Hi Everyone

I’m getting rid of some older photo and video gear to clear out some space in the RE kit room (and because Ariel has rightly gone on strike until the kit room is in a safer, less-cluttered state to work in).

I’ll be putting stuff on eBay, but I’d rather the kit went to kinksters who might shoot wicked things with it!

To that end I’ve got a few “package deals” on offer to anyone who would like to acquire a shooting setup.

I’ll get photos etc. together in due course as I’ll need those to post on eBay anyway, but if you’re interested in taking any of the packages off my hands as a job lot to shoot with, it would be a lot easier for me and a lot more satisfying to send kit off to a good new home. (I hate getting rid of gear, have I ever mentioned that?

General Note: Postage

I’ve not yet priced up posting and packaging, which is one of the reasons I’ve not got this stuff on eBay yet. So prices here EXCLUDE P&P. Happy to post stuff but we will need to add P&P at cost, email me at webmaster@restrainedelegance.com to discuss. Or you can collect in person for nothing, of course.

So what am I getting rid of?

Micro Four Thirds Shooting Setup

• Panasonic GH4. Superb video/stills hybrid camera, the best small camera set-up for shooting 4K video. Used on many RE productions, including “The Underground” and Pony Girl series ES features. Also useful for stills- I have shot a few RE sets with it.
• Panasonic 7/14 mm f/4 wide angle lens
• Panasonic 12-35 mm f/2.8 – an excellent quality standard zoom lens
• Panasonic 45mm macro lens
• Gorgeous Voigtlander 25mm f/0.95 “see in the dark” manual focus prime lens. It’s this lens that makes me most reluctant to sell the GH4, it’s a stunner.
• Olympus 12-60mm f/2.8-4 4/3rd lens with 4/3 to micro 4/3 adaptor. Full pro quality lens, lovely optics, I’ve shot many videos with it and also landscape photos up to 24″ x 36″
• metabones speedbooster adaptor for Canon EF lenses to micro 4/3
• battery grip and extra batteries- all you to run all day (and into the night) on one set of batteries. I used this in the mountains for extended timelapse, but it is great for stills shooting as well.

Potentially also a Libec video tripod to give a complete video shooting set-up. (That’s what we shot with on the British Fetish Film Festival for example).

Potentially also including a Panasonic GF1 pocketable camera with detachable electronic viewfinder, 12mm and 20mm pancake prime lenses. Mostly useful for stills, does shoot video but only to 720p rather than 1080p I believe. Still, useful as a master wide cam for two camera shoots to cover yourself just in case the main cam is blocked, I’ve used it as such in the past.

Why I am Selling It?

Yeh, I’m asking myself the same question. Basically it is down to space in the kit room and space in the car when we go on location. Although the GH4 is a kick ass camera, it doesn’t share lenses with the rest of my set-up so easily. (The Metabones adaptor works, but it’s not as good as native lenses). This means an extra packing case on every trip, and I find myself increasingly relying on my Sony camera for all the stuff I used to use the GH4 for, because it kills two birds with one stone, being a great backup to both the Hasselblad and the RED.

It is a wrench, but Ariel is right, we need the space and having a complete lens kit for micro four thirds just takes up too much space.

Price

New, this set-up cost well over £7000! Based on eBay recent sales, the GH4 is worth around £500 and the lenses 400+400+300+400+250+400 = £2150. The GF1 with lenses maybe £250. The libec tripod around £100.

So there’s at least £3000 value in the package. Will anyone give me £2500 for the lot? It would set you up for video production nicely- you might need to add a shotgun mic (Rode or similar) and some lights if you haven’t got any, but potentially it’s a two-camera set-up, even.

DJI Osmo+ hand held gimbal camera

It’s one of these: LINK. It’s a handheld gimbal for steady shots as you move, built in camera with zoom lens, and you use your phone as a monitor. Shoots 4K, excellent for roaming around shots and the zoom lens makes it very much more versatile than similar stuff (or a gimbal for your phone, I know because that’s what I tried first).

Why Am I Selling It?

I LOVED the shooting experience and form factor of this, shot quite a few things with it at our location trip in Cornwall, including Ariel and Penny in the hot tub. It does slow mo, it’s generally a delight to use. So why I am selling it?

