As you say, the Classic Restrained Elegance cart contains the first 15 years of the site. Since the site is now 19 years old, that leaves 4 years of material (and growing) not on the Classic Restrained Elegance cart. But they are available! They are on the eStore here:
https://estore.surfnetcorp.com/store/elegancestudios/index.cfm

Some of those sets are coming around in archives, on the same sort of schedule as they usually do, which is that I start bringing them back a year or two after they finish their run as new sets on the members’ area. All of them will come back into the members’ archive eventually if you stay a member.

In the meantime you can purchase these “lost treasures” any time you like from the eStore. They are 50% off for the next couple of days in celebration of our birthday, in fact.

Best regards,

Hywel Phillips

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by  Hywel.

Thank you!

Fingers crossed, it all seems to be going well so far.

Stay safe,

Cheers, Hywel

Ahh, the new MacPro is too expensive for me to consider for the moment. With the UK pound exchange rate the way it is, it’s just completely unaffordable, and I’m not sure the performance gains over my current set-up of two iMacs would justify the cost.

Furthermore the latest version of MacOS finally and conclusively breaks some software on which I (still) rely- Aperture and the “old way” of handling REDcode RAW video files.

I’ve moved away from Aperture for most things but still find it by far the most efficient tool for the final retouch pass. And I’m sure there is a new way of handling REDcode files, but I really like the way the current workflow decouples editing and grading.

And MacOS Catalina is buggy as hell by most accounts, too. Ariel’s new laptop runs it I think and it keeps spewing random crap when she tries to print anything on the shared printer which has just worked for about a dozen different Macs over the years and now suddenly breaks.

So I’m not going to update my computing and especially my MacOS until I’m forced to.

Cheers, Hywel

Glad you enjoyed them!

I need to get a new set-up actually.

I used to use a DataSpyder to calibrate my screen and eyeball it from that, then periodically check it by looking at some of my images on random devices (friend’s windows PCs, laptops, phones, etc.)

But the workflow got pretty crappy and the thing is so old that I don’t think it runs with modern versions of MacOS. I’ve been coasting on the basis that my Mac monitors don’t seem to drift all that much, and the Hasselblad in particular has very good colour stability

So I should invest a new system, especially as I’ve just switched to using Lightroom and Photoshop for the raw conversion and skin smoothing steps for Sony files, and Lightroom’s colour treatment is WAAAAAY funkier on skin tones than Hasselblad’s or Apple’s. So I might need to make some custom profiles. I’m looking at the ColorMunki stuff based around a ColorChecker Passport.

If you go that route, please could you post and let us know your experiences?

Cheers, Hywel

Yes it has been a while since we worked with Penny – we did a week-long shoot with her some time ago and we’ve nearly got through the updates, so I should book her again soon. We live on opposite sides of the country now so it’s a bit of long haul to get her over here, but hopefully we can figure something out over the summer.

I’ve also wound down the Game of Slaves updates, having finished the arcs on the few parallel stories I’d planned. Did people enjoy it? Should we do another round of Game of Slaves shoots?

Cheers, Hywel

To be honest I’ve always just shoved everything in my cabin bag and hoped they don’t check the weight. I do tend to offload everything else into my pockets (phone, kindle, headphones, etc.) so that the cabin baggage is clearly just a camera case

What I will say is that I’ve tried various bridge or small camera combos over the years and none of them have ever really lived up to the promises. The image quality always takes too much of a knock for me. They always end up getting left at home after one or two unsatisfactory outings.

Nowadays I always just go with my primary A7 R II or III and economise on the lens choice according to what weight limits you have. I find even the relatively cheap and cheerful Sony 24-240 mm superzoom, paired with the high resolution of the A7RII, gives significantly better results over a wide focal length range without being over-heavy.

This is the combination I ended up using a lot of the time for mountain photography, where weight is also at a premium especially when lugging a tent up a mountain as well as camera and tripod.

