Hi Andrew and Mikki!

For tying with, natural fibres are generally the easiest. They have more “bite” which means that the knots stay tied and the ropes are less likely to slide, slip or pull through and tighten. Most riggers seem to prefer hemp, and Twisted Monk is the best supplier we’ve found. The drawbacks are:

1) Tends to leave more pronounced rope marks.
2) Will not take the really bright colours, so only available in fairly earthy shades.
3) Can be expensive.
4) In theory, needs care- oiling after washes, etc. In practice this hasn’t turned out to be much of a hardship.

Nylon is horrid to tie with, slippery, slidy, no bite, some batches seem to be a bit stiff for a long while too. But… it is available in super vibrant colours, which really suits the Restrained Elegance look. When it does soften up, I think it is kinder to the skin than hemp, too.

We get ours from http://www.rainbowrope.com
Buy the 6 mm solid braid MFP (1/4 inch) stuff, the thicker variants I found tend to be stiffer and not hold the knots well. I tend to buy a couple of hundred metres at a time because the colour does vary from batch to batch. Import duties, VAT etc. need to be paid so as usual I’d reckon on the final price in pounds being about what the numerical dollar price initially looks to be. (i.e. $100 ends up as £100 by the time you’ve paid all the taxes).

The red hemp rope from Twisted Monk is a deeper colour than the scarlet from Rainbow Rope, but actually is the closest in colour of any of the hemps to the vibrancy of the nylon. If I were to buy any one batch for play myself, I think I’d get a selection of the red hemp from Twisted Monk. It looks like this:

and it is really nice to tie with once it has softened up a little.

Yup, Ariel’s just bought a reel of cotton rope of her very own to experiment with. I’ll ask her to report back on how she finds it when she’s had a go at rigging with it.

Cheers, Hywel.

I’m going to ‘fess up here: I don’t find these mummy bags sexy myself. Ariel is super-keen, and I can see there are lots of ideas and suggestions, and they don’t cost very much. So yes, happy to give it a go.

Buuuuuuut…. I’m going to need more than the usual amount of help from you guys and girls to tell me what to concentrate on when we shoot it. What do we need to do/emphasise about it to make it a sexy photoset or video for you?

I like the sealed-inside-by-an-Alien idea, and I can see struggling and stretching the fabric to get out. How do we make it sexy when we can’t really see the girl much- do we need to shoot plenty of shots before she’s put into the bag? Should she be tied up before she goes in the bag? (I have no idea how tough these things are- would she be able to claw her way out if she’s not tied up?)

What about if she is standing up under the metal pole in the black studio like she’s dangling from it, with a rope or chain coming from the bondage around her body to the pole?

I think maybe it should be a video rather than stills, so you can see her struggling and hear the noises? Otherwise it might look a bit like a shop dummy in a bag? 🙂 Is that a good way to go about shooting the idea?

Cheers, Hywel.

I hadn’t commented because I read it and thought “uh, sounds good, but to really figure it out I need someone to try it on” and HRH Mrs. Ariel has been out 13+ hours a day working.

We’ll give it a go next time she’s around and at one of the shoots early next year.

Cheers, Hywel.

Whoops.

Sorry, just clean forgot to do the previews!

As you said, it has been a bit of a distracting month. Still struggling to catch up on the email mountain and jobs which had been put off while we were getting married and away on honeymoon.

(Apologies to anyone who has sent me an email which needs a thoughtful response, too- I will get to it ASAP).

Anyway, without further ado, here are the October previews!

Cheers, Hywel.

And in the archives:

Ahhhh, Charlie’s Angels! Yum!

🙂

Sometimes, we don’t even know how a film is going to turn out. There are so many little decisions and practical things that affect the tone that sometimes we don’t know what mood we’ll end up with until we’ve finished the edit.

For this video, I think the original intention was to play it straight as a kidnap scenario, but as soon as Anita appeared in the Madonna-esque bra it was clear that we were going to be going for something a bit more high-camp. Only when we saw the edit did we realise that Scarlot’s relative lack of struggles to permit the cutting clothes off bit to be done safely lent itself to a semi-consensual scenario. So we edited the film with that subtext in mind, rather than trying to drama it up and cut out bits of shot where Scarlot didn’t seem to be protesting enough. We could have dropped screams over the top and cut the film with much more aggressive, fast-paced short cuts and a more intense soundtrack if we’d decided to go the opposite way, the footage just naturally seemed to lead in a less realistic, higher camp direction!

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it, and glad it was worth hiring the van!

Cheers, Hywel.

I was turned off BDSM group activities by a trip to Torture Garden in London, way back in the mists of time when Ariel and I went to one (we weren’t together then- we were researching our first movie project!) It was a scattergun collection of people in an obnoxiously loud nightclub with a public play room you could hardly have swung a cat in if you’d wanted to. I know that’s not how all events are.

I did quite enjoy BondCon when I went to one in New York a decade or so ago… but clearly not enough to have gone to anything similar since, and the memory of a transatlantic flight home with food poisoning kinda soured me on the experience a bit.

My problem with these events is that I hate unstructured aimless milling around time with strangers (a.k.a. “parties”, if you are less introverted than me). An event with lots of interesting panels and workshops and tutorials and events would interest me, but anything with hours of “social time” in the program is not going to be my thing. It was the same when I used to go to the odd Science Fiction convention- anything with gaping holes in the program for “room parties” was a red light for me.

