Tillie and the red blindfold by Stephenkly

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  • #23909

    Hywel
    Keymaster

    Hi Everyone,

    Member and photographer Stephenkly has been kind enough to share some more of his bondage photography with us. Here is the lovely Tillie enjoying and experiencing the red blindfold…

    Cheers, Hywel.

    Tillie in bondage

    Tillie in bondage

    Tillie in bondage

    Tillie in bondage

    Tillie in bondage

    Tillie in bondage

    #23910

    Hywel
    Keymaster

    I had a few technical comments on the images which Stephenkly has kindly said I can post here. I’ll post comments on both sets of images (these of Tillie and the earlier ones of Ariel) together here. If you’ve got any thoughts or comments, please post them!

    The best thing is that the girls look good, the shots are nice and crisp, in focus, no camera shake- so already a strong start!

    What I did notice was a fairly strong green colour cast. I thought that just be my monitor and my personal taste, so I tried loading the image into Aperture and doing a click-white-balance on the wall behind Tillie in one of these shots. Sure enough, Aperture also thought there was quite a green tint and dialled in a fairly strong magenta correction to counterbalance it. Here’s the result:

    Edited Tillie pic, removing green colour cast

    (I also couldn’t resist pulling the mid tones and highlights up a little with a tone curve to make the whites look a little crisper; I may have overdone it a bit).

    If shooting RAW (which you should) colour casts like this are not a big deal- just carry a white card. A posh white/grey balance card is good, but frankly a clean sheet of white paper will do. Then, in photoshop/lightroom/aperture/whatever, just clicking on the card will set a starting white balance that should get you 90% of the way there on colour balance. You can then tweak it from there to create an overall warmer or cooler tone as you like.

    As to where the green cast comes from- are you shooting with fluorescent light sources? CFL bulbs or similar? If so, these have a massive spike in the green which is hard to deal with. The effects on skin tones in particular can be subtle and hard to correct for. For my preference, Tillie’s skin tones still looked a little sallow even after I did the overall white balance so I tweaked it a little by selecting the skin tones and shifting them a little to warmer and more magenta.

    If you have access to different sorts of lights (eg tungsten or flash) play around with them a bit and see how you like the resultant images. I like using flash for stills, but failing that would choose Tungsten over fluorescents despite the heat and power issues, just because the rendition of skin tones feels warmer and more flattering to my eye.

    For the shots with Ariel, the first thing that caught my eye was again the green colour cast. The second thing is that the shots on the cross look a little under-exposed (or under-lit). I’d try pulling the mid-tones and highlights up a bit in post.

    The ones of Ariel on the bed have the opposite problem, with the highlights on her shirt and hair possibly being a little too hot, resulting in a problem that’s called clipping where you tend to lose detail and colour information in the highlights. If these were shot in RAW, you might be able to dial down the exposure or the highlights a little to recover from that.

    Hope that’s of some interest and help… looking forward to seeing more of your work!

    Cheers, Hywel

    • This reply was modified 10 years, 2 months ago by  Hywel.
    #23912

    Sablesword
    Participant

    I like to use the “coffee-filter trick” to set a custom white balance when I shoot sets with strobes. It gets things close enough to right that any further adjustments are as much a matter of artistic judgment as of technical correctness.

    In other cases I’ll use a preset or automatic white balance. If I remember to change the setting. Sometimes the first shot or two will be very yellow (or very blue), and I’ll remember “Oh, yeah. I forgot to change the white balance setting.”

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