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It is ten years since I did my first photo-shoot for what would become Restrained Elegance, and a little over nine years since we opened our doors to all you lovely paying members. It has been an awesome ride, and looking back on the last ten years I’m really proud of everything we’ve done and the body of work we have put together.
Chatting amongst ourselves during the set-ups at our recent location shoot, thoughts turned to the future. The tenth anniversary seems like a good opportunity to step back and evaluate and figure out how to go forward into the second decade of Restrained Elegance. We thought we’d post a few ideas and ask you what you think.
A bit of background. About the only thing our current shoots have in common with those early ones is that there’s a girl in bondage in the photos.
I started off with home-made ball-gags and leather cuffs, a few bits of chain and rope from B&Q, a cheap Canon film camera, a zoom lens and a cheap reflector. An update consisted of one scanned film, which meant at most 36 exposures, taking out the bad ones, leaving maybe 15-25 photos per update and each set spread over three or four updates. A whole update might have come to 3 MB (a single photo from a hi-res set is more than that now!)
Our first videos (as you can see from our “Blast from the Past” updates) were only 30 seconds long. Everything was on a much more modest scale, shot in my living room.
Of course, the world has moved on, most people have fast internet connections, video is Hi Def, digital cameras are higher resolution than film, and the site has gone from being a one-man-band to being a collaborative effort between quite a few creative people. We have tackled things from location shoots in the Alps to upside-down suspensions and experimented with hot wax, nipple clamps and canings on screen. We’ve done members’ chats, written lexicons, acquired a resident slave-girl, run tutorials, Bondage X Factor search-for-stars and shot hour-long horror films and love films and thrillers full of all manner of hot BDSM and kinky things.
A decade on, it is an oddity that our basic structure is still the same as it was when an update was by definition a single physical roll of film. We need to restructure to continue the improvement, do more ambitious and exciting stuff, and have the time and energy to keep making the quality better… and get more interactivity and shoot the things you really want to see.
Our most exciting development is that Ariel and I are planning to have her come in as a permanent part of the production team, working 50% of her time solely on projects for Restrained Elegance.
This will let her work on more ambitious film scripts, help out with the rigging and set production, and generally spend more of her time thinking about great bondage ideas to shoot. It’ll mean she’s able to post here much more regularly both to share her ideas and thoughts about bondage but also to find out more about what sort of bondage scenes you want to see!
It will also allow us to develop new ideas we have in the works- like a regular live show controlled by you, the members, shot in proper Restrained Elegance style, and maybe things like “request video of the month” or expanded tutorials like online “how-to-tie” videos.
We’re also thinking of changing our update schedule so we put up new photo sets on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and a new film every Saturday. This will allow us to do the very best job we can on each update, a final end to multi-part photo-sets and enabling us to properly showcase each bondage idea, storyline and request in full 22- or 31-megapixel/720p glory. (Keeping the web-res versions for everyone without huge bandwidth of course!) On top of that we might do a monthly live show, members’ chats, request of the month and other bonus features like Ariel’s video diaries.
We are now shooting some films in 1080p now so a move to full-on progressive 1920 x 1080 x 25 fps progressive scan (past DVD, we’re talking Blu-ray quality) is a distinct possibility.
We’ll probably maintain the archive frequency so they still come up at two every day, or maybe three on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays… with ten years’ worth of great material, it is really tricky to do justice to it all.
This is largely why I don’t leave the archives up forever, by the way- huge archives of material that just sit there are actually very hard to browse and find the stuff of interest to you, even with good keyword indexing. Better for them to come around fresh in the archives rather than have your perfect set lurking on page 263 of 379, never to be seen by anyone. We might extend the run of sets on the site a bit, but not so much that sets get lost on page two-hundred-and-something of the updates.
The biggest and best change that has happened in Restrained Elegance’s ten years is that we’re now a community, with many people contributing either in person at shoots or on chats or here on the forum, so we’d love to know what you in the RE community think of our ideas for the next decade!
Cheers, Hywel & Ariel & Steve
Just from my own point of view:
o I am not a video fan, so I can’t say I’d be happy if RE shifted emphasis more to video and less to those beautiful still photos.
o In theory I’d like to see drawings & stories included in the RE mix. In practice I know that those things haven’t worked very well in the past. For me they didn’t work because most of them were shifted toward the DSM end of BDSM, often to the point of having little or no actual BONDAGE in them at all. The RE photosets, by contrast, generally offer me a “pure bondage” fix.
o In particular, I’d be a big fan of Steve Reno’s artwork, if he weren’t such a dedicated boots & high-heels guy. He does come close enough to the “more B, less DSM” that I’d want to see in drawings. If it weren’t for the footwear, I’d ask for him to be made a regular RE contributor, with maybe one drawing (or set of drawings) a month. (So if you could convince him to contribute a monthly “barefoot, but not necessarily nude” bondage drawing, or else find someone whose drawings were similar in subject and tone, but without the footwear…)
When you put it like that, Hywel, it’s amazing to think how much has changed with EVERYTHING over the past decade – and I think that it is to your credit that Restrained Elegance has kept up and moved with the times.
I think the biggest change in the coming decade is going to be in the way that people access internet content. People are going to be more and more reliant on mobile internet on netbooks and phones, so this could be an area that RE could move into more maybe? How about an RE pic of the day App?? Or a mobile version of the site? Out of interest, does anyone out there currently view the site on their mobile phone (Have you got an iphone yet, Hywel?)? How does it look?
I am all for making each photo update more of an event. As a photographer, I would much rather invest my time in producing a single set with a substantial idea / tie / storyline than feel the pressure to produce three less meaningful sets.
And Ariel, how exciting preparing to become a resident resident slavegirl (in residence)! I look forward to working with you more. Hurrah! š
Kate x
Hi,
As Kate says, it isn’t so much about emphasising video at the expense of stills as feeling we want to be able to concentrate more effort into each stills set and avoid being too “production line” at the expense of quality and creativity. We want to be able to put a significant investment of time and creative thought into getting each and every photoset right and doing it as well as we can do it.
Of course I’ve got an iPhone, Kate. I am manfully resisting the lure of the iPad for now. I can see the iPad bringing a real revolution to magazine and website publishing if it takes off (and if Apple ever allow any sort of adult-related material).
I agree that the coming of mobiles is probably going to be the biggest shakeup over the next few years. That’s why one of the formats for the videos is the iPhone-friendly MP4’s, although I know the delivery isn’t ideal right now (you need to go via a PC and iTunes, you can’t play the videos directly on the phone for some reason). That’s something else we’re hoping to work on.
Apps are a non-starter, at least until Apple allows adult-themed apps back into the store. They arbitrarily cut off almost all of those a few months ago – even though their already draconian policy meant they were little more than collections of lingerie photos.
I look at the site on my iPhone 3 and it looks OK. Bit busy for the small screen maybe, but not a total disaster.
I’d not want to use it as my only means of browsing the site right now. It is fine for downloading and viewing a few images, but not for looking at complete sets, and it won’t download the videos directly, you have to go via iTunes. The iPhone doesn’t remember the site username/password for me either (maybe I can make it do so, but it doesn’t seem to by default). It won’t download ZIP files and doesn’t have a user-accessible directory structure for downloaded pics either, which makes downloading whole sets more than a little painful. There’s stuff we need to change on the way files are served to make it work with videos directly, which I must chase up: might be something as daft as needing .mov instead of .mp4 extension, or wrong MIME time or something, might be a deliberate policy from Apple or might need us to wrap the videos with an HTML5 page or something for iPhone users.
I’m certainly watching other HTML5 developments with interest, too, and a future mobile version of RE is worth thinking about… although I think given the screen on the iPhone 4 the way of progress means that actually the site may be fine with some delivery tweaks to optimise the experience rather than requiring a totally separate version for mobile based browsing. At least Apple and its competitors are moving towards having these mobile devices work like normal web browsers, so hopefully we won’t need to make too many changes.
