A post on our forum got me wondering what distinguishes Restrained Elegance from “just another paysite”. There isn’t a single right answer- something one person sees as vital, another may see as peripheral.

Here’s my go at critical ingredients, almost a mission statement.

– BDSM (primarily bondage)
– Female submissive/bottom
– Dominant’s gaze
– Barefoot
– Image Quality
– Artistic Ambition
– Artistic Vision (Hywel’s, in the end)
– Style, grace, polish, attention to detail. Elegance, in other words
– Within those broad parameters, variety

To explain a bit further…

BDSM, primarily bondage
Fairly self-explanatory. We do occasionally do spanking, CP, pure dom/sub with no bondage (e.g. some of the slave training videos Ariel and I did) but most of the time we concentrate on bondage and the other BDSM elements are secondary.

Female submissive/bottom
Again, self-explanatory. I’m heterosexual and I have an opinion on how I want to make women look in photos. I do not have that for men. So although the few shoots I’ve done with men have been fun, I don’t want to pursue that at the moment, and RE will not feature male subs. It will feature both male and female dom/tops from time to time.

Dominant’s gaze
As a corollary to that, the focus of the attention is likely to be the submissive female, with the dom/top as a secondary element rather than being shot from the submissive’s point of view concentrating on the dom. I’m interested in shooting sub’s gaze more at some point to play with the concepts but that’s not core RE.

Barefoot
I have a foot fetish and I like bare feet. (That rather understates the case). The girls of RE are ALWAYS going to be primarily barefoot. It is not an option for me, it is actually more important than BDSM in some ways (although in my head I always add BDSM to the stories that occur when I look at foot fetish material). Hence the forthcoming relaunch of a non-bondage foot fetish site.

Image Quality
I have a genuine fetish for image quality. I actually can’t enjoy stuff that’s out of focus, camera shaky, badly lit, pixellated, low resolution or generally crappy. For the moment I am happy with the technical quality it is possible to obtain from our Hasselblad and RED, but want to improve so that all the shots are as good as the best ones are now and I know the main factors limiting that at the moment.

For video, we really need more lighting gear to get us away from having to shoot f/2.8 all the time, and we need to improve camera mounting options. If things go well enough that we can pay off the RED on schedule in a couple of years time, I’m itching to try steadicam and invest in a whole wall’s worth of LED multicolour light panels.

For stills, the limits are more to do with focussing accuracy and knocking out the last little bits of camera shake and unwanted subject movement which compromise the last 5% of the crispness. Some day I may be able to afford to move up to a higher resolution medium format back, I guess, but it’s not going to happen until the world comes out of recession 🙂

Artistic Ambition
The day we spend a shoot churning out sets to a formula, just going with it when a rig starts to get a bit untidy, declining an exciting location shoot to generate a bit more profit is the day we will stop running Restrained Elegance.

I don’t think people realise how laughable it would be to a mainstream production house to aim to create ambitious work like Ariel and Katy in the Norwegian Fjords or Slave Auction on a budget determined by the generosity of bondage fans kicking in $30 each. They wouldn’t have the first frigging clue how to do what we do on the money we have available.

We’ve got over a decade’s experience in ploughing as much imagination and ingenuity as we can into producing images that belie these budgets. (And ploughing almost all the money you pay us back into equipment and shoots, too). If we were happy to settle for “good enough” we could still be shooting on a 5D Mark one, and Ariel and I might be able to have more lavish holidays without me taking on multi-year debts to invest in the few bits of kit we genuinely need to achieve top-flight results. But then we’d have lost our ambition, our drive to produce gob-smacking images, and Restrained Elegance would be dead.

Artistic Vision
The site has always been intensely personal, Hywel’s artistic vision. If you wonder why the rest of the things appear on this list, it is because that’s what I care about, what I’m driven to create.

I love collaborating, learning from other people, incorporating cool ideas and getting them to help me bring things to life. One of the most fulfilling things about the last 12 years has been working with each individual model on each update and longer-term on the behind the scenes collaborators like Kate, Ariel, Steve, Merlin, Sheep, Alexander Lightspear and many more. It is an absolute pleasure to bring something like the inventive predicament bondage of Sheep and the beauty of Ariel to a Restrained Elegance shoot and create something that none of us could have done in isolation.

You’ll see everyone listed in the crew info for every set they’ve worked on on the site because I like giving people the credit they deserve.

But you’ll also notice that my name appears on every set. This isn’t producer’s vanity. Even sets shot when I wasn’t on set were the result of extended discussions under my direction. On location shoots, I run around like a blue-arsed fly setting the lights up for almost every set, even if we have two units shooting in parallel. I do the final colour correction, look-and-feel grade of every single photograph and frame of video that appears on the site. And I have the final say what goes up on the site- I make the final image selections, I get to say that a set doesn’t meet the grade and doesn’t go up, or can only go up as a bonus. I have the final cut on every video.

