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DIY Art (a reply to @bandreesub)

Hi All,

This morning I read an interesting couple of tweets from @bandreesub:

“I like bondage photography. Very pretty, and all that. But – like fashion photography – it’s a little bit “not for the likes of you””

“I’d love to see some shibari on plain, normal, chubby, scarred or even – gasp! – OLDER people.”

I had some thoughts which “this margin” (i.e. a tweet) was too small to contain, especially since I was worried that the short form of this post would come across as very rude, whereas it is meant to be the absolute opposite- very enthusiastic.

The short version is: if you’re not seeing what you want to see, do something about it. Either make it yourself or pay someone else to make it for you.

And in the internet age it has never been easier to do exactly that.

Here’s the long form:

I absolutely agree that a lot of bondage photography on sees on the internet uses pretty young women as the models. The gay porn equivalent uses a lot of muscle-bound hunks, from what I can gather.

There are probably lots of reasons for this* (see footnote), but the interesting thing is that none of those reasons prevent you from going out doing something different.

If you want something that you are not seeing, it has NEVER been easier to remedy the situation. Like what, I hear you cry?

1) Find someone who does it and encourage them

Have you seen someone who does shoot shibari you like, or with models you like, but not together? Why not drop them a line and say you like their work and make a few (polite) requests for what you might like to see?

That’s how I started- I probably made quite a nuisance of myself to Subgirl Molly Matthews on the subject of barefoot bondage and bastinado, I struck up conversations with Felix Dartmouth of Archives BBS on the subject of barefoot bondage, and probably Lorelei and Ashley Renee and Bondage By Request and whole bunch of other people.

The person I know who is most likely to be interested is probably @PandoraBlake. I’m sure there are lots of people doing good stuff especially on Fetlife who might be up for this project.

If the photographer/rigger/model is really good at what they do, they might be a professional. This means that they may not be able to fold your request into their plans and shoot it for you for free, because they have to make enough money to pay the bills and eat. But many producers are very receptive to commissions.

2) Commission Something

Find someone whose work has some elements of what you like, and commission them to shoot your vision for you.

I’d be absolutely delighted to shoot this if you’d like to see a wider range of models shot in the RE style.

The costs might be lower than you think; we’d look at as a custom photoshoot and price it like any other where we’re not sure whether we’d be able to sell the resulting photos on to a wider audience.

It depends on how much the shoot will cost to stage, but also on what the possible returns on the shoot are for the photographer. If they have a ready market for it, as we do for bondage videos of Ariel, they can probably charge you cost price or even less, and the photographer will cover the cost of their time and work by selling the product more generally afterwards.

If the photographer has no ready market (as we do not for fem-dom or male-sub photos, for example) they will probably have to charge their own day rate on top. It isn’t that the market doesn’t exist by the way: it is whether you already have a presence. Fem-dom is a very big market. But the amount of work required to build a publicity and sales presence in that market is prohibitive for a cottage industry producer to do by themselves given that they already have an existing business to run. Even Clips4Sale only generates meaningful sales figures if you update daily. Connecting with the target audience for a single photoshoot or video may not be cost effective in terms of the producer’s time. So they charge their own day rate instead.

I’m not the only one who shoots commissions: you might find @JohnTisbury‘s style more to your tastes, for example. And if you fancy being the model yourself, Mighty Aphrodite are lovely and do beautiful work (and we’d be happy to go along as the rigger if you wanted more complex bondage than they are up for).

I actually started by commissioning photos- the first photo set I commissioned was when I was 18 and had just gone to University. I ordered a barefoot bondage and whipping set from a photographer who advertised in the back of Practical Photography magazine. I also ordered custom sets from several US photographers once the web took off.

3) Do It Yourself

If no-one is going to consistently make what you want to see, make it yourself.

It has never been easier. Let’s take the example of shibari with an older model. You’ll need:

A model. If you don’t know someone suitable you can persuade and you don’t want to do it yourself, I’d probably start with Fetlife.

Or if you have a look around, the model portfolio sites like PurplePort, Model Mayhem, Purestorm do have a wider variety of models that might immediately be obvious; just run a suitable search.

Or start on Twitter.

I did my first shoot with a couple I met online via their website; these days I get all my models from the portfolio sites or by them contacting me direct.

A location. If your house won’t do, hire a local photo studio if you have one, or travel to a non-local one. They’ll have lighting which the studio owner will probably be very happy to help with. I did my second shoot at a studio near where I worked. Failing that, a decent sized hotel room works fine.

A camera. These days you can get good enough to get going results out of an iPhone, but you can pick up a Canon 20D and kit lens for £150 which is more than enough to get you going.

