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Just went on my first professional bondage photo shoot. It was my first time using my DSLR for still images (I normally shoot video) but I think the results turned out great. It will take a ton of time to go through and process all of the images but I wanted to share with the community here because Hywell was so kind to give me fantastic advice before going on the shoot (hopefully I’m posting the image correctly…not quite sure how to do it on the forum 😉
Oh, and before you criticize too harshly this was done with only available light – we didn’t have any actual photography lights 😉
One more before I’m off to bed (shooting really wears you out!)
Hiya,
AWESOME! I’d love to see more. Lovely girl, and I like the way her bare soles look in the first shot especially. You’ve done a good job on mixed colour temperature lighting in that first shot… that would be my first suggestion for lighting is to get some daylight balanced bulbs for the normal electric lights inside.
How did you find the shoot? What worked the way you thought it would, and what was a surprise?
Cheers, Hywel.
Thanks so much Hywel! Yes, I absolutely need to invest in a good set of lights for if/when I start my own site – but I was just shooting for a friend and had to use whatever was on hand. I actually found the shoot oddly enough through fetlife (the best website ever by the way if other members aren’t on it – go join now!) – it was just a photographer whose site I’ve admired and coincidentally he shoots in NYC where I live 🙂
Ha – what worked and what didn’t work…well, the most surprising thing was how unsexy the entire affair was, I had posted before about being afraid of *ahem* becoming aroused…yeah not a problem when you have to turn off the air conditioning for the video sound, it’s 100 degrees and you’re just trying not to sweat directly on the camera 😉
I ended up blowing through an entire CF card so I could only load a few shots on my computer last night…had to run out and purchase an external hard drive 😉 — But I’ll be editing more this evening and will deft. post some pics. when they’re ready to go. Oh and just FYI to plug the guy’s site it’s for jeansbound.com 🙂
I love that first shot! I love the expression, the angle and the mood. You did really well with available light. I really like the styling on the second shot too. Really looking forward to seeing more! Well done you 🙂
We do have a Restrained Elegance group on Fetlife but I am a really bad hostess… It does sound like Fetlife is growing and becoming more well known now so may have to revisit!
Kate x
Hi all, just a few more shots (sorry for the repetitiveness, but we only had one model). My biggest complaint is that the images don’t have that super-sharp focus that RE shots have. I think it’s most likely due to using only available light and not having anything more powerful…oh well, live and learn 🙂
Very nice work for your first pics….
i wonder if hywel has some of his first images to hand… i mean the very 1st ones…. would be nice to see
Hi,
There are lots of ways that sharpness can be compromised, and most of those get worse in low light… so you’re right, I think the sharpness issue is down to not having more power in the lights. The basic issues are:
1) Slow shutter speed.
The shot I looked at the metadata for was shot at 1/40th of a second. Unless the camera was on a tripod and you used mirror lock-up, you’d have to have hydraulic rams for arms not to get at least some camera shake. Plus in that time a struggling (or posing) model might well be moving enough to cause blur too.2) Wide aperture= soft edges
Few lenses are as sharp wide open as they are when stopped down a couple of stops, especially at the edges. Most 35mm system lenses are at their sharpest around f/8. Primes are better than zooms usually in this respect, and the shot I looked at was taken at f/5.6 so shouldn’t be too bad.3) High ISO.
This means more noise, which means an unavoidable slight loss of crispness, depending on how the image has been processed. Aperture applies pretty good noise reduction in its raw processing step, even if you don’t explicitly add in the noise reduction block, but the result is a slight loss of critical sharpness- so an ISO 3200 shot is never going to be as sharp as an ISO 100 shot.I think the main reason for the lack of crispness on these shots is probably slow shutter speed… which is why we use flash for stills wherever we can. There’s just not enough light available in indoor settings like that to shoot at the 1/250th of a second f/8 ISO 100 setting we like to use for optimum sharpness.
Cheers, Hywel
P.S. I’ll see if I can dig out some shots from my first shoot to post
Hi,
Here are a few shots from my very first bondage photoshoot. These were done for a now-defunct bondage site run by the model and her husband, I hope they won’t mind me posting a few samples here. I did the photography, her husband did the rigging. They were shot on slide film and scanned in… and not scanned in well, I have to say- the quality of the original slides is significantly better than these small scans show, but still a long, long way short of what we routinely achieve these days. Hooray, progress, technology and personal development and all that sort of stuff!
Cheers, Hywel
Blimey…. ‘bondageuk’ was a blast from the past… thanks for showin Hywel… 😀
Thanks Hywel! I’ll definitely look into my camera options and see about making changes to shoot at those better settings. And thanks for sharing your first shoot – very good indeed! But oh how I love being able to photoshop out my little mistakes…I would shudder to have to simply scan in the film!
I’ve already found another shoot that I can most likely make fit into my schedule so I’ll be sure to post some pics. from round 2 🙂
Haha – also just noticed that the one file I uploaded that had breasts in it got deleted because a user on the image sharing site reported it. Really? Oh the prudes…they ruin everything!
Sigh. Prudes.
You should just be able to post the files as attachments directly to the forum, without needing to have them hosted elsewhere (scroll down and fine the filename/ add the file sections). If that doesn’t work, you could also email me the files and I’ll put them up on the RE server and link to them.
Cheers, Hywel.
Thanks Hywel, I’ll try those methods in the future. Can I ask you a totally business related question? I’m starting to think about booking models independent of other sites and am curious what a “going-rate” per hour for a bondage shoot is. I don’t want to low-ball people, but also don’t want to offer something that is *way* more than typical.
Thanks,
Mark.Hi,
Varies from country to country (and doubtless from region to region as well).
We think a typical rate for the USA is probably $100 US per hour. Some models will charge more, others less, and it’ll depend a bit on how long the shoot is (I’d expect a bit of a discount for a six hour shoot for example) and what you’re doing (fully clothed love bondage would probably be a lower rate than harcore SM that’ll leave long-lasting marks or hardcore sex scenes).
But that’s a sensible ball park figure to start off with.
Cheers, Hywel.
Thanks again Hywel and may I just say how wonderful your tutorial sessions are…I keep going to look at them and using the light diagrams to figure out the general cinematography of the scene…so very helpful (you should open up a photography class!) I come from the film world so I’m used to continuous lighting and strobes are very new to me (but I’m learning) 😉 — hope to have some better lit and processed photos for the forum in the next few weeks 🙂 — till then keep up the extraordinary work and thank you again for the detailed and very helpful replies (and also for maintaining a fantastic blog about the photography aspect of RE – it’s been so, so helpful!)
Mark.
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