Right now the best way to view the site remains a PC/Mac, using iTunes to upload stuff to your phone if you want to view it later. Far from ideal, and well worth us looking into ways of improving it as I completely agree that accessing the site on the move is likely to be much more common in the next few years.
Cheers, Hywel
Greetings from New Jersey,
Hope everyone is doing well. Iāve had a chance to read through this REās second decade thread a couple of times now as well as the related one on āWebsite videos… what plots are permissible to film?ā and the two threads cover a lot of ground. Hywel and all the others behind and in front of the RE cameras have created, at least in my eyes, a wonderful and very high class and high quality bondage community and I would have no problem if it were to continue on just doing what they have been doing. However, as high class and quality as it is, continuously doing the same thing will get routine after some period of time, members might get a little bored and the site might get a little stale. On the other hand if everyone keeps trying to continuously push the boundaries within the current format of one new photo set or video for a daily update then one could see a time when production team members either hit a creative road block or simply hit a burn out period. It happens. So perhaps the coming ten year anniversary is the perfect point to reflect, look at various possibilities and perhaps change things up a bit. Obviously still going down the road of tried and true āclassic RE bondageā a good part of the time but also reaching out and experimenting with going in some other directions as part of the mix. Yeah there will no doubt be some who donāt want to see any changes and/or donāt want things to go in some specific direction but I suspect every long running creative entity (TV show, website, rock band) runs into the same problem. The site, or whatever, hits on a good formula that people like and then either things get stale or the show, band, etc. tries to go in a slightly different direction. Most fans will give the new material a chance, a small percentage never will. Little you will be able to do about it.
I think many of the ideas Hywel mentioned certainly make sense a lot of sense. By limiting the new sets/videos to say three days a week it allows the various riggers and photographers to take their time a bit more with both the original production as well as the editing without the pressure of having to make that daily deadline. Of course there will be the odd set or video that will not work for most of the membership and then you will get the obvious comments of āI waited āXā days for an update and you give us this garbage?ā Itās going to happen but there is little you can do about it. Plus with ten years of back work that is a lot of material to fill remaining days during the week and still maintain some sort of daily update.
Having Ariel contribute more to the production side of RE also clearly makes sense. One it brings another female prospective into the mix along with Temptress Kateās so that will put a different spin on some of the material. Also clearly Ariel has a number of good ideas as we have already seen with much of the RE Nights material. Now granted some of that was/is a little harder than where my general interests lie but everything in moderation as the saying goes. Also by having another potential photographer / rigger available it might allow for some more on camera tying in some of the sets or videos which is always hard to show if it is just one model and one person behind the camera. Of course not everyone likes the on camera tying but I happen to. Allowing Ariel more time to post on the forum to both share her thoughts as well as solicit input from the members also make good sense. Hopefully some of the other models will routinely contribute their thoughts and feelings about some of their shoots and sets as well. All the ideas should provide the team with a lot of useful information to keep moving forward.
I find the idea of the on-line shows to be very promising. Obviously you could get some comments and requests that are far outside the bounds of good taste as well as the limits of what RE is about and controlling all that could be a bit of a pain but the results could and should be very interesting. The on-line tutorials would also be a nice feature as well. Probably a bit hard to do for photographic or video tutorials but would work for bondage and rigging. It would also be nice if there were going to be a way to download and save the on-line shows and tutorials so members could watch them again at their leisure. The āClips4Saleā site might be the possible path for those types of downloads, depending on the price.
Iāve always liked the Arielās Video Diaries and particularly the ones with an interview of a model or just having a camera rolling during the shooting of a set or video. āFly on the Wallā point of view so to speak. I would certainly enjoy more of that in the future. As somewhat of an adjunct to this, Hywel talked about toping and tailing in reference to the thread about what was permissible for RE to shoot on video. Personally I would enjoy an interview section with the model from time to time after a video. Certainly doesnāt have to go with every video but it would be nice to hear what the lady was thinking about before, during and after a photo set or video from time to time. Such a top and tail format would not always have to be linked with a harder edge scenario either. Iād enjoy hearing what the lady was thinking about, what she enjoyed, what she didnāt enjoy and so forth if this was her first bondage modeling work, first outdoor work with the possibility of being discovered or first location work, first suspension and other similar ideas. If you donāt want to put the tail on the videos themselves you could always group a couple of tails together as a video update with just a short trailer of what update the interview was from. I particularly like to know what a lady is thinking when she sees herself in bondage either during the bondage or looking at the final photo set or video. Thereās a scene in a bondage video I have where one lady is lacing another lady into a black full coverage corset and making some comments about how nice a tight corset looks. The model being laced into the corset is sitting on the edge of a bed and looking at herself in a full length mirror. Besides the black corset she is wearing black stockings and heels (sorry Hywel). Her wrists are tied to her knees, her ankles are tied with the shoes tied on as well and she is wearing a tight ball gag. Part of me wants to believe she is enjoying her mistressās attention and the bondage and is into the character of the video and I like that thought. But I also know itās acting and I can also easily see the bound lady thinking to herself as she looks in the mirror that she needs to pick up the dry cleaning before 5:00 today and she needs to get to the post office later as well and that thought makes me laugh.
I think Kate makes a very good point on potential changes in the way many people access the web over the coming years. For myself, I suspect I will always trail the pack and that doesnāt really bother me too much, so long as I donāt get shut out by the changes in technology. I donāt have a big flat screen TV or HD TV at home yet and I donāt really know how soon I might go to that. Frankly the price the satellite TV service adds to the monthly bill for HD service will probably keep me from going to HD TV for at least another year or two, unless the current TV rolls over and dies then who knows. Currently my PC uses a 19ā diagonal flat panel monitor and there is no link to my TV for the computer. Not sure I really would want such a connection and the computer is upstairs from the main TV anyway, but such connections seems a growing trend as well as HD. While I do expect to replace the computer in a couple of months the current likely replacement is, if I remember correctly, a 21 inch diagonal flat screen and I donāt see myself going to a large flat screen for the computer anywhere soon down the line. I donāt own a lap top and not sure if I would really want one. I have a cell (sorry mobile) phone but I need to use my reading glasses to read the caller ID or text messages and I hate texting, twitter, face book, my space and similar related excuses not to deal with others directly. Granted the screen size on an iPhone or Blackberry is at least twice the size of the screen on the phone that I have now but I have a hard time envisioning myself getting the bulk of my TV and my RE over a smart phone and I donāt see a need for me to go the iPad route at the moment either. The thought of having to get prescription reading 3D glasses to watch TV on my phone doesnāt hold much appeal for me at the moment. Yes I have seen the advancements in clarity and sharpness of the pictures and particularly the videos as the resolution rates RE has used has changed over the years and thatās certainly a good thing. Not sure what Blu-Ray quality will do for me given my current or projected computer equipment or if it would look worse than current formats for those of us without the latest and greatest. Backwards compatibility is always tricky and at some point RE will have to cut the cord on older formats and technology to keep pace with where the majority of viewers are currently. I donāt have a problem with that as you can not be all things to all people either in content or transmission method.
As far as the thread of what kinds of videos are permissible to shoot for RE ā¦.. I have enjoyed most of the videos that RE has presented over the years. It would be pretty much impossible for any site to have every photo and video be like by any one viewer. In general I am not much of a fan of some of the harder edged scenes. As Iāve mentioned on other forum posts that while I understand that many people like the scenes of floggings, canings, hot wax, nipple clamps and such and I understand that many women can find them enjoyable under the right circumstancesā¦. they are just not my hot button bondage scenarios. I tend to stick to more of the bondage side of things and am not so much a fan of the discipline or SM side of things. Yes I get that people are into the harder stuff, male and female, and thatās fine so long as no one is forced but itās not really why Iām a member of this site. But you canāt have everything you want every time so Iām fine with the harder stuff from time to time.