Lights. If you’re at a studio, they’ll have some. Otherwise, a two head flash starter kit can be yours for around £200 from WEX photographic. Sure these are weedy but it’s all you need to get started shooting in a modest-sized space.

A photographer. Of course, you could just hire a photographer who would probably have their own camera and lighting kit. I work for a day rate, for example, and I’m sure many other photographers would be happy to help out with an interesting project like this. But don’t be put off, you can do it yourself, photography isn’t rocket science. Get a cheap light meter (I’ve had one of these for 15 years) to go with your flash kit and camera, set to manual, set 1/125th of second shutter and whatever the light meter tells you for aperture and you’re ready to start experimenting. Do that before anyone gets tied up, of course.

Rope. Easy to get hold of. B&Q will do to get started, or internet suppliers like Rainbow rope for coloured nylon or Twisted Monk for hemp will get you what you need.

A rigger. You can do this yourself- start simple, keep safe, and get going with something like Bondage for Sex (Chanta’s book) or one of the other bondage for beginners books. Pick someone whose style you like and go from there. Or you can hire a rigger- some photographers can rig too, @ArielAnderssen or I are happy to be booked to rig for the day, or maybe Wyk_Dave for Shibari?

We’re happy to run a bondage rope work and bondage photography tutorials if you want to learn, just drop us a line. Others run workshops, munches, etc. too of course.

A computer to process the shots. You probably have one. If you’ve got a Mac, iPhoto will do just fine. If you’ve got a PC, consider something like Lightroom which you can now pay for on a month-by-month basis which removes any significant up-front cost.

And that’s it.

I ended up at 3) myself when I realised that it was probably cheaper and better and certainly more direct for me to shoot what I wanted to see myself rather than keep commissioning shoots.

Really, whichever way you go I’d have thought £1000 or $1500 or so should be enough. It’ll either get you enough kit to get started and book your first shoot or two, or commission a shoot or two from a photographer whose work you like.

I’ve no idea how much interest there would be in shibari photographs with a wider range of models. It might be wildly commercial, with a pent-up demand from people whose artistic desires are not currently being served. Or it could be a very small niche. There’s only one way to know- make some, and see what people think.

The people who should make some are the people who want to see it. Who else can know what it is they want to see? So either as creator or as patron of the arts, if you want to see something that’s not out there right now, get stuck in!

I’m not going to go and do it myself right now. This is my job and I already have more ideas of my own that I have time and money to shoot. It’s not been an easy time for website producers over the last few years, and I think we’re all a bit cautious about sinking our own money into shoots if we’re uncertain about the returns.

Yes, that’s timid of me. Sorry. It’s my mortgage and food bills on the line. But if you are committed enough to the idea to help pay for it, I’m totally up for it.

In fact I’d be delighted to help out as photographer, rigger, or commissioned producer or just with advice and suggestions and support. If my photographic or bondage style isn’t what you’re after, I’m sure many other photographers would be just as happy to work on this.

Cheers, Hywel Phillips

Footnote: Because of Reasons

I copped out of a digression into WHY most bondage photography features pretty young girls (or hunks in gay porn) in the main post. I think it is basically just a reflection of what mainstream culture finds attractive. If anything I’d say there’s probably a greater diversity of models in fetish and spanking work than there is in the mainstream media- bondage models have much greater career longevity than their mainstream glamour comrades, for example. Lots of sites feature women in their thirties and forties, without having to bill them as “MILFs” or “Cougars” or “Grannies” (yuck- had this discussion before about the horrid terminology).

The majority of bondage photography you see around the internet is commercial bondage photography. That’s because commercial bondage photographers create more bondage than amateurs, because it is their day job. And also they have to publicise more widely, to generate sales to cover costs, generate profits to live on and to sink back into doing more shoots. So they’ve got a vested interest in getting their work in front of potential customers’ eyeballs in any way possible, which amateurs shooting for themselves have not.

So one ingredient in what you see is just what other people want to see. Specifically, what the sort of people who PAY for their bondage photography want to see.

That’s not to say that there aren’t niches not currently served where there are potential paying customers waiting for someone to deliver what they want so they can hand over their money. Maybe they are just waiting for a producer to make more diverse films, as Pandora Blake has neatly proved with Dreams Of Spanking.

The other ingredient, which also reflects the mainstream concept of attractiveness, is what the photographers and artists want to make. I don’t know of a single bondage photographer who didn’t start doing it as a hobby, shooting exactly what they wanted to see. Since most of us started some time in our thirties and are heterosexual males, it’s probably no great surprise that the overwhelming majority of bondage photography models are exactly what you’d expect if you asked a bunch of thirty-something heterosexual men to pick a model’s photo out of a great scrolling list of model head shots.