780 g lens + 625 g camera (probably plus battery) = pretty much OK for a 5 kg weight limit.

Or the 24-105mm f/4 which is a shade lighter, and probably better optically. (I very much wanted the longer focal lengths for mountains myself).

If you need to get even lighter and don’t need the extreme focal lengths (eg for more street photography) most mount systems will do you a pancake lens; the Sony/Samyang 35mm f/2.8 options come in around 120g (Sony) or 85g (Samyang). I’ve got the Samyang and it works just fine- cheap and cheerful and about the lightest option there is. The Sony 28mm f/2 which is my choice for really lightweight situations is only 200g and is a really cracking lens, especially for the price.

If A doesn’t like Sony, there are similar options for Canon/Nikon/etc of course.

So my advice is use your regular camera body and get a lightweight lens for the occasion. Or take the opportunity to get a lightweight spare body if your main camera is a hulking great pro dSLR- a 6D Mark II is only 765 g. A 80D or second-hand 70D is even lighter, and the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 is a great option for regular shooting at only 645g for a 28-90ish equivalent.

An RX10 IV is 1095 g and honestly I don’t think the weight saving on these sorts of cameras is worth taking the hit on smaller sensor.

The only reason I’d maybe change my mind is if I were primarily going to be shooting wildlife, in which case the reach of a 600mm equivalent lens is hard to beat.

But even in that case I’d be very tempted by a Sony 100-400mm lens plus the 35mm Samyang or 28mm Sony f/2 for everything else out and about. Total weight 2.3 kg including battery, which again should be doable in a 5 kg allowance.

There are just so many more ways to make a flexible shooting kit. I often take the 24-240mm plus one specialist lens- say a 12mm fisheye or 14mm f/2.8 for astrophotography as on a trip to Norway last year.

So I’d say standard SLR/CSC body, one lens for general use, one lens for whatever specialist subject you think you are most likely to be shooting.

Cheers, Hywel

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by  Hywel.

I use it as a light shaper, mostly to stop light falling on bits of the scene I don’t want to. It’s basically like flexible, reshapable barn doors. Actually I just ran out, I should buy another roll- the last one lasted me at least a decade. I like that it is possible to attach it to almost any light fitting with a bit of bending and pushing or at most a clothes-peg or a bit of gaffer tape.

You can also cut holes in it and put it over the front a hard light to cast interesting shadows, that’s not really my lighting style but it works well with something like a Fresnel spotlight or a reflector on a flash head if you want to have some streaks of light across a background or something. (You need to be a bit careful of heat buildup with continuous tungsten lights but it is fine for LED and flash).

Cheers, Hywel

Shot 07049 – 38 mm full length, not particularly tilted up or down, flat on lighting as you say.
Not as flattering as I’d maybe like in an ideal world- it’s not the most flattering on her thighs,
but conversely she’s not posing either, it’s a test/behind the scenes shot. In an ideal world I’d
have moved backwards and shot on my face 85mm focal length, but as you know in the dungeon
there’s walls and doors and so forth in the way, so sometimes one compromises.

Shot 07074 – 24 mm full length. There’s definitely some distortion to my eyes in that shot, her bum
looks a bit big, her legs a bit short. It’s on the borderlines of what I’d consider acceptable myself, but
there’s no absolute criterion I’m afraid. 07079 has definitely got big head small feet distortion going on,
and is only borderline acceptable for my personal tastes. I probably left them in because:

A) the whole set is quite stylised with the blue lighting etc. so isn’t meant to have a particularly natural or
neutral rendition.

B) I tend to accept more distortion with the dungeon because of the physical constraints of the space.