I understand what Hywel is talking about in terms of the photo sets containing a lot of āfantasy neutralā aspects to them and how the viewer is free to insert their own story as the reason behind the set. I generally do tend to read the story line trailers for the sets and videos and some become my back ground story when I look at the set or video and in others I insert my own. Iām not sure the videos need to be fantasy neutral or at least a percentage of them doesnāt have to be. To be sure it is nice to see a lovely woman in good bondage (level of clothing optional) struggling against her restraints. Sometimes that is more than enough and a 5 minute video of her moving within the limits of her restraints, perhaps trying to escape them and āmmpphhingā into a gag if present is fine. But for myself there are several other scenarios that I equally like seeing. Iām happy to view that same 5 minutes of struggling and āmmpphhingā seeing and knowing from a proceeding brief scene that she got put into this bondage consensually by her lover (male or female) which results in knowing, or at least suspecting, what will follow later without having to see it. The same basic 5 minutes of struggling would also work with a brief proceeding scene of the lady putting herself in restraints for her lover to find her. Again I have a pretty good idea of what will follow after we see the lover discover her but I donāt really need to see it. And I can also appreciate the aspect of a force scene of the type where the damsel in distress falls in love with her capture and that works for me also but it is harder to show the transition from forced captive to participating lover in a 5 minute video. What appears to be an outright abuse or rape scenario (ala the basic Kink.com set or video) is generally a turn off to me and I donāt have much interest in seeing hard core penetration. Just really doesnāt do anything for me. Personally I do enjoy a āgirl/girlā video where the top does a little groping of the bottom and it perhaps ends with a āforcedā orgasm via a vibrator. RE has done a little of this from time to time but I would not mind seeing more. Of course you have to have models that are comfortable with that scenario to pull it off correctly. One other type of bondage video that really turns me off are ones where you see the model or models āstruggling to escapeā their bondage and itās a single turn of rope with a big knot that she / they can easily reach and untie and yet in the 5 ā 7 minutes she / they are tied she / they seem to manage to do everything but the most obvious thing of untying the knot even though they can clearly reach it. REās bondage has NEVER been that sloppy but where Iām going more with this comment is that I also enjoy seeing a lady working to escape her bondage as a form of game she and her lover are playing (or trying to escape the evil captor). When Iām playing that form of bondage game hopefully the lady loses more than wins but I can appreciate and even cheer for her to escape from time to time. Obviously this applies more to rope bondage than hard steel cuffs, yokes and cages.
Strictly speaking for myself, there are a couple of things Iād love to see RE bring into the mix in terms of attire, restraints and general scenarios. Weāve seen some latex, spandex and leather or leather like attire from time to time but I donāt think we have seen much of it in more recent sets. Iād enjoy seeing some skirts or pants of any of those materials work their way into a few sets from time to time as theyād go good with the silk and satin blouses. Iād also love to see some more catsuits but I realize they can get pricy and you have to think about how many of the models they might fit. Iād also love to see some ankle length hobble skirts from time to time as they make an easy leg restraint and something that can easily go out in public. Personally I always like the use of Cheongsams and Medieval attire so more of both would always work for me. In terms of restraints Iād love to see a metal chastity belt or belts used as was suggested on the forum as well as a leather straitjacket or sleep sack (both personal favorites) or perhaps some of the restraints from RigidCuff. However, here again they are not cheap and RE would need to work out how cost effective they would be in terms of the number of models that they would fit. Also seeing some more of the favorite RE restraints in more of the videos would be nice like the metal yokes, the globe cuffs, the cage, Arielās five point chain restraint (donāt think the globe cuffs or Ariel in her five point has made a video yet). Iāve always been a big fan of the outdoor work the RE has done. Part of that is just the wonderful backdrops you can get as well as the natural lighting. But there is also the aspect of being seen and what would happen. We saw a little of that in the trip to Sweden and it might or might not have happened during part three of the āBondage Romanceā videos with Sammie B. Iāve seen several sites based in Germany and the Netherlands that have a fair amount of public bondage. Models walking along city streets, in parks and so forth collared, wearing handcuffs, even ball gagged passing by the general public. For the most part no one seems to care, or at least they donāt show it on most of the videos. It would be nice if RE could take things that public but obviously the cultures are different (certainly would be hard pressed to do that here in the US except on certain days in certain cities) but would be nice none the less. I also enjoy scenarios of the lady being in some sort of bondage as part of her day to day life. She comes home from work and puts herself in a collar and cuffs for the evening or while doing chores around her home. Sheās working from home but in bondage. She and her lover have a bet that she looses and has to spend a day or a weekend in bondage. She wants to try to set a personal record of being in a straightjacket for āXā hours or strapped down to the bed with hospital restraints for a day and we look in on her from time to time. Iāve also liked a number of the videos that a couple of RE models have routinely done for another UK based site where generally one lady is tying up the other and itās all perfectly normal and the conversation between the two covers every day subjects as well as what the ladies like about their bondages. Somewhat a case of throwing the ladies the restraints and seeing what they come up with. And a bit of tickling would not be bad either though I know some models absolutely hate it. Of course I understand that some of those topics might not be to everyoneās tastes but they are to part of mine.
As far as how to handle doing some of the āharderā aspect videos in the future and how both the models/crew as well as the viewer might respond I think you might have been on the right track previously with the RE Nights video. We kind of knew they were a bit different from the normal RE videos just by the intro. As far as dealing with the crew you could have a meeting / email session with them to explain what you are looking to do, how they would feel about it, would they want to be a part of it and get their inputs on dealing with the models and the viewers. Iām not sure what the best way to reach the majority of the models might be. It would probably be difficult to have a mass meeting or even a bunch of smaller meetings. Conference call or email would probably be the best approach to present what you might want to try to do and see how the ladies feel and how best to work things into the RE mix. Very probably some of the models will not want to be a part of that type of work but perhaps presenting it up front so that they know this is a possibility in the future would eliminate the shock factor of showing up for a shoot and freaking out. As far as getting the message across to the members and viewers that some of the videos will be containing a harder edge than the usually RE material perhaps create a subsection to the website. Currently you have the members home page that shows the daily regular and archive updates and then there are āXā number of Update and Archive pages linked to the members home page. You could add an āRE Nightsā type section to this as well that would take the viewer to a text page, perhaps also with a video, explaining what the RE Nights concept is all about and that material found here goes in a somewhat different direction and tone than the regular material and might not be to everyoneās tastes but it is all being done consensually despite depicting non- consensual material. At least by having to go through that type of portal what follows should not come as a shock to anyone and they are given the chance to bail out and go back to the more comfortable RE material. Not saying itās the best or only potential solution but itās what initially comes to my mind.
In any event, sorry to have rambled on so long with this post. Hywel, I think it is great that RE will be turning ten next year. You have put together a great site over the years and produced a lot of wonderful material. Very well done sir. You have also had the courage to let go of the site enough to bring in others (Kate, Steve, Merlin, Ariel and others Iām sure Iām forgetting) to help with the site and that has only added to itās charm, class and quality. Very well done all. Re has also generated its own little community and that is great as well. I look forward to what will come over the next decade. Thanks, as always, to all on the production crew and to all the lovely ladies living out our bondage fantasies for us. Your efforts are appreciated. Would love to be able to give some more back to help but being across the pond does play a bit of a limiting factor in what I can do.
Best to all, cheers and hereās to great things comingā¦..
