I’m afraid we don’t do anything! They all live in a big box together, not very carefully packed. I guess they get oiled naturally every time we shoot a set where the model has baby oil or moisturiser on her skin, but we don’t clean or polish them specifically and I’d expect them to be duller than average because they must get a bit knocked about when we transport everything to shoots.

My suspicion is that it may be to do with the lighting- if you see the reflection of a great big white softbox in the cuffs, they are going to look like shining mirrors. But otherwise, try oiling the cuffs up with a very light coating of a light mineral oil like baby oil and see if that achieves the desired finish?

Cheers, Hywel.

HI Lurker (and anonanonanon7),

Welcome to the obsessive-about-photographic-quality bondage photographers’ club 😉

I think you can see a big step forward going from the compact to the dSLR and improved lighting. The main thing you now have is control, rather than being stuck with the best the camera could do on auto 🙂 🙂 🙂

I’d play around with the lighting ratios a bit- maybe try using the shoot through umbrella as they key light instead of the fill, and turn the fill down a bit. Shoot-throughs are usually more light efficient than bounce umbrellas and usually also produce a slightly harder light with more defined shadows, which is usually what one wants for the key- it should be the brighter of the two lights and also the harder.

Some sort of hairlight or backlight would help too of course. Hotel rooms can be a pig to light because it can be hard to get any back light in. I sometimes put a small light on a boom or a clamp stand somewhere in the background- depending how fast you shoot, even a small regular flashgun on manual can produce a nice hairlight as long as it can trigger from the main system somehow. If and when funds permit, buying a third light that is small enough and agile enough to be used as a hairlight would complement your existing lighting rig nicely.

To answer the question about how dSLRs handle white balance, and the benefits of shooting raw. Raw files store the unprocessed data from the imaging chip (more or less- most camera’s processors do a bit of work on the data, compressing it losslessly like a ZIP file for example). As you say, raw files store the full dynamic range of the image (not the 8 bits of JPEG) and also allow you to put off several choices until post-processing. Most notable of those choices is the choice of what white balance and tone curves to apply.

Setting white balance on the camera makes no difference to what the per-pixel data in the raw file are. It just sets a data word in the file suggesting to the raw processing software that maybe it should start off by treating this image as if it were daylight balanced (or whatever). So it is just setting a switch in the metadata, which will enable you to change your mind in post processing, either because you cocked up, or because you want to do something else for dramatic effect.

Raw also allows you to get the benefit of all that extra dynamic range and decide exactly which bits of the range you are interested in. You can then map the linear response of the sensor into a file suitable for viewing by humans on computer monitors by an appropriate choice of tone curves. If you shoot JPEG, you usually control that through a choice of scene file (“natural” look, “saturated” look, etc.) But that information gets “baked in” to a JPEG, along with the white balance choice, and with only 8 bits of range, if you get the choice wrong, you’ve probably thrown away any chance to change your mind, see a bit more detail in the shadows, etc..

I would recommend anyone serious about their photography to shoot raw these days. In the early days of the site we shot in JPEG, which seemed to make sense at the time as storage space and card space was relatively expensive and the dynamic range benefits were not so marked for older cameras anyway, as they didn’t have such great sensors. But with Terabytes of data storage available for less than a hundred pounds, 16 GB cards routinely available, and the much better sensors in modern cameras it makes no sense to throw away information until the very last step in the processing chain.

One of the things I’m really hoping for over the next few years is the continuation of this trend to video capture. Our new video camera is lovely, but it is kinda crippled by being limited to shooting 8 bits with baked-in white balance and scene files- essentially the equivalent of shooting JPEGs, and JPEGs with pretty low quality settings at that. RED have produced a moderately affordable (for “buying a swanky new car” values of affordable!) system which records to something a bit like RAW for video, and I’m really hoping that they and their competitors keep developing this sort of technology until it is available in a more sensible package. (Or that the recession finally ends, people start spending again, and we can maybe look at hiring an actual digital cinema system at least for major video shoots… 🙂 🙂 🙂 )

Cheers, Hywel

Update… Steve, Ariel and I just had a viewing of the rough cuts of Haunted and Slave Auction.

