I moved on to the more pro-spec 5D Mark I.
The Hasselblad got cranky at the end of a long location shoot in Spain one time, I think we’d maybe jolted it because the autofocus calibration went out. Just switched to the 7D for the last day of the shoot and send Dave back to Scandinavia for a rest-cure.
So I always try to have a backup camera that’s capable of manual exposure control and hotshoe with me at every shoot. In recent times the 7D has also been the backup video camera in case Lady Scarlet plays up (which thus far she never has).
I’ve got a GF1 as a backup to the backup in case the 7D dies while Dave is getting fixed. Sure, the images won’t be as lovely, but a 16 megapixel image on a micro-four-thirds camera is a hell of a lot better than trying to shoot with an iPhone with studio flash.
As to why only the Hasselblad and the RED have names- you’ll have to ask Kate. She was the one who started calling Dave by name 🙂
I’m thinking it is time to replace the 7D though, I’ve never really fallen in love with its ergonomics despite it being a very capable performer. Dpending on what Canon come up with in the next few months, I might just pick up a second hand 5D Mark II. I’ve used Steve’s a few times and it is one of the nicest cameras I’ve ever shot with.
Cheers, Hywel
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This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by
Oooh, oh, in all the excitement of moving house and getting broadband I clean forgot.
I just remembered, came in to post them, and saw your post. Don’t be sad!Sorry! Here we go!
And in the archives:
Hi,
Should be there now. Let me now if there are any problems. Must have “moved” rather than “copied” the JPEG for the icon or something.
Apologies, Hywel
Hi,
That’s odd… it doesn’t seem to be there. I will find it and add back to the set. Apologies.
Hywel.
Well, there’s the original dance videos – slavegirl dance plus the “individual” dance performances. I’ll bring those back in the archives, think I just queued them for August in fact (I’m working a long way ahead to try and allow for time-out from internet if/when we move house).
Cheers, Hywel.
Here are the pics:
Hard to get meaningful numbers, Sablesword.
Running my “standard” search for models with references within a sane distance who advertise as being happy to do bondage and nude work generated approx. 450 portfolios on one of the larger UK model/photographer portfolio sites.
Running the same thing for just “bondage” generated about 650.
For bondage and topless, it was 480.
For just nude it was over 1000 (couldn’t get an exact number).
Not all models are on this site (which is one of the few with a specific bondage category).
Not all models who are happy to work with us advertise themselves as shooting bondage. Being happy to shoot with Restrained Elegance or Models Tied or Bondage Cafe is not the same as being willing to shoot it with just any old guy with camera.
Not all models who are happy shooting nude and bondage are happy to shoot nude whilst in bondage.
Really there are no hard and fast rules.
Each model is an independent contractor who only takes on shoots which appeal to her.
Each model we employ is a contractor who we’ve decided to risk paying for a shoot in the hope she will be on the same wavelength as us and produce some stunning photos.
It hard to guess from a model’s portfolio whether she will be on the same wavelength as us. After 13+ years, the best I have come up with are the following heuristics, none of which are hard-and-fast rules:
– Models who are happy to work to nude are often more comfortable with posing generally, and give us more scope for shooting different ideas. Models who do much more explicit work are often pretty laid back, but not always. (Plenty of exceptions, Paige Robbins being a prime example- stunning, awesome at posing, very flexible, great bondage brain, but very conservative about nudity. Wouldn’t have missed out on shooting her for the world).
– Models who contact me get a brownie point and at least make me look at their portfolio. If they’ve contacted me with something other than a form letter which implies they actually have looked at our work and like it, they get two brownie points.
– Models who have a lot of variety of styles in the portfolios are often more versatile.
– Models whose portfolio shots are all very heavily photoshopped, or all from one or two photographers, raise a red flag. (Less so if they say they are new and have contacted me, but still a bit warning sign).
– Models who have a variety of facial expressions in their portfolio get several brownie points.