Style, grace, polish, attention to detail. Elegance, in other words
I’m not arrogant enough to believe that our images are flawless, or more elegant than everyone else’s. It is more the sensibility- we will try to make them as elegant as possible, within the constraints of budget and the need to actually produce something instead of spending endless days tweaking a single image. I’d love to, but I can’t- I need to get the image done and get on with realising the next idea that’s buzzing around in my head demanding to be let out before it fades away.

Our motto is “Every shot good enough for the cover of Vogue, every frame of video a Rembrandt”. Of course we don’t achieve it, but we’re damn well going to try.

Within those broad parameters, variety
And I think that speaks for itself. Metal, handcuffs, medieval restraints, ropes, collars, chains, suspensions, gags, ungagged, tape, scarves… we will at least try all of them.

It is at this point that questions of “is the mix of sets changing”? are valid.

Yes, it is constantly changing. If we’re inspired by shooting in a particular location, it might go very 1950’s and fetish-y. On location in the sun in Spain, it’ll go very wild west and nudie. In Norway, it’ll be viking maidens and snow queens.

Norway. Snow Queens and Viking girls.

If I’m listening to Fireworks by Blue Oyster Cult, it’ll go very 1970’s big hair and Farrah Fawcett. If Ariel is in a gag-fantasy mood, you might get a whole gag training video series. If Steve makes a magnificent contraption, you’ll probably see quite a bit of it as we bring all the fizzing ideas it inspires to life. If Kate’s in a wicked mood, you’ll see a lot of hair hogties (all shot through kitchen spoons and bannisters, with a Dutch Tilt in honour of Merlin). If someone were to offer us the use of a huge furnished but unpeopled office building for a week, you’ll see a lot of business girls and secretaries. If I’m feeling in the mood for hogties and handcuffs when I edit this month’s sets, they might be a bit over-represented compared with their statistical average. If we start working with a fabulous new model we might schedule several shoots with her in quick succession.

I try to iron out the worst of these fluctuations by staggering the updates from any given shoot over time. Otherwise you’d get nothing but the same model in the same place for a month or two every time we went on location.

This is THE key way we manage to punch above our weight. Taking advantage of the ability to schedule shoots efficiently, we can do things that would be out of our financial reach by a factor of thirty if we just had to shoot that one idea in isolation.

As Robert Rodriguez says, if you have access to a fast car and an actor friend who owns a guitar case, make a film about a guy who drives a fast car and carries a guitar case. Draw up a list of assets, and write your script around those. If you do the opposite, draw up a list of dream items and then go out and buy them to fit your script, you quickly incur Hollywood budgets.

The Rodriguez list is the key weapon in our armoury to do what we do. We’ve invested in gear which gets used over and over again (rope, lights, cameras, tripods, handcuffs) but beyond that we have to rely on stuff we can blag. The rise of Primark means the clothes are now something we can largely get from the model- no more attempting to fit them into Chinese Dresses designed for Asian girls who aren’t the same shape as British glamour models. Which is why, incidentally, we don’t shoot as many Chinese dress sets as once we did.

So if a model shows up with a suitcase full of vintage lingerie and seamed stockings, we might take the opportunity to shoot them without having to buy them (which would probably blow the whole shoot budget out of the water). Sure, we make suggestions based on our current ideas and what we know of the location we’ve sourced for the shoot, we do have some influence in advance of shoot day.

Still, we rely upon the Rodriguez list of what we can already lay our hands on to inspire us with stuff we can shoot that looks like a cost a million dollars. Paradoxically, the combination of limitation and freedom to shoot what we want is an amazingly inspiring way to work compared with a blank sheet of paper, write what you like.

Incidentally, this is why we rarely shoot custom videos/photosets. Take away the ability to streamline shoots the way we can when going with our own inspirations and the request jumps up to what it would cost to have a commercial photographic house shoot it- and quickly become out of reach. Fixing even a few key decisions – model, location, clothes, bondage- can quickly run into scheduling and cost issues that mean shooting a single set might take more time and cost more money than shooting a whole month’s content for RE.

That goes some way to explaining that makes Restrained Elegance different in my head- and maybe a bit of a rant on the contortions we have to go through to punch that much above our weight in artistic integrity and, we hope, quality.

I wonder if any of it translates? What is it that draws you to Restrained Elegance? Or if you aren’t a fan, what puts you off? What distinguishes our work from other websites or other photographers?