Both are looking good, but Steve and I both ended up with two pages of notes for fine tuning, and Slave Auction needs finishing the rough cut as well. Steve’s got everything he needs to finish hopefully, so that should come along as soon as he has time, but I need to shoot a few inserts and record some more soundtrack stuff as well as editing the last few scenes of the films.

So we’re hoping to get the films out on a timescale of a month or so, but we’re definitely going to take the time to do it right so don’t hold us to that!

Cheers, Hywel

There are two movies in post production at Elegance Studios. Slave Auction, which I’m editing, and Haunted, which Steve has kindly taken over editing in order to get it done in something like a reasonable time scale.

I’ve about 80% through Slave Auction with the rough cut edit. I need to spend two or three days to finish it, which I hope to be able to do in the next week or two. I also need to shoot a few pick-up shots but other than that I think I have everything I need (except time to do it!)

Haunted – Steve said he was about 60% of the way through the rough cut. Then he’ll need to go through and do colour correction/grading/beauty pass to make it all look at its best, then finish off with a few effects shots.

On the plus side, this week Ariel has discovered the joys of video editing and has been going great guns- so the videos from our recent shoot with Pandora Blake are pretty much edited already! Having an extra person able to contribute on the editing will be a big benefit. As Ariel has discovered, video editing is creative, absorbing and fun but absolutely cannot be done in a day filled with distractions.

As the boss, I have a lot of different tasks to juggle – including lots of mundane but necessary production stuff like taking care of all the arranging of shoots, doing the paperwork, customer and technical assistance if people are having problems, website software updates, accounts, doing the taxes, and all that sort of stuff. It is the intrusion of those sorts of things that can make it hard to find a concentrated spell of time to edit demanding projects like the Elegance Studios films, especially as we are obviously still shooting and editing for RE updates all the time too.

So hopefully having three of us able to contribute on the editing should make a lot of difference!

More news on the release schedule for Elegance Studios soon, I hope!

Cheers, Hywel.

🙂 The last two posts are a classic illustration of the problem every website faces – can’t please all the people all of the time!

We’ll continue to have a mix of love bondage and damsel-in-distress bondage themes 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

Well I hope we can tempt you to join- the only way we can continue to produce photos and videos is for enough people to join to see them!

The back content is still rotated. There are several reasons for that (see previous forum posts and the site FAQ) but briefly we rotate because it keeps the site fresh and keeps a lid on the bandwidth consumption to make sure that people don’t run up a bigger bandwidth bill for us than their membership actually cost!

But with the content being rotated with two or three archive sets a day, all the old sets will eventually come around, and if there are things you particularly want to see, I can schedule them for you.

All the old photosets and videos do eventually go up on the store. Once they come off the members’ area after their first run, they are put into the schedule for the archives and usually show up there about 12 months after their first debut. In principle we’re trying to catch up on that so they appear a bit sooner, but they all do appear eventually!

It has been a while since we did a “camera rolling/behind the scenes” video in the way you suggest. I don’t think it is something we would be able to do for every set but we could certainly do it again sometimes. We couldn’t do it every time for a few reasons- first, that not everyone who helps out at shoots is happy to appear on cameras. Second, we light differently for stills and video- stills we light with studio flash, and depending where we are shooting, the available light might not be bright enough or particularly flattering, Third, it does tend to slow one down on shoot days even if you just set the cameras up and roll while shooting the stills. And fourth, I don’t feel that the quality would match our normal videos, which are lit with video lighting and staged in a different way to look a bit more “movie-like”. I’d get frustrated with the quality of one-rolling-take-one-camera angle shooting, then try it with two or three cameras covering the action, which would mean more editing, which means suddenly it is a full production rather than a quick behind-the-scenes.