– Models with bad photos in their portfolio get a red flag. If they have no eye for a good photo, I’m concerned. Exception: models who post no-makeup-no-photoshop shots deliberately get a brownie point.
– As Ariel said, models with extensive tattoos get a red flag. (As always there are exceptions: Natalia K!)
– Models with lots of positive references get a brownie point, but we’ve worked with models who have lots of references with whom we totally failed to click.
– Models with really eye-catching images that I’ve seen around and not twigged who the model was get several brownie points when I spot those memorable images in their portfolios.
– Previous bondage experience doesn’t count for much to us. If the model is happy to give it a go and is expressive, whole-hearted and really goes for it on set, the results can be very strong, whereas a jaded been-there-seen-it-got-the-t-shirt lifestyler can generate lacklustre images.
– In fact I’d generally say that lifestyler models raise a red flag. We are creating artistic images, not delivering satisfying bondage experiences, and sometimes those expectations collide. Professional models are used to putting up with a modest amount of discomfort in their daily work life (eg cold studio floors) and have experience of delivering the required performance even in challenging situations. Sometimes lifestyler models forget that we are paying them to do a job and a few elements that aren’t in line with their ideal personal fantasies are entirely reasonable given that we are paying them to help with realising our vision, not vice versa.
– Lots of negative words in their portfolio profile raises a red flag. The portfolio is a pro model’s shop window, and you should use it to make people enthusiastic about the possibility of shooting with you.
– Ultimately, the decision on who to book is made on an emotional level: would I like to see photos of that person tied up? Do I think they will be fun and interesting? Do I keep coming back to their portfolio for a second look? Are there shots in their portfolio I wish I had taken? When I think about a shoot plan, do I have lots of ideas to try, or am I scrabbling around for something that I’d rather shoot with one of our regular models?
It’s not a very scientific process, given that each shoot is a serious investment of money, time and energy. (A typical shoot day comes in at about 500 pounds in cold cash, plus a day of time in advance to plan and maybe four days afterwards to process, write stories, backup, edit videos, etc.. )
But I’m not much a business person when it comes to Restrained Elegance. I make the stuff I want to see, that I’m excited to shoot. Which is why it ultimately comes down to the emotional decision- do I want to see photos of that girl in bondage? Am I excited and filled with ideas to try with her?
Cheers, Hywel
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This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by
Hi Wrapturist,
Yes, I’d be very happy for you to do that! All I’d ask is that the models aren’t portrayed doing anything they didn’t actually do (e.g. not adding sexual contact) as I know that’s something some models are worried about.
Cheers, Hywel
I don’t get it either- I’ll have to ask Ariel. She wrote the stories for most of the sets this month for the first time…
I also find that I can eyeball one or two flash units, but three or more and I reach for the meter.
And similarly I find that to get what the meter reads isn’t necessarily what the camera sees. I’ve found setting my meter at ISO 64 gives me more like the exposure the camera needs when the camera is set at ISO 100.
Could be several reasons for that but it doesn’t really matter so long as it is consistent from shot to shot and across the exposure range you use. So I just leave my meter set to ISO 80 and set the lights accordingly.
If you test and you find that the offset is reasonably consistent from f/2.8 to f/11 or whatever range you use, just dial in compensation or set a different ISO and you’re good to go.
Cheers, Hywel
Hi,
Those are all very good suggestions. I will implement as many of them as I can as soon as we’ve figured out the server move. Elegance Studios (and this forum) should just have moved to its new server, so this post is also a test to see if it shows up.
Some of the suggestions may need input from the billing company- don’t hold your breath for those, they can be glacially slow to implement new features (sensibly so, given that it is dealing with personal and credit card info- they have a much stricter testing regime than I can manage for the bits of RE that I update myself!)
Cheers, Hywel
Duly noted! 🙂
It may be a while though, I just stacked up a bunch of archive updates.
Cheers, Hywel.
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