Jeff
Folllowing up on lurker’s post, I tend to prefer still photo sets over videos. Some of your videos have been superb; however, for my taste they tend to be too long.
As I have said previously, I prefer sets (still or video) where the model is obviously enjoying herself; smiles are wonderful.
I hope that you will have more chat sessions with the models. The time is somewhat awkward for me, since I am in the US Central time zone, but I can work around that.
Thank you.
Thank you all for the thoughtful replies, especially Jeff for the essay. Many good and considered points there which we will be pondering and discussing at our next get together at the next location shoot.
The more I think about it the more I like the idea of moving to a different update schedule with photosets on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and a video on Saturday. Archives will still update every day, and new things like live shows, chats, behind-the-scenes videos and so forth can then be scheduled perfectly sensibly on “non-scheduled-update” days. At the moment it always feels a bit weird to put up a video diary or something with little or no bondage as a scheduled daily update, so that’ll loosen things up a little.
For the live shows I’ve not look into possible technologies yet but would certainly be intending to record the shows and put them up afterwards so people who couldn’t make the show live can see what happened.
Cheers, Hywel.
A late reply, but a reply none the less.
Having been a member of RE on and off since 2002, its been a pleasure seeing the development and the increasing amount of work, Hywel has put into this. RE is really a unique bondage site, and I hope you’ll continue to focus on the elegance and simplicity of bondage, and not fall into the pits of hardcore pornography that other similar sites have been unable to avoid.
The new update schedule makes sense, though I support others who have said that they prefer the pictures. Of course, seeing as I have very few gaps in my RE collection over nearly 10 years, the archive updates are not really a replacement for daily updates of new material for me – this might be different for other members.
I was originally drawn to RE and has returned as a member so many times because of the large amount of steel bondage that was originally here – I dont know if it was because Hywel was still learning how to tie a good knot and rig a suspension š But it seems that the steel bondage has dissapeared somewhat over the last years, at least the kind I liked. Todays update of Christina Carter in a 5-point shackle is the kind I miss; the heavier, “dirtier” kind of shackles. I always thought the strength of Hywels photography and the models of RE was the ability to look stunning and elegant in spite of being restrained in large amounts of metal. It gave a wonderful contrast. I dont know if you just wore out the original shackles that was used in many harem and medieval shoots, the collar and leg irons occasionally pop up still, but I’d love to see them make a comeback once in a while.
Thats my only, small gripe with the development, because everything else is sounding and looking amazing. Keep up the good work!
Thank you for your kind and supportive comments.
To answer a few points… the old style shackles. The fastenings were hard to operate and eventually broke on the smallest set- I had to shear a bolt to get them off, which fortunately I could do with brute strength and didn’t have to cut them off. I basically retired the others in the set then, because I didn’t want another fixture going on me and ended up at the Fire Station getting them cut off. You can’t get them any more, and besides that’s a design flaw with them which would make me uncomfortable to keep using.
I hear you on the steel bondage- it sounds like I should invest in some more of the five-cuff-shackle style in different sizes.
We’re planning to run our next location shoot aiming for the new update scheme, working on fewer photosets but putting more time and energy into each. We’ll have a much better feel for this when we’ve done so- we’ll let you know how it goes.
Incidentally I’m not saying that there won’t be an update on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Sundays. Things which feel a bit like “cheating” updates like a behind the scenes set of photos, Ariel’s video diary, out-takes and other things will now have a place without me feeling I may be short changing people with an update that may be a bit short on bondage or not really a self-contained bondage feature.
Cheers, Hywel.
Variety is good, and those heavy five-cuff shackles are a good thing to have as part of that variety. If you had to retire your current irons, I’ll endorse the idea of getting new ones so that they show up occasionally.
Another prop I’d suggest investing in is a pole-dance style pole, possibly modified to serve as a “slave post.” A model in (e.g.) a frog tie who is also tied sitting with her back to a post is different from one who is squirming on the carpet, struggling with her bonds. Both can be hot, but they’re different.
I’ll also second J8tennant’s comment: “smiles are wonderful”
I dont know where you bought your original pair, but here they are, straight from the guy who makes them:
I forgot to add in my earlier post, that I do think you’ve taken the right approach by using Darby cuffs more than regular handcuffs – they photograph very, very well.
Hi,
Yes, they were from Huse. I thought they’d stopped doing them- I’ll check them out and see if the design flaw has been fixed.
Cheers, Hywel.
Greetings from New Jersey,
I hope everyone is doing well today.
I’m also a big fan of the various metal restraints Hywel has used on the site over the years. Clearly you have to have faith that the restraint will function properly each time out. As Hywel mentioned, trips to the fire station to have something cut off would never be a good thing. If Huse has corrected their design flaw then that might work. One other possible source of a five point system is http://www.steel-bondage.com which I think is where RE got it’s metal fiddle restraint if the pictures on their site are correct (“Steel Bondage in the Harem” set with Sabrina). I have never seen their products in person so I can not speak for quality but they have a five point combination set on their site that can closed either with a screw lock or a padlock (the later would seem to eliminate the design fault of the other set) plus you can specify the lengths of the various connecting chains from collar to wrists cuffs and wrist cuffs to ankle chain along with the distances between the wrist cuffs and between the ankle cuffs to you might be able to have a set built that would fit a large enough number of the models to justify the cost. Anyway just a thought.
Best to all and Cheers,
Jeff
I’m a huge fan of the five point shackle sets and I wish there were a lot more sets done using them as was the case in the past. If you’re looking for sets to buy trying searching for “sirik” as that’s the name this chain combination is given in John Norman’s popular Gor books and they are frequently sold under that name, for example, at
As for the suggested shooting schedule changes, they don’t appeal to me. I don’t come to the site for video and very rarely download it. What attracts me to the site are the still sets so having the production of still sets halved is a retrograde step as far as I am concerned. Replacement of new sets by archive sets isn’t of interest to me either because being a long term member on and off I already have all the archive sets I am interested in. Behind the scenes material is vaguely interesting but not a substitute for new content.
The shooting schedule changes are hard to explain without it sounding like we are whinging, I fear. I’ll try.
In physical terms it boils down to the shooting budget for a stills set being Ā£100, one hour maximum shooting time, and two hours maximum processing time.
These are related by the way- two hours shooting time would immediately double the budget, because the model, crew and location fees double.
The processing time is primarily limited to the number of Hywel-hours in a month, and the only trade-off there would be to farm the post production out to someone else, which would blow the Ā£100 budget.
An hour is plenty to shoot a set in the studio if I’ve already lit the set, unless it is a very complex rig.
On location, it is a push. Even if I’m doing the lighting while someone else rigs the bondage, it is tight enough that we can’t really afford the time to check the test shots on the laptop for every set, and fine tune the lighting accordingly… something I’d really like to move over to doing.
I think the other people who shoot for the site would agree with me that the knowledge of how many updates we need to get from the trip, and the consequent time pressure, does have an effect on how we work. I hope that RE shoots are a good and creative environment for shooting stunning images, but I think everyone is aware that a Ā£8,000 ($12,000 US at current exchange rates) location trip is a big risky investment and we can’t afford to only generate two weeks of content from such a shoot.
Now every so often we really push the boat out with something like the lexicons- which I note have been the most highly-rated special feature we’ve ever done. Part one of the lexicon took a day to shoot and two days to edit. Part two took two days to shoot, and two days to edit (and I haven’t done the full edit on all the photosets from it yet- just the ones for the feature itself). The up-front costs we kept a lid on by having it just Ariel and me, but still that’s three days of her time. For my time, it meant spending a week to generate a total of two updates for the site. That would be three and a half weeks- a working month- to generate a single week’s worth of updates for the site.