Add to that the fact that I don’t particularly want to play in public, or watch other people play, and I’m afraid there’s not a great deal of appeal.

So for me anything calling itself a party is probably not my scene. But an organized series of workshops or tutorials would be fun.

Cheers, Hywel.

The delay is not significant for normal studio use in either radio or IR systems. You’re looking for the start of a great big signal, and you can do that easily and cheaply with electronics that responds at sub milliseconds timing. The electronics isn’t doing anything complicated, just
REPEAT (check input)
UNTIL (input jumps up by enough to trigger)
Fire flash

And that’s basically the same whether you are triggering from sync cord, IR or radio. Only the delay in sending the original signal will be different because IR has to trigger a flash and radio has to send a radio “beep”.

Here’s a test:

http://photo.net/photography-lighting-equipment-techniques-forum/00ZpwE

showing that the pocket wizard system introduces delays around 0.7 milliseconds, or around 1/1500 th of a second. That’s not likely to be the limiting factor for most shooting setups. It might come into play if you were using ultra-short shutter speeds with extremely short duration flash. Presumably guys that need 1/4000th of a second exposures would be using kit with faster response times.

Most digital SLRs do indeed still have the two-curtain sync system which limits the flash sync speed. They make their exposure by firing two curtains- the first one opens the shutter, the second one closes it again. To generate short exposures, they fire the second curtain closer and closer to the first one. At around about their flash sync speed, there’s no longer a time when the whole aperture is fully open- the second curtain starts to close the shutter before the first curtain has cleared the top of the frame. This is cheating- it makes short exposures by making a strip of light which it moves across the sensor, rather than by just opening the whole shutter up at one go.

Flash is generally fast compared with this, so you get a “band” or see the shadow of second curtain starting to close if you exceed the sync speed. Actually with the Canon dSLRs we generally turned it down from 1/200th (the nominal sync speed) to 1/160th because in a few studios we started to get second curtain shadowing:
http://www.restrainedelegance.com/members/kendrapinkknickershandcuffs1/full/re9_08042009_IMG_0135.jpg
(Which shows me I didn’t do a good enough job getting rid of it in post processing- bad form, Hywel 🙁 🙁 )

Medium format cameras traditionally have leaf shutters in the lenses, which open a circular hole. They aren’t capable of shutter speeds as fast as a two-curtain focal plane shutter (typically 1/800th of a second) but at least they are fully open when they are open, and so can sync with flash at any shutter speed. With our Hasselblad you have to adjust the exposure a little at 1/800th (because the leaf shutter works like having a smaller aperture while it is opening and closing, so a bit less light gets through than you’d expect) but the system is entirely robust and allows us to use 1/400th of a second or faster routinely. This helps with sharpness.

More recently, dSLR’s have started using a combination of electronic and physical shutters. These can sync up to very high speeds in principle- they open the physical shutter for say 1/125th of a second but only read out the chip for for a very short time. Using this for fast flash sync is outside their intended use so might be a bit hit and miss but there are reports of cameras being successfully used with studio flash at 1/8000th of a second or faster: shorter than the duration of most flashes. That’s a place where timing issues on triggers could start to creep in.

Cheers, Hywel.

Hi Lurker,

I don’t use them often, but when you need them, they’re invaluable. As you’ve found, studio flash can be just too damn powerful sometimes.

There are alternatives- notably buying some ND or diffusion gel and putting it in front of the flash can work. I do this sometimes, because I have a stack of gels for colour temperature effects and it didn’t cost much to buy a sheet of ND as well. I just clip it up between the umbrella reflector and the dome of the flash head with wooden clothes pegs. If you can find somewhere to buy a sheet of ND as a one off this will probably be your cheapest option, too. You could even try a very poor man’s version by putting some tin foil with a hole in it in the way to try to cut down a bit of light.

If buying ND for the front of the lens, I’d consider getting something like the Cokin filter holder system which will let you use the same filters on multiple lenses. In particular this is very useful for ND grad filters which are very useful for subtly taming too-bright skies. Not something it sounds like you’re concerned with at the moment, but worth considering for the future. You have to take good care of these plastic or resin square filters but kept in their boxes they last decades- I’m still using ones I bought to go with my Pentax P30 20 years ago!

If you’ve only got one or two lenses with the same front filter screw diameter a screw-in filter might be worth considering but they tend to be expensive and (paradoxically) in my experience they’re actually more prone to scratches and destruction than the resin squares are, perhaps because they’re more likely to get unfastened and thrown into a bag. They tend to be more expensive.

If you want to go to more extreme filtration (like 3 or 4 stops) I gather it is worth investing in ND filters which also reject infrared. These are more expensive but otherwise you can get into problems with IR contamination causing bad colour shifts especially in the shadows and on man-made fabrics.

I have a couple of ND filters and a couple of graduated ND filters which are quite useful for shooting outside especially for video. If we ended up doing that regularly I’d probably go for the ultimate in filter technology and buy a matte box, which has slots for filters. That circumvents the issues with flare and glare you can sometimes get by putting a sheet of not very optically clever dark stuff in front of a nice expensive anti-flare multi-coated lens…

In your position I’d definitely try clipping ND gel to the flash head before messing around with filters on the lens. It is likely to be cheaper and less likely to compromise the quality you get at the camera.

Cheers, Hywel.