Because I liked the form factor so much I bought a hand-held gimbal for my Sony A7Rii, and I find myself taking and using that in preference to the DJI.

Price

New is about £580, eBay shows they are going for around £450 second hand, yours for £400 if you use it for kinky productions.

Canon shooting outfit: Canon 7D and L series zooms

Canon 7D used for countless RE films and stills sets, including top sellers like Sophia Smith Bedroom Slavegirl. Alexander Lightspear still shoots sets for RE using his 7D.

Canon L-series 24-70mm f/2.8 and 16-35mm f/2.8 zooms.

This outfit would set you up with a complete pro-quality shooting set-up for stills and video with older but top-notch-of-their-era zoom lenses. I’ve used this camera and lenses to shoot a wedding, vintage fashion, and loads of RE sets.

Why am I selling it?

I need the space in the kit-room. I don’t use these two zooms much any more – I prefer primes for stills (which I am not selling, sorry), and the Canon zooms I do use are staying on my RED. So I can part with this camera and the two zooms which work best on it without compromising my current shooting kit.

Price

Body is around £300. Lenses are 450 + 600 = £1050. Value £1350, I’ll sell for £1100.

Gekko Kelvin Tile LED video lighting setup

The Gekko Kelvin tiles are bi-colour LED 1×1 panels which were the workhorse video lighting for RE for several years; Slave Auction and most of the other early ES films were shot using them. They can be operated by mains or by V-lock battery (which is fantastic for location shoots). They are dimmable, and the colour temperature is adjustable from about 2500K to 7000K ish via dials on the back. They’ve got removable plastic diffuser panels on front so you can choose harder or softer light.

Add the Kelvin Tile Paintbox, though, and they transform to a complete coloured light solution. You can dial in primary colours, any gel colour you think of, adjust saturation and brightness, or control any of the six physical LED colours directly (each LED is actually a red, a green, a blue, a warm white, a cool white and an amber and all can be controlled directly).

Unlike cheap LED’s, their colour rendition is EXCELLENT- and more importantly, variable. You can dial in a plus or minus green/magenta tint with the paintbox controller, which is extremely useful when matching natural light or other lighting on location.

If you are a DMX wizard, you can control via computer, but for us mere mortals the control box is necessary.

Why am I selling them?

Because I love the technology so much that I’ve invested in their bigger, badder, actual-Hollywood-film brother, an Arri Skypanel S60.

There are two caveats about these lights. 1) Because they have six colours of LED and most of them are dimmed to give the right white balance at any one time, they are not as bright as some solutions. I ran them in banks of two or three to make up for this, which also gives the nice side effect of broader, softer and more flattering light. 2) The buggers do have a bit of a tendency to overheat and blink if used in a hot studio for too long (especially if run from the mains adaptors, which generate a fair amount of heat). They’re fine as soon as they cool down a bit.

Be aware of that and they’re really useful lights. I used them for years, and I only upgraded to the Arris for convenience of packing and carrying around the same light output and colour control in a more tightly integrated package. They’re fine for short trips, but getting them on ferries I needed a more compact fit-in-the-car solution. (Or maybe I should have just bought a van).

The reason I have six of them was that I could run four at once- two or three as the key light, one as a fill, one as a backlight, and have a spare or two in case any of them started to overheat. If you don’t do long shoots or don’t shoot in really hot studios, or mostly shoot on battery, you’ll be fine. But in all good conscience I have to let you know of the shortcomings.

Price

Well, it depends. I have six of them, but only one Paintbox controller. I need to get rid of at least some of them to make space in the kit room. If I put them on eBay I might just sell two or three of them, keep the others and the control box myself. But if I can find them a good home as a complete set-up, you can have the control box and all six lights.

Hard to find prices on eBay but they were £1000 each originally, plus £500 for the control box. They are a bit dim compared with cheap bicolour panels today, but the complete colour control with the Paintbox puts them in a whole different category- they’re a creative powerhouse, and I had to spend a LOT of money to match them.

If you’ll take the whole lot off my hands as a job lot, I’ll accept £2500 for all six plus the control box. (N.B. if you need postage you’ll have to budget for that too as they come in around 7kg each with all fixtures and fittings).

Add a few cheap kit stands (they work just fine on cheapy ones) and you’ll have enough lighting to shoot feature films. I shot a mainstream feature with these plus a few cheap tungsten parcans and backlights for the scenery.