That’s clearly impossible to do regularly unless there were four people working on the post production full time, and there isn’t, there’s just me, and not full time at that. I have to fit a month’s worth of processing into a calendar month, but I also have to fit in shooting, answering customer service emails, writing scripts and shoot plans, general production chores, re-painting the infinity cove, and so on. Not to mention sleeping š I actually have maybe 10 days a month to edit, less on months where we are doing a lot of shoots. I don’t want to complain, but jiggering my time around to fit in several extra days to process one of these ambitious sets is really, really tricky. So tricky it can get put off for many months.
What this means is that every set we do which is a little bit special requires quite considerable planning and contortions of scheduling to find the extra time to plan it, shoot it and edit it. Of course not every special set is as elaborate as the lexicon but even a set which takes an afternoon to shoot puts a big strain on our time and our budgets… and it only provides a day’s update, even if it took three days to prepare when you add in processing time. The temptation is not to bother any more and just do a very simple set which will fill the same slot in the update schedule in a tenth the time (and effort).
A concrete example, in this case a video rather than a stills set, but the resource limitations are the same. Two months ago Ariel, Sheep and I spent the afternoon shooting her bondage dance. I did a rough-cut edit but it is a complicated job to fine tune, and I need to spend at least one full day to finish it. I’ve not managed to find that day in the last two months, and it is hard to justify grabbing it when I need to get through the next month’s updates. There’s just not enough spare capacity, especially on the editing and processing side, to do these things. Not enough Hywel-hours in the month, specifically.
I really don’t want to whinge because I enjoy my job, but I’m routinely working from 8 am to midnight several days a month just to get everything done. That’s fine for now- we’re in a recession, we all have to buckle in and work our socks off. But long-term it is unsustainable, the workload is too much for one person. If I was to get a really bad case of ‘flu for two weeks or a break a leg, things could be in a rather perilous state for the site.
So our first step is to add an extra person, by getting Ariel to work 50% of her time on the site. We can’t add any more unless the website membership increases dramatically (and in fact like all other fetish sites I know about, membership has declined for us somewhat since the credit crunch).
Can we add even more manpower? Not unless we significantly raise the price, and use the money to take on another person permanently. That’s the main alternative I have been considering, but it seems too risky in the current financial climate. I don’t know how many of you would be willing to pay $60+ a month for the site?
So the next step has to be to look at the schedule and realise that one cannot currently justify doing more ambitious photosets if each photoset is only one update. There’s no way around the hammerlock of the total overall budget/time resources. This leads to a temptation to bang out “just another quick set” in a very lazy way. Short term, this is efficient. Long term, it risks becoming a creative straightjacket.
There’s nothing wrong with shooting efficiently, and taking advantage of a lighting set-up to shoot two or three sets in the same place with different themes. What’s wrong is if this way of working becomes so much the norm that we dismiss any more ambitious project as being too much work, too much money, too much trouble… and stop trying to do anything more adventurous.
We totally could run RE as a production line. Shoot almost everything in our house, shoot the popular ties in places we know how to light already, get the models to bring their own clothes, and try to get eight updates out from a day’s shoot. That would be GREAT for a year or two actually!!! It would be very relaxing!!! That was and is our “plan B” to weather the recession if we really needed to keep the lid on costs while waiting for things to pick up again, interspersing the more adventurous location shoots and grand ideas with these sets to keep everything ticking along within budget for as long as we have to. It is a very attractive idea to do it for a couple of years for those reasons.
But… would it really retain the “soul” of RE to do nothing but that for the next ten years? I don’t feel it would; I think it is a trap, in the long term. If we’d been thinking like that we’d never have tried any of the spectacular new things we’ve done over the years, succeed or fail, and we’d probably still be shooting on a D60 or 10D because who needs a Hasselblad or even a 5D, really? It would certainly cut my time spent in front of the computer to only be editing 6 megapixel images shot in entirely known and predictable lighting situations, rather than ultra-sharp 31 megapixel photos taken in challenging conditions š š š
So… my problem as a producer is this. How do I provide enough resources for the creative people involved in shooting for RE, including myself, to be able to shoot more ambitious sets? How do I keep everyone’s interest and inspiration up? How do I look a new model or crew member coming along to our shoots and convince them that I really mean it when I say that image quality is the most important thing to get from the day, then say “but you only have an hour to get this really tricky and involved storyline photoset in the can, including lighting and rigging time, and we don’t really have time to redo the rig even though the ropes are a bit loose at the back and that knot’s a bit untidy at her waist and I don’t have time to check the lighting of test shots on the big screen so let’s just roll and hope”?
I believe it comes down to the pressure of the daily update schedule. I’ll remind you again that when this was instigated, an “update” was by definition a roll of slide film, no matter what that film had on it really. Only got sixteen usable images? That was an update. No bondage because it was the storyline setup? Still an update. Seventeen parts to the storyline? An update each. (There really were seventeen-part sets back then).
When there is no physical roll of film, it got harder to mentally justify to myself that sixteen non-bondage shots at the start of a set should constitute an update, or that a single tie that we happened to be able to shoot lots of interesting angles or shots of should be split into two updates just because we shot what would once have been two rolls of film.
So the third possibility is to go back to the early days. Define “an update” as (say) 50 photos minimum, 100 photos maximum. If a set consists of 100 photos, it gets split into two, regardless of whether or not that makes any sense to the storyline.
That was my rule of thumb for a few years, actually. Should I go back to that? Perfectly valid way to schedule the same material so you get multi-part updates and an update every day. I moved away from it because I felt it was “cheating” to split sets that really were all one idea or story into several updates. It also lead to the temptation on shoot days when you’d shot 80 photos to somehow find a way to bang out another 30 or so to guarantee two updates, which is the same pressure on quality vs quantity in a different guise.
I thought that was a dangerous road to go down, so last year I specifically changed the shooting guidelines for us to aim for 50-60 really good, interesting, unique, appealing shots rather than 100+ (with the danger that a lot of shots were rather similar). I started being much more rigorous about rejecting any shots that were slightly below par or choosing between mutliple shots which were very similar at that time, too. The end result is that I feel the quality has improved, but at yet more pressure to get the sets shot in an hour.
I would rather present each idea as a single set even if it took two or three hours to shoot, but not have to produce so many of them. That will allow for more time to be dedicated to the sets which could really, really benefit from taking a whole afternoon to shoot instead of hurrying to get them all in the can in an hour- and since studio sets absolutely can be shot comfortably in an hour, the location ones get even more benefit to take our time. It seems to have the most integrity and allow me to say to Steve or Kate or even myself on location “Yes. This is a stunning idea. It’s great. Let’s have all three of us work on it and take two or three hours to shoot it if we need to, to get it right”.
Does it mean a reduction in the total number of photos on the site? Yes, but I hope they will be better photos (something we’ve already done with changing our shooting guidelines from 100+ shots to make two updates to 50-60 REALLY good ones).
I’d rather make that quality vs quantity trade, for all the reasons I’ve talked about above. Will it be half the number of photos as there are now? I believe not, because some of the more ambitious sets should generate more photos per update. Can I be precise? Not yet. I can give you a better answer in a few weeks’ time when we’ve tried shooting in this new style.
I hope I’ve explained more clearly why I think the current situation is unsustainable on the timescale of ten more years. We’ve been doing it, but increasingly feeling the pressure especially on the location stills sets where the pressure of the one hour/Ā£100 limit is the most acute, feeling like we are making too many quality compromises to get the quality we all strive for.
We all started shooting to make STUNNING images we’re proud of, not to mass-produce run of the mill imahes. Looking forward to 2021, hoping RE is still going, I want to see the quality improved still further, and the work pattern has to be sustainable to achieve that.
So our options as I see them are:
1) Significant price increase of membership in order to pay for a second person full time and give more leeway on shoot budgets. (We’d like to double the membership instead, of course, but without a magic wand I don’t see how to do it- it isn’t like we haven’t been trying!)
