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I tend not to “vote” on posts. All are very good. But I guess I do have a general comment. The lighting may well be artistic, but often, IMHO, too dim. The models are often not lit well. Maybe artistically, but not always visibly. (OK, so I’m a dirty old man.)
The most recent display (the hair-tie hog-tie) of Ariel is great, except fort he lighting. Even this one (/re9_04082010_IMG_4426.jpg) doesn’t show the model’s face in any detail. It is an excellent pose. Indeed, every pose of Ariel is wonderful. They just don’t display her beauty as she should be.
Sorry to complain. RE is the best site on the web. The models are always tastefully bound and displayed. Ariel is obviously our favourite. But the other models are also very, very good.
As I have said before, sets where the models are obviously enjoying their situation are my favourites; a smile makes things much more interesting to me. I won’t name any model other than your Ariel, but they are all quite wonderful
I’ll be suspending my subscription, for personal reasons. I’m marrying a girl from West Yorkshire, will be moving to England, and be a bit busy with her to enjoy the models here. (And a bit busy packing up things here in these United States and renting out my townhouse.)
I am sure Hywel will respond upon his return but I just have a point re: your comments about the lighting…
The hair hog tie isn’t lit as ‘glamourously’ as the majority of sets on the site but this creates a more natural, intimate feel (and may even have been specified by the requester?), The colours in the room also give a more ‘muted’ feel than normal and this is obviously not going to be to everyone’s taste.
I would strongly disagree with your generalisation though… Now obviously, not everyone likes the same style of lighting and not everyone’s monitors display identically. The set you mentioned is the exception rather than the rule (just a quick scroll down the updates page shows this). The classic ‘RE style’ that Hywel has spent years perfecting and exploring relies on well lit, punchy and dynamic images and I don’t think anyone could deny that the lighting is something that he does consistently well. This style has been developed to specifically bring out the beauty of the model and the beauty of the restrained situation…
Its always interesting to read people’s opinions though (even if I don’t agree :P) so thanks for sharing!
Oh and congratulations! And good luck with your move to West Yorkshire – my home also, small world!!
Kate x
I’m a little surprised by this comment because I’d have to say that RE’s lighting is generally excellent. There are occasional exceptions, but I think it’s much of what sets RE so far above most other bondage sites.
If a particular pose or situation doesn’t show everything you’d like to see, then I think the answer is greater variety in the pictures taken of each pose. Some sets have many pictures that are barely distinguishable from each other.
A good example is the current set of Sharlize. She’s in a tight hogtie, so she can do barely more than wiggle her fingers and change her facial expression. Even that’s difficult because of the ball gag.
Not that I don’t like tight hogties and ball gags; on the contrary, they’re my top favorites, and this is a very hot scene for me. But the photographer should have gone out of his way to introduce variety in his shots to compensate for Sharlize’s inability to vary her pose. Move around more; show her from more angles. Or move her around a little, taking great care of course to ensure she’s as comfortable as possible given her circumstances.
Greater variety in picture-taking angles should also answer any objections about the lighting; one shot may do an excellent job of showing what another shot completely hides in a shadow.
I have to agree with anonanonanon7 that RE’s lighting is generally excellent. Sometimes Hywel et. al. do experiment with low-key lighting styles and I’m Not A Fan of that, but it’s still better to see experiments than to have the site fall into a rut. It’s just that it’s the nature of experiments to sometimes not work out.
In the case of the June 22 hair hogtie, I wouldn’t even call it “low key.” It is, as Kate said, an attempt to produce a more natural and less “staged” look. I would have prefered to see a little more fill, but I can see an argument that more fill would have made the set look tacky and artificial.
I’m very new to RE but even I know its great attraction is the quality of the photography, of which the lighting is a crucial element. I have very much enjoyed some of the archive sets where Hywel describes the lighting he is using.
With so many stylish shots, it’s right to experiment. I’m sure you were trying something far more subtle but it’s fair to tell you some of the Hair Hogtie shots reminded me of what I could manage with a subject that is strongly backlit from a window.
I also agree the importance of the models enjoying themselves. RE sells itself as elegant bondage and I started off so very impressed at how successfully it delivers what it says. Hair Hogtie was the first set to make me wonder about motives and worry a little. I don’t want to get off the subject – and yes I may be new but I am not so naïve I don’t know the descriptions often involve a fair bit of fantasy – but may I just say please keep it to restraint and elegance and you will continue being fabulous.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
Ariel’s skin does look oddly greyish in some of the shots but there is no actual lack of detail due to shadows. j8tennant is right about the lack of detail in Ariel’s face in shot number 4473 but that’s probably due to the relative distance and low resolution; after all, on my monitor her face is only a few centimeters wide. There is certainly no deep shadows in her face – or anywhere in the picture, really – and there are plenty of detail in her hair, the ropes, and the shadowed carpet.
The darkest shot of them all, number 4473, is too dark even for my taste, but it still shows a fair amount of detail in Ariel’s hair.