C) It wasn’t bad enough for me to throw the photo away at first glance, and I learned years ago that
being over-selective on photos for full photosets can end up short-changing customers who are
place different emphasis on what’s OK and what’s not. When I did an experiment a very long time
ago with a full set of 36 images (from a roll of slide film) and with just the 20 or so I’d selected.
pretty much everybody preferred seeing all 36 images, even if some were to my eyes less than optimal.
That even applied to focus being in places which I don’t like – if I’ve accidentally focussed on fingernails
where I was aiming for eyes or cuffs, I leave the shot in because the fingernail fans might love it beyond
all others in the set. So I only throw stuff away if there’s a gross error – nothing sharp, or nothing on the girl
or the bondage sharp, or excessive camera shake, flash didn’t fire, gross over or under exposure etc..

D) There’s a sense in which I guess I intend my photos to be seen as sets, rather than as
individual shots too, so I’ll keep stuff in if it tells a story or is the only shot of a certain angle or
style in the set (eg the only landscape shot or the only closeup of something).

E) By the looks of it, later on in the set I’ve decided to embrace it and go for weird angles,
probably emboldened by standing in places I don’t usually stand in in the dungeon. For example
DSC07151 has big old head small feet distortion made deliberately more stylised by the cock-eyed
composition. I personally accept the distortions more easily in that sort of shot than in a
“normally composed” shot which looks like it is trying to be more lifestyley/naturalistic. I may
even have decided “oh, I can shoot from inside the dungeon with this lens, I wonder how that
looks?” (My memory is in no way up to recalling what I was actually thinking BTW, so this
is all pure post-hoc figuring out the process by reverse engineering looking at the shots I took).

F) If I need to keep the number of photos in the set up and I’ve cocked up and need to
keep as many shots as possible (doubt it was the case here).

G) It was a mistake – I was doing exactly what I warn people about using a zoom at its
widest setting, and I should have removed the shots but didn’t for some reason. I do tend
to process and leave shots in and learn my lessons for the next set, rather than be too
cruel on culling a set with errors. See C) and recall that none of this actually goes through my
mind in a cold blooded way when I shoot- I evolved the “focal lengths from hell” rule through
trial and error, making mistakes and figuring out ways to avoid making them without noticing
in future, like only using prime lenses and never going below 35mm if I could possibly help it!

Sensibilities are different I guess when aiming for single shots, especially if the shots are to be
submitted to individual comment or judging. I guess because we all recognise that photographs can
have whacky distortion, everybody is probably different in what sorts of distortion they find
aesthetically pleasing and what sorts or what amounts they dislike? I’ve not thought about
it particularly deeply before, beyond my own rule of thumb which I sometimes break when
I feel like it or the physical situation seems to call for it.

So I’d rather guess that there isn’t any rule which can guide you, beyond the general
rules of thumb. Shoot for oneself and if it doesn’t bother you well why should one care
what other people think about it, really? One can learn technique from others of course,
and emulate artistic works we like and find out how they were created, but technique
segues into artistic choice pretty quickly when you start digging deeper.

I’ve been very lucky that my personal bondage artistic vision appeals to enough people that I can
make a living from it, but I didn’t start doing it to appeal to others. (Parenthetically,
it looks like my landcape photography does not appeal to others enough for me to
make a living from it, at least not with my (utter lack of) salesmanship and woeful
marketing ability,

It’s nice when it does appeal to others but I don’t really care when it doesn’t.
I’m going to keep doing landscape photography for my own pleasure, like I have been
since I was a teenager.

The sort of photos that do the rounds at local photography club competitions
usually send me right to sleep. There’s nothing wrong with them. The judges are
usually all very correct and nit—picking and to my personal tastes utterly fail
to spot a work of art with an ability to provoke an emotional response in me.
But maybe they get the same thrill from a well-turned macro shot of a screw
focus stacked to get a completely sharp photo of something completely boring
that I get from a mountain sunset or a girl in barefoot bondage. I dunno. It seems
to appeal to plenty of people, and if they are having fun, fantastic! I’m probably just projecting
my hatred of competitions in general and hatred of closed group art competitions in particular.