Getting the model to start doing actual video (“couple of minutes writhing”) after each photoset is a non-starter because of the different staging and different lighting setups- it is probably too complicated to shoot that way and we feel we get better quality for both the stills and the videos by concentrating on one at a time! It is hard to explain until you’ve tried to do it, because you are right that in principle it is just a matter of setting a camera on a tripod and hitting record. In practice, though, you get much better results with someone operating the camera, having video lights instead of ambient light, using the flash lighting for stills, etc. Even the way you want to arrange the scene is different, we’ve discovered. In stills, where one has chance to peruse each frame, you want the boundaries of the image to be clean, free from visual clutter and uncomplicated. For video, such a staging looks cheap and nasty- you need to stage in depth and having things protrude into frame at the edges gives a feeling of inhabiting a larger world, especially if the camera starts to track or move around (which we want to do, as keeping to a single angle for too long makes for a very boring video, even if the subject matter is really hot!)

It is a great idea to go back to doing it from time to time, some of my favourite sets were shot that way with Chanta and Ariel 🙂 so we will definitely do that. It works best when you can set up at least a couple of video lights, have two rolling cameras, one of which is manned for closeups and one of which is a locked off wide shot to fall back to. So it works best with a rigger who can tie on screen and someone else to be behind the camera. Now Ariel is rigging more often, we should have more chance to do it!

Cheers, Hywel

.. just posted 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

Yup, we’re looking at several variants on these- anyone know of any which have matching leg irons? Or have any measurements available so we know what size we will be getting?

Cheers, Hywel

I’ll certainly confess that 4473 is too dark- I shot it too impatiently and the flash hadn’t fully recharged, but I still like the dramatic way it looks so I left it in the set. I can certainly still see plenty of detail in Ariel’s face in that shot on my monitor, too.

Looking at the full size version there’s clearly a bit more noise than we usually like in our sets, and Ariel’s eyes don’t have catchlights because of the non-firing flash. Looking at the shot before it and I can make out individual eyelashes and some skin details and skin tone, again a bit more noise than we’d usually have because I was shooting available light at ISO 400 with the Canon rather than ISO 100 with the Hasselbald as we usually do, but still it looks pretty “film grain like” and there’s loads of shadow detail visible. It is maybe not quite as super-sharp as a shot taken with a full-on blast of light at f/8 on the sharpest Hasselblad lens I own, but on my monitor it still looks very detailed and lovely.

Which brings me back to the idea that it might have more to do with monitor calibration (or lack thereof…)

Cheers, Hywel

Hi,

Congratulations! I hope you’ll be far too busy to check back here to read my reply! 🙂 🙂 🙂

I must admit that I’m a bit baffled by the “too dark” comment. This has come up once or twice before and I don’t know quite what to make of it. On my monitor (a calibrated Apple cinema display), there’s still detail in Ariel’s face even in that Hair Hogtie set. I used diffused fill-in flash to bring a bit more life to the shadows but wanted to keep the overall feeling of the ambient light because I liked it.

What does puzzle me a lot is the idea that

The lighting may well be artistic, but often, IMHO, too dim. The models are often not lit well. Maybe artistically, but not always visibly.

I really don’t think you can be seeing the shots on your monitor the way I am seeing them on mine, if that is true for enough sets to count as “often”. I’ve got some grounds for hoping that what I see on my monitor is reasonably close to “true” because I have all the tools of the RAW processing trade like histograms to make sure the range of brightness in the image is sensible, the blacks aren’t crushed (or not crushed much) and the highlights are only burnt out if I want them to be. We’re using docking great 1200 J flash units so there’s really no shortage of light available on set, and the histograms and eye dropper shows me that the shadows on that hair hogtie set still have a whole heap of detail in them.

Have you calibrated your monitor? Even doing it by eye with the Windows Display Color Calibration or the Apple Display Calibration Utility should improve matters, although of course you’ll get a better control with a Spyder or similar calibration system.

Because really the only explanation (other than radically different eyeballs, which I can’t help you with) for the sets being dim “often” is a serious and significant difference in monitor calibration, or possibly your image display software not reading colour profiles correctly. What are you using to look at the pics? You’re not looking at them on a TV are you (a lot of TVs have a “pop” circuit which crushes the blacks- looks dynamic in the shop, but rubbish for actually viewing stuff).

Cheers, Hywel