2) Going back to splitting all sets of 100+ photos into multiple parts, thus freeing up some time to be allocated to the more ambitious sets. This led to compromises that I didn’t like when shooting, but I’m certainly willing to contemplate a return to this shooting mode if it is what you, the members, would prefer. I know of no bondage website with daily updates that doesn’t split their sets (and indeed many on a one-per-two-days or even less often schedule split their sets).
I know some mainstream sites like Femjoy and OnlyTease update even more often, but the scale of these operations is so far in excess of our own that they aren’t really comparable (I’d be very surprised if they didn’t have at least ten times the membership of RE, probably even more).3) Changing the update schedule to allow time to shoot more ambitious sets and do what we do better. Personally I feel this has the most integrity and honesty with a set being a set, and I believe it will provide a shooting environment more conducive to doing our very best work.
There are certainly other options, but not attractive or particularly feasible ones. I feel option three is the best way forward but I’d be very glad to hear if anyone has alternatives to propose.
Cheers, Hywel.
P.S. reading that back, I can see that if you are not on the crew you might be wondering why the hell we bother with all this location stuff, if it is the thing which is causing the most problems.
The best way I can explain it is in terms of creative stimulation. Stories and ideas immediately leap to mind in the right location, in a much more natural way than thinking of building the same set in the studio would do. Finding three or four interesting and beautiful lighting patterns in a space is easy; lighting the same space in a new way when you have already shot twenty sets in it is hard.
Location shoots are exciting, interesting, stimulating and fun, and they lead to sets which we would have found it really hard to think up without that initial spark from being somewhere new.
We tried the studio shoot approach for three and a half years, and while it had lots of advantages (like space!) we ultimately started to find the limitations of having build everything before you could shoot there quite a restriction. It also impose a heavy financial overhead which we were stuck with, even on weeks we didn’t shoot. The only way out of that would have been to bring in another person as a studio manager to hire it out when we weren’t using it, but the business case for so doing was marginal at best.
So we opted to get rid of the studio (at just the right time for the recession- we’d be absolutely crippled if we still had the Ā£2500 a month fixed overhead right now). At least locations only cost you money when you are actually shooting at them.
We have the more modest studio facilities of our house for regular shoots, which one wants to do with new models to make sure everyone gets on well before booking them for a week-long location shoot š š š
As I said above, this also provides our fallback if we do need to radically trim costs if the recession gets much worse before it gets better. It also gives Ariel and I a place to live and work running the site from in the meantime! And of course there are LOTS of ideas that work really well in the domestic setting, or on the plain white or black backgrounds and we really enjoy shooting these and won’t be stopping that any time soon. It is just that ONLY shooting these would start to be a problem if we didn’t also have the location shoots to keep everything fresh as well.
Cheers, Hywel.
P.P.S. I should also add that multi-part STORYLINES are not really the issue here. If the story is in four episodes and the girl gets tied up by different people in different places and in different ways in each of the four parts, that would seem absolutely great to me to run as four updates.
I’m speaking of sets where the only difference between part one and part two is maybe the appearance of a gag, or the final addition of a rope to make a hogtie out of a nearly-hogtie, or no difference at all except that the set was 120 photos and it needed to be split into two. I had got the purist feeling in my heart that to call that two updates was rather cheating.
Cheers, Hywel.
OK, you’re saying that doing daily updates depend on having smaller sets or splitting sets into two (or more) parts. And you’d rather drop the daily updates in favor of doing larger, unsplit sets. My own druthers would be to keep the daily updates with split sets, all other things being equal. But it’s a mild preference on my part, and you’re saying that other things aren’t equal. Fair enough.
My larger worry is that “three photoset updates a week” is a move toward doing more video at the expense of fewer still photos. Since I come here for the still photos and rarely bother downloading the video, that’s a move I’d strongly prefer not to see.
Do others have the same preference for daily updates, but with a return to split sets?
Daily updates with smaller sets is not sustainable- that’s what we’ve discovered in the last 18 months. The overheads on shoot days of each lighting set up and bondage tie tend to overpower the advantages of reduced editing time for each set. The slow bit isn’t shooting photos, it is getting ready to shoot them. Banging out more photos of each set is absolutely possible, which is what a return to split sets would mean.
We did find the pressure to find the extra few shots to make a set viably split into two was somewhat compromising, but that was a workable approach. I am certainly willing to return to that if there is a strong consensus in favour. We can explore more ways of having a progression in the sets so I do’t feel too guilty about part two being the same as part one. The crew’s feeling was that shooting less pics and aiming for highly quality had been a good thing, but that the workload required was prohibitive. Going back to shooting longer sets and splitting them is certainly a viable alternative.
On the video side, I would add that although the posters who have commented on the forum so far have expressed little interest in that side of the site, I have had comments in emails to the opposite effect, complaining that there aren’t enough videos. So as always there’s a balance to be struck and we won’t be able to please everyone all of the time.
Parenthetically even if one were to cut out the video updates in favour of more stills, or only do two videos a month, they are a relatively small fraction of the total workload compared with the stills; the workload is dominated by the stills and the need to get 26 stills updates a month, not the need to get four or five videos a month. That’s why I’m proposing to leave the video updates as they are, producing them is just a small blip on the workload compared with the voracious appetite of daily updates for the stills as things stand right now.
Cheers, Hywel.
If you want to save production time my personal preferences would be:
– Drop all videos or make them a lot rarer.
– Do more studio shots. I personally like the simplicity of simple lighting and backgrounds contrasting with the models in bondage. I even like models against a pure black background. I like some outdoor shots particular au natural in forests or pools but you don’t need to go and hire a castle in Spain for me to enjoy the sets.
– Don’t worry about constructing elaborate storylines to justify pretty girls being naked or semi-clothed in bondage. We can fill in the gaps in our own minds.
I’d rather have 100 still shots broken into 2×50 than see still production drop at the cost of more video. But please, and I know this has been mentioned before, if we are going to have 100 shots in a set lets have plenty of variety in the model’s posing. The sort of sets I don’t like are where you get 50 almost identical left front quarter shots and one is left wondering whether the model has a backside or a hideous birthmark on the right side of the face because she seemingly refused to adopt any other pose!
Thanks for the chance to offer feedback.
HI,
Thank you for the well-considered thoughts. I’m sure you can appreciate that we have a balancing act to perform running the site commercially. There are sufficient people whose main interest is the videos that it is not really a viable proposition to drop them, even if we wanted to, and we don’t, because we enjoy making both the stills and the videos.
The variety in the 100 shots was the reason we stopped aiming for split sets. While there are some ties that naturally lend themselves to a progression in the tying, which easily gives one 100 different shots, there are others like a strict hogtie where there are exactly two poses the model can get into (on her stomach or on her side) and there are only so many angle one can shoot from or expressions one can capture. That’s what I meant about the pressure to get your 80-shot set up to 110 so as to be securely in the two-updates category (allowing for a few rejects). We did find ourselves pushing to get those last shots and ending up shooting shots which were too similar to ones we’d already taken earlier in the set.
The balance between location and studio sets is certainly something we look at at the start of each year when we plan the shooting. Some number of location shoots are useful to keep everyone fresh and shoot ideas that might never have occurred to us otherwise. Doing too many is a financial risk and an organisational nightmare. We like doing them, and I think it is nice to be able to mix in some sets shot in the sun in a swimming pool with studio stuff, but the balance is definitely something we dynamically assess. It is good to know that your enjoyment on the sets doesn’t really depend on the lush expensive locations!
Cheers, Hywel.