I don’t mean to diss photography groups, they’re just not my thing. I managed a single
meeting of the local Welshpool group. I was more patient in my younger days when Kate
dragged me to a few in the early days at Paul’s group in Reading, back in 2001 or something like that,
but she lasted a lot longer there than I did.

Cheers, Hywel

Yes, totally! My knees tell me about the need to keep doing this when I’ve done several shoot days in a row, but there’s just no getting around the fact that shooting from waist height causes less geometrical distortion and therefore looks better, most of the time. Knee height looks good too (it makes people look heroic, and Hollywood uses it all the time for that reason).

Annoyingly, the photographer on-the-floor distortion (bigger feet, smaller head) looks quite nice as long as it isn’t too overdone, which is a literal pain in the neck to shoot. But does nice things to long legs 🙂

One other time I reach for the 28 mm lens is shooting overhead stuff, where the length of my arms may be the limiting factor. This produces something of the big head small feet distortion, but also I think tends to make the model look big-eyed and anime-waif-like, so usually works for BDSM. Love shooting in spaces where it is possible to get proper overhead shots with an 85mm lens, but there aren’t many of them around!

The other main time I reach for 28 mm is shooting video on a handheld gimbal. Much though I’d like to be able to use a 55mm lens, it’s just too hard to get the framing right when grabbing unrehearsed shots of a moving model with a lens that tight and get focus something like right too. The 28mm gives more forgiving depth of field and wider field of view whilst allowing one to get close enough to produce some separation from the background (a bit from boken, but more from parallax as the camera moves).

Interesting discussion chaps, thanks. Have decided on next shoot to practice using the funkier focal lengths in my lens case for 20 shots at the end of each set, to see what I can come up with using stuff like a 14mm f/2.8, 300 mm f/5.6 catadioptric or 180mm macro lens.

Cheers, Hywel

I can recommend top-to-bottom, the ones I have have lasted a good 15 years so far, they are tough and really comfortable. They also size them more for girls than for large men, if that is a consideration- I’ve found a lot of products online tend to be too large, and Fetters in particular traditionally catered more to the gay male market and therefore everything was very chunky and too large for RE models.

Gags and blindfolds I will have to defer to Ariel’s expertise on, although the blackout contact lenses worked pretty well.

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

I think I’ve replied directly via Email to the first question, but in case I haven’t… your forum membership is independent of your website members’ area membership. You can stay and post and read stuff here on the forum regardless of whether you are current an RE member or not. The usernames are independent.

Unfortunately, there’s no new material of Belle- she retired about 10 years ago!

Cheers, Hywel Phillips

The AL sets were shot for me by Alexander Lightspear in Sibera (under my direction of course, and I do all the post-production too).

There’s no plan to go back and assign RE or AL numbers to older sets.

It’s actually my filing system for sets straight from shoots, which I’ve been using since about 2013. I finally got a bit confused with my old filing system names for sets on the members’ area, so decided to switch to using my previously-private filing system ID’s for sets as they go up on the site.

It was done originally to make it easy for me to keep track of sets as they were shot, in chronological order. That’s the most relevant thing for my backups and processing.

Videos have a reference number as well, starting VID. Silk Soles sets start with SS. Old sets unprocessed at the time I made the switchover were given an OLD reference number. Customs have CUS reference, Femme Domme Monologues an FDM reference, bastinado a BAST reference, etc.

The digits are not unique- there will be an RE0234_set and an AL0234_set and a VID0234_video, and these will be unrelated.

Indeed, it is possible that somewhere I might have made a cock-up and have sets with the same initial ID: it’s possible that I got the file name wrong on location and failed to spot it or fix it before the sets got into the processing/backup/off-site backup pipeline.

But the whole set name with RE_number_model_setdescription will definitely be unique.

The longer file names might actually be causing some problems with the site voting scripts- we’re investigating this at the moment. Fix one problem, create another… 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by  Hywel.