2x Core Flash CF-300 mains-powered flash heads

SOLD! (Provisonally!)

Two cheap and cheerful mains-powered studio flash heads, with reflectors, with slot for mounting umbrellas. Originally donated by RE member Merlin, they were used to light the white infinity cove in the old RE house for many, many photosets including the RE lexicon.

They’ve been sat on a shelf since we moved, I’ve decided to sell the cove sections so they’re surplus to requirements.

Great starter kit for getting up to speed with flash photography, just add a cheap Infrared flash trigger.

Price

New, a two-unit set up costs £400. Similar units seem to be going for £100 each on eBay, give me £150 and you can have the two.

Ronin Gimbal Rig

More of a specialised item, this is a full-blown camera gimbal rig. It’ll take the RED, but I used to use it with the Pansonic GH4. I’ve shot feature films and many RE videos on it. This is the original full-sized Ronin, not the later Ronin M, and it can take any dSLR and heavy lenses, all the way up to cine cameras. Comes with a remote control box and dedicated flight case.

Why I Am Selling It?

Tennis elbow. I’ve been forced to switch to using a lighter hand-held gimbal set-up, even though this one is technically far superior.

Price

New it was £2000. They are going for around £900 on eBay, yours for kinky purposes for £750.

Hi Everyone

Welcome to another episode of the UK’s slide into a right-wing totalitarian state. The government, cravenly unopposed by the supine opposition, just signed the Snooper’s Charter into law. This is a monumentally bad idea, and a worse one is coming in the form of the Digital Economy Bill.

The state, in the form of more or less any agency that cares to ask for it, can now find out every website you visited in the last year from your internet service provider. They don’t even need a warrant. Let that sink in for a while. Even if you have nothing to hide and are doing nothing wrong, the information that a junior civil servant can punch up about you is very worrying. And of course, the records will be hacked or sold corruptly to the tabloids or anyone who wants them.

If you live in Britain, the government have effectively just installed webcams pointing in through every window in your house.

I urge everyone reading this who lives in the UK to install and start using a VPN (virtual private network). Choose one that’s registered in another country, that doesn’t keep logs, and choose one that you pay for. British ones have to obey the same snooping laws to spy on you that your internet service provider does. Free ones sell your data, which is the opposite of what you want. And if the company doesn’t keep logs, they don’t even have the information to pass on.

This is not a panacea. It means placing some trust in the VPN operator, for a start. But if they make their money by running the service, it is in their interests to do a good job for you.

A VPN routes your internet activity through its internal network so outsiders can’t see where you are going. It also encrypts the data as it goes to make it hard to snoop on. All your ISP can report to the government is that you are using a VPN: they can’t tell them which sites you have visited or anything much else. They’ve been used by companies for years to allow people to connect to the company’s internal network whist working away so they don’t have to worry about security at random free wifi hotspots. They are a mature and well-integrated technology which integrates easily with modern devices (for example, iPhones bring up a little “VPN” icon when you’re connected).

This was already pretty good practice for protection against hacking and cyber-crime. State-sponsored intrusion into ALL our private lives is on a whole different level, though, and I really must urge everyone in the UK to do something to limit the information that a junior civil servant or policeman can find out about you. It’s only a matter of months before the records are hacked, too, and some poor celebrity’s choice of porn will be splashed all over the tabloids. The number of people suddenly having access to everything you’ve looked at online will be HUGE, and corrupt release of records or out and out hacking the database is pretty much a certainty.

If you are very concerned, you can use Tor. In fact you can use Tor over a VPN, but this slows things down a lot. A well-run VPN should have relatively minimal impact on your connection speed.

The state has just installed CCTV pointing in through every window in your house. A VPN is drawing the curtains. If you live in the UK, I strongly urge you to install and use a VPN right now.

You can find out some good ones here: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/test-centre/internet/best-vpn-2016-2017-uk-what-is-vpn-3641578/

Hywel

Hi Everyone,

The production company have just sent us a link to final transmitted version of Kinky Britain, so if you are interested and haven’t been able to see it yet (eg from the USA) you can hopefully watch it here:

https://vimeo.com/wearesundogpictures/review/178167400/ecbb5ec999

Hywel & Ariel (Joceline)