Two questions about the bondage: Is it easier to hold this position than a normal wrists to ankles hogtie, in that you can shift the stress from neck to arms and back again? Would there be any major difference if the hair was tied to the wrists instead?
Martes
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
Sorry, I meant “j8tennant is right about the lack of detail in Ariel’s face in shot number 4426…”.
And indeed, I have no complaints about the quality of the set. It’s just a bit more subdued (no pun intended) than what we normally see here.Martes
When a picture looks “dark” even when some areas are bright white, the first thing I’d check is the display gamma.
Hywel, I’m sure you know what ‘gamma’ is — do you think that might indeed be the reason you’ve heard this complaint more than once?
Sorry, this is only tangential really, in reply to Martes 🙂
I think hair hogties are tougher than normal ones, for pretty much the reason you said. In a normal hogtie, most of the stress is on lower back (for me, anyway) and chest (lots of people struggle a bit with breathing after a while if they can’t roll over onto their side). With a hair hogtie, those two stresses remain, but you can’t rest your head on the floor unless you roll onto your side, and your neck starts to complain after a while about not being able to bend forwards. I’m not complaining though, I still liked it 🙂
I hope I’ve answered your question; let me know if not!
Yes, it might well be a gamma issue, although the usual source of that problem (different default gamma for Mac vs. PC displays) has largely been done away with by the latest version of Mac OS moving to the default PC gamma of 2.2 for everything.
My screen is calibrated to PC-like gamma and daylight 6500K native colour balance, so it shouldn’t be so far away from the typical PC setup and I output everything to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 which should put me as close to the mythical “typical” user’s monitor set up as one can get in the wild world of the uncalibrated world wide web. Most modern browsers should pick up that tag in the output JPEGs and do as good a job as they can, but that doesn’t help if the monitor settings are wildly off.
Most people seem to see the pictures OK, and they look OK on most monitors I try it on… even uncalibrated PC ones and stuff like mobile phones and internet cafes. I tend to check how the site looks slightly obsessively every time I get to sit down at a different PC, especially if it is likely to be utterly uncalibrated and have its monitor settings as they were out of the box.
So when I hear someone complain that the pictures are OFTEN too dark (rather than occasionally, which I could totally believe is us being arty) I immediately suspect that the difference is coming from how their system is displaying the images, rather than being at my end originating them.
The most likely candidates are:
1) Using a TV as a monitor. The typical out-of-the-box settings even for a high-end TV are very contrasty and usually crush the blacks mercilessly.
http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.html2) Out-of-the-box settings on new monitors are pretty random. Famously they are often set with a very blue white point, because if you compare two “whites” side by side, the bluer one looks somehow “cleaner” to the eye. Which means that a monitor with a very high colour temperature and the contrast whacked up a lot will stand out from a crowd in a PC store as looking crisp and clean. It is only when you start to look at what that does to photos you figure out that it has killed your shadow detail totally and turned skin tones blue-purple.
For print media, 5600K used to be the standard. 6500K is recommended for the web; many monitors come set up with white points as high as 9000K out of the box!3) Using older OS (especially Mac OS) or old browser (old Internet Explorer, particularly) that either have a different native gamma or fail to pick up the sRGB profile tag in the JPEGs and do something random with it, so displaying with wild gamma or colour shifts. Try opening the photos in Safari (which is a free download) or Photoshop and see if it looks different from your normal picture viewing software- if so, it is probably not handling the profiles correctly.
4) Plain old bad adjustment of the monitor. If you have your contrast at max, you’re probably crushing your blacks a lot, for example. The visual calibration tools in your OS will likely give you an idea if that’s happening- they usually display greyscales and get you to count different tones. For example, in:
http://www.pawprint.net/designresources/monitorcalibration.phpCheers, Hywel
A pretty good, web-based resource for checking monitor settings is The Lagom LCD monitor test pages http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test. For my monitor I actually reached almost the same result with these pages as when doing a proper calibration. Coincidence? Maybe, but they are (much) better than nothing.
To Ariel: You know, when answering like that (“I think hair hogties are tougher than normal ones, for pretty much the reason you said.”) you make me wonder weather I should just throw in the towel and accept that my English is totally incomprehensible. I thought I phrased the question the other way around, but never mind – I got the answer I was looking for.
Martes
My bride has returned to West Yorkshire. 🙁 I have some work to do in the US before I can be with her again, but I think I will be there by early August.
With regard to lighting, Hywel did note something in addition to the monitor tuning I need to do. I have a cataract in my left eye and have had surgery on my right eye; that’s a story too long for here and irrelevant. That may well be a cause for my complaint.
Thank you for your comments. West Yorkshire is beautiful, made more so by my lady there and hope to get there very soon.
Whoops, sorry Martes, totally my fault. I just misread your reply – sorry! Anyway, in proper answer to your question, it doesn’t really help (me, anyway) to shift the pressure from shoulders to neck, cos its just too painful that way to hold the position by letting my neck take the strain….
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