I know you have to keep a balance. For myself I’m just throwing in two cents on the “stills!” side as a counterweight to all that e-mail on the “video!” side. It’s more a wish to keep RE from shifting away from stills to more video rather than shifting the balance to more stills. And it sounds as if sacrificing the current level of video wouldn’t do all that much to free up more resources for stills anyway.
Off the top of my head: How much trouble would it be to get two “takes” or storylines from a single tie-up?
E.g. the model is roped up in a hogtie and a lot of photos are taken. In half of them she’s all serious and glowering, and the photos are posted in Set A: “Grrr… I’m going to get Agent H for what he did to me! …just as soon as I get loose…” In the other half, she’d all smiling and bubbly, and those photos are posted in Set B: “He picked me! He picked me! He picked me! The Sultan picked me for tonight!”
In both sets, the model is the same, the tie is the same, the positions are mostly the same – but the tone, emotions, and storylines are different.
(Hmm, I’d like to see this tried out as an experiment, even if it turns out not to be practical for regular use.)
I like the videos.
LOL, Lurker, I like that idea! I know it wouldn’t work for every set, but it’d be a really fun experiment to sometimes shoot the same tie in two different ways. Great idea š
On a side-note, sorry to have been away from the forum. I’ve got a new laptop to replace the stolen one, but I couldn’t remember my forum login and was too proud to ask Hywel for help….
Ariel x
Greetings from New Jersey,
I hope everyone is doing well.
Well it seems pretty clear that there is probably no way of keeping everyone fully satisfied on exactly how RE should move forward from here. I see a lot of passion in some of the forum responses and I can only assume there is much the same level on the email responses. Thatās basically a good thing. There have been several postings dealing with the level of effort required to do a 50 photo update six days a week. I hope that has registered with most of the readers because it is draining between editing color balances, removing āred eyeā if the camera doesnāt do it, possibly removing the odd element that should have not been in frame but got in anyway (like a reflection in a mirror or window), adjusting size and or resolution to balance picture quality vs. upload / download speed, adding the copyright lettering and on and on. Iāve done that for several commercial website over the years and itās not exactly as exciting as taking the photos in the first place, despite the subject matter of the photos Hywel is editing. And as has been said the lead time in setting up lighting and doing the bondage rigging far exceeds the time spent actually taking the photos.
My thoughts on some of the possible ways forward:
I like the current mix of photo sets vs. videos. Personally I tend to prefer the videos a little over the photo sets because I like to see the model moving with and against her bondage, I like to hear the gag noises (though 5 ā 7 minutes of just going āmmuupphhā can get old fairly quickly) and particularly in the case of metal restraints I like to hear the sound of the handcuffs closing or the padlock locking. Of course this is not to say that I like every video over every photo set.
Iāve been a member long enough to have seen a number of the older sets where it was a single roll of film and the update was whatever number of shots worked from the roll. It might be over 30 or it might be under 20. It was what it was. I also have seen a number of the two part sets. Personally I donāt have an issue with splitting a set into two parts if there is a logical progression to the combined set or if the āplotā takes a big turn in the middle. But for a split set to work for me it is not simply a case of a series of one or two inch changes in the angle of the camera to increase the number of shots. I also canāt say Iām much of a fan of the progressions where the photo angle is much the same and the only thing changing is another button on the models blouse is unbuttoned on each shot or some part of her clothing is cut away. I find those scenarios a bit too contrived. Along similar lines, however, I think Lurkerās idea of a dual set (same position, attire and restraints but two different attitudes) is worth experimenting with a couple of times to judge feedback.
I would not like to see the number of outdoor and location shots cut back to any great extent although I know they are expensive and can be a logistics headache. I think it is helpful for the crew and the models to work in different surroundings from time to time and it helps keep the creative juices flowing. I canāt say I would find set after set in front of the same white or black background that interesting in the long term. There are only so many positions and scenarios that can be presented that way. To me it makes it much more interesting and realistic (even if I know it is all fantasy) to have shoots done in the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen and so forth).
As Iāve said previously I have no problem with RE going to a revised update schedule if that is what it takes to keep everyoneās efforts focused at a high level and to help them from hitting a āwriterās blockā or a burnout period. It that means a little less new work I can live with it. I doubt most sites have maintained a daily update rate as long as RE has. I also have no problem with using some behind the scenes work as some of the updates. I like the behind the scenes and the āfly on the wallā material as I have previously said.
While I certainly would not like to see a 100% price increase I would understand a minor one on an ongoing basis. There is pretty much always some level of inflation so over time the price may need to go up a bit to maintain the same level of quality and close to the same level of updates. Everything costs money or course. Sever space, camera equipment, restraints, attire, modeling fees and on and on. Small increases year to year are a lot easier to handle than one big one every five or ten years.
Not sure if this would be a viable solution of not but Iāll throw it out for consideration. Hywel, would it be feasible to bring someone in on a part time basis to handle the ālower levelā web update work to allow you to concentrate on the higher level editing as well as the shoots themselves. You would handle picking what photos to use, crop them as required and adjust color, tone, balance and so forth along with writing the storyline for the set. Then hand things off to someone else to do image sizing, change resolution as needed for the web, add in the copyright text, do the page layout and upload to the server after approval. It would seem a logical breakpoint in the workload between the more creative / quality control side and the routine stuff that has to be done on every photo and every update but takes a fair amount of your time. Time that could be better spent elsewhere (including getting some sleep or some time off). Just a thought.
Looking forward to REās second decade regardless of how things may or may not change. Know it will all be good in the long run.
Cheers and best to all,
Jeff
@panther79 wrote:
Do more studio shots. I personally like the simplicity of simple lighting and backgrounds contrasting with the models in bondage. I even like models against a pure black background.
Same here. Sometimes less is more. (Make that less is quite often more.) Exotic backgrounds can sometimes be an interesting change of pace, but sometimes they can clutter the pictures and distract from the model who’s supposed to be the sole center of attention.
I believe RE to be an established site since some years but I guess in this fast paced business you couldn’t rest for long if you want to survive. And I would like to be able to see RE for many years in the future, because it still is such a unique concept and “friendly” site.
I remember former forum threads talking about cost of shooting and running the site. Keeping this in mind I have to say that I don’t understand the direction the site is going, adding more and more bandwidth consuming and maintenance driving stuff.
Like many others I’m not a video fan although I have to confess there are some really nice ones (e.g. ?Bondage Driving Test 4,5?). Nevertheless I prefer those beautiful still images. They are the reasons I have been an occasional member on and off since some years.
Video production and post processing is very time consuming and in my opinion not worth the efford compared to stills, but of course a nice addon occasionally. On-line shows not only increase these effords but – sorry so say this – will demystify / reveal some of the vievers imagination. I’ve seen this at another site and didn’t like it.
I don’t think that opening another business field like a RE version for the smartphone market will be a good idea – at least for now. The smartphone market is segmented and will do some some more in the future. iPhone is no market leader anymore, these devices are very restricted and company policies often are against adult stuff. In my opinion RE high quality stills are contray to those tiny smartphone displays. If someone wants to carry some RE content on her/his smartphone then it should be enough for RE to supply its media in a suitable format, i.e. fitting for iTunes etc … so IMHO to support the omnipresent JPG and additional smaller MP4 videos should be enough.
Coming back to the initial posting asking for our ideas about preferences.
š I joined RE after a rest of 1-2 years again and am glad to see your taste of quality and elegance has not changed
š the improved camera equipment / addition HQ stills are very nice
š I believe the increased update frequency lead to more shoots but with less variety. It doesn’t make sense to publish 50-70 stills of nearly the same position / bondage – some times less is more or in other words, I would like to see some more variety / development in a shoot. Todays status results in much post processing time for you without a big benefit for RE members
š although it’s good that RE kept its unique style but in my case – as I really like the view of a beautiful womans back and bottom – it’s still bad, there had been no development. It’s so plainly obvious that almost everything is done to avoid back view stills, a policy I really don’t like. There are e.g. shoots with the model chained and resting on elbows and knees, the photografer going around her – but of course there is no shoot from behind or nearly behind … (exceptions only in <0,1% don't count). A view from behind to show anything between her legs? No way!!
Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see ‘gynecologist’ views, this can be done quite tasteful with or without panties on – but hey, this is an adult site showing models in bondage (quite harmless for sure but nevertheless) and then you’re more prude than others at simple bikini models shoots? Even Playboy is hardcore compared to RE in this matter. Sorry, but this is ridiculous.š in the beginnig there were some beautiful drawn pics, later some of artists like Morgan Cauthers-Knox / Steve O. Reno, but there seems to be no new ones
Wishes for the future? mmmh
* keep on going and live your dream.
* support standard long living data media formats (JPG, WMV9, MP4 H.264)
* more variety pleaseThank you
Hi domestos29 and thank you for your feedback.
On the required production time for video, I’ll just echo what I said in earlier posts. My job is editing photos. Everything else on the site is a small perturbation to that main job. Even shooting the photos takes only a small fraction of the time spent editing them. Editing the photos takes one or two WEEKS per month. Editing the videos takes one or two DAYS. Shooting takes two or three days. Even dropping the video from the site completely (which is something we’ll never do, as we enjoy making videos ourselves) would only free up an extra circa 10% of total effort.
Of course new features will not be to everyone’s taste either. I can see the issue about demystifying stuff on the site, but Ariel and I hopefully demystify it quite a lot with blogs and forum posts and emails, the tutorial stuff we do hopefully demystifies it a bit more, as do the members’ chat sessions. It just seems to us to go along with the thing you said you liked about RE being a “friendly” site, being friendly and open and honest does run the risk of demystifying things.
I completely agree with you on the smartphone market analysis, and indeed about the strategy for providing material in suitable format (which is why we have MP4 videos in iPod compatible format as an option of course). I know I store and enjoy RE photos on my phone, so I figure other people may want to as well. If that’s true, I don’t see the harm in trying to provide things in formats and interfaces that are easy. I’m not about to commission an iphone-specific version of RE from a programming team! But if we can (for example) “frame” say just the single PHP page used to display video galleries so it presents in HTML5 where it senses a suitable browser, that’s an entirely self contained and rather straightforward programming task which might make the browsing experience richer and simpler for people with those browsers, specifically the ones on mobile phones.
On the “less is more” front, we have been feeling that for some time the pressure of the daily update schedule has led to compromises in variety and in how much time we can devote to thinking out and shooting each set. This is why we have decided to go to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule for photosets, so we can do a much more considered and thorough job for each. (In contrast with the Hywel time budget, which is dominated by the photo processing, the actual cash budget is dominated by stills shoots where one might be paying for several people’s time plus a location. )
On the artwork front, it is true, I stopped commissioning art as not so many people seemed to be interested. The one I was most hoping to continue with was Sigridsaga but sadly for various reasons Brian had to put that on hold. I hope to be able to continue with that at some point. Steve O’Reno is still drawing as far as I know, but I suspect he had a lot of back catalogue which went into his first two books and now he probably has to settle down and a draw a lot more if he is to produce Volume 3! I hope he will and I hope he will be kind enough to let me showcase some more of the work at that point.
The one area where I will take issue with you is over the back views. Not because I doubt your analysis at all- in fact I’m ashamed to admit that it looks as though you are right. Just because I have to defend myself a bit against this statement:
“It’s so plainly obvious that almost everything is done to avoid back view stills, a policy I really don’t like.”There genuinely is no such policy! I hope Ariel, Merlin, Steve, Kate, Iain T and Alexander Lightspear would be able to back me up because as far as I know, I have never once issued the direction “no back view stills”. Not once.
So the question really is why, given that I’m claiming the shooting team has no such direction, are we not producing these back view stills? I’m really not sure. Looking through the sets from the last couple of weeks, I really do see what you mean. My best guess would be that we usually try to include the girls’ faces in shot, and the models usually turn towards camera to facilitate this. But the net result is quite marked isn’t it? Like today’s set with Ashley W which has side views, three quarter views and front views but not so much as a single rear three quarter view, let alone a square-on rear view. There’s no reason for that- Ashley can turn, and the lighting would be fine.
Now Steve shot this set in the studio while I was not even in the room… so I don’t think it can have been a policy decision on my part. I think this is something we are going to have to watch carefully at our forthcoming shoots and make a definite policy of trying to shoot some back shots, because right now while we are not specifically avoiding them, we are not actually getting them either.
So- I must apologise for this shortcoming, but all I can do is to promise to watch out for it and try to improve.
Out of interest, do you find sets by Iain T or Alexander Lightspear to be better? As I’ve never been anywhere near one of their shoots and indeed I’ve never met Alexander- so if their sets are also lacking in this regard, I don’t think it can be as a result of “RE policy”!
You can see Alexander’s sets at http://www.restrainedelegance.com/crewbio.php?id=Alexander+Lightspear&members=1 and Iain’s at http://www.restrainedelegance.com/crewbio.php?id=IainT&members=1
It would provide interesting data for me to know what you think of their sets, because if they are doing a better job, we can figure out what we’re doing wrong more easily!
Cheers, Hywel.
Since it’s come up again, I want to repeat what I said earlier in the thread: In theory I’d like to see drawings & stories included in the RE mix. In practice I know that those things haven’t worked very well in the past. For me they didn’t work because most of them were shifted toward the DSM end of BDSM, often to the point of having little or no actual BONDAGE in them at all. The RE photosets, by contrast, generally offer me a “pure bondage” fix.
Part Six of Sigrid’s Saga, for example, has bondage in it, but the bondage is in a supporting role. It’s the D/s and SM that’s clearly the star of the show. The old Leona storyline was D/s, D/s, and more D/s, with nary any bondage in it that I could see at all.
I liked Steve Reno’s work except for the small detail of him being a boots-and-heels guy. I would like to see his stuff as a regularly recurring feature if you could convince him to do barefoot (but not necessarily nude) drawings. Or if you could find an artist who hit the same “tone” while being a barefoot fan rather than a boots fan.
Another possibility might be some tickling artwork as an occasional special. Or as a regular monthly feature.
So the question really is why, given that I’m claiming the shooting team has no such direction, are we not producing these back view stills? I’m really not sure. Looking through the sets from the last couple of weeks, I really do see what you mean. My best guess would be that we usually try to include the girls’ faces in shot, and the models usually turn towards camera to facilitate this. But the net result is quite marked isn’t it? Like today’s set with Ashley W which has side views, three quarter views and front views but not so much as a single rear three quarter view, let alone a square-on rear view. There’s no reason for that- Ashley can turn, and the lighting would be fine.
Since this came up before, I have made a conscious effort to include back views. Believe it or not, every set I have shot since, I have held this in my mind.
I think the lack of back views tends to be because every modelling instinct tells the model to look down the lens, and every photography instinct tells the shooter to focus on the eyes. I always try to include at least a couple of shots from the back though, if at all possible due to model positioning, tie, lighting and possible shooting angles. I would rather go with my instinct and shoot what comes naturally than feel like I am trying to document the model in 360 degrees like a technical manual – but I have been trying to step outside of my instincts for at least a couple of shots!!
I believe that the thing that sets RE apart from other sites is the focus on the beauty of the model within her situation – rather than the focus being totally on the bondage or the situation itself. The more restrictions and rules you place on yourself, the more you limit your creativity; ultimately, I shoot the angles that I want and shoot the angles that make the model look good. Hopefully, I have been doing it long enough to know RE and to create beautiful pictures that all can enjoy š
I don’t know what other photographers think…
Kate x
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