Or that if you ask a gay photographer what he’d like to shoot, with his own money, you end up with a lot of muscle-bound hunks.

So to widen the demographic of models you probably need to widen the demographic of customers and of photographers. Which again brings us to the point: if you don’t see art you like, do something about it. Either create art you want to see yourself, or commission someone to help bring your vision to life.

Are YOU willing to sink a thousand pounds of your own money into making the bondage photographs you want to see?

If you’re not willing to do that, and other people with the same tastes aren’t willing to do it either, there won’t be any of the sort of art you want. You’ll be stuck with the output of people who ARE willing to sink their own time and money into creating the photographs.

Roleplaying Games, Inspirations and Appendix N

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I play roleplaying games: Dungeons and Dragons, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu and the like.

I run them for my friends. I’ve been doing so for over 30 years, the last 20 or so in a comfortable routine every Wednesday night for the same group of ex-college-housemates who are my closest friends. The house move has scuppered that, so we’re trying to reconstruct as a roleplaying game every couple of months for a whole weekend. This weekend will be the first.

I should go into a long song and dance about how great roleplaying games are. They’ve certainly been great fun for me. But the main thing they did was introduce me to storytelling for other people, at a very early age. My photography and film-making are informed and motivated by the same inspirations and mental images that I draw on to write games for my friends.

Have you ever wondered why Restrained Elegance has stories about captured djinni’s and efreeti, slavegirls of the wicked baron, viking maidens, nature spirits and bondage pleasure robots? It’s me playing with the same mythologies, settings and story ideas that I enjoy exploring (in a non-kinky context) with my friends around the games table.

I like telling stories and it comes as naturally to me to construct tales about a family of vikings cast adrift into the deep under dark trying to find their way back to the surface as to write sexy stories about tied up Medieval maidens or slavegirls in fantasy Arabian nights.

The kinky and non-kinky facets have bounced off against each other for years. Can you imagine what might have caught my eye about this book when I saw it age about 12 in a bookstore in the magical far-off land of Canada on a super-exciting family holiday?

Recently there’s been a movement called the “Old School Renaissance” where a bunch of 40-somethings like me try to recreate the excitement and limitless possibilities that the early roleplaying games offered. Many quote as their inspiration Gary Gygax’s Appendix N from that weighty tome, the Dungeon Master’s guide (WHAT a title! No wonder it spurred my interest, especially paired with that picture!

I’ve read a lot of the Appendix N authors. Many have a whimsical, arbitrary quality to their worlds which I find as annoying in their writing as I did in the early D&D modules which drew heavily on them. So I thought I’d offer up my own Appendix N replacement for books and other works of art which have inspired me over the years.

And thank them all for making such evocative work.

The black and white illustrations from old-school Dungeons and Dragons. Scantily clad warrior maidens, impossibly beautiful elf princesses, virgin sacrifices… artists like Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, Jeff Easley, Jim Roslof and Liz Danforth evoke whole world and civilisations with a few lines of the pen. A picture is worth a thousand words. If I could draw like that, I wouldn’t need a camera.

The gorgeous colour artwork of their successors, especially the artists who worked on Dragonlance like Clyde Caldwell, Larry Elmore, et al. The pictures are often nonsensical from a “protect your vulnerable bits from harm” point of view, but oh so glamorous. And even the strong maidens I wanted to to tie up 🙂 Simultaneously, their world builds and portrayal of landscapes motivated me to get out in the mountains and write stories set in abandoned keeps or next to ice fjords, not just in domestic or modern settings.

Leaving the visual arts for the written, I’ll include just two things from Gygax’s original appendix N: Tolkien (more The Hobbit than The Lord of The Rings for me), Zelazny’s Amber series. Conan I find more inspiration from the films and pulp illustrations than the original fiction, and Call of Cthulhu makes an excellent game but I find Lovecraft a bit dry to read for fun.

To Gygax’s list of authors I’d add Glen Cook, Mary Gentle, Iain M. Banks, Guy Gavriel Kay, J. K. Rowling and Jonathon Stroud. I can’t think of a bad book by any of them, and all of them have the knack of making the most fantastic settings make sense by viewing them as logical worlds populated by people who feel real.

If you want to take away my top tips I’d say go read The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose, Tigana, Golden Witchbreed, Excession and The Screaming Staircase. And if you haven’t read or watched Harry Potter yet there’s no hope for you 🙂

David Brin’s a marvel, but I’m not always enough of a grown-up to feel up to tackling one of his books.

David Eddings does good character and banter (although the plots are by the numbers loony epic fantasy). Raymond Chandler has the best “sting” in his use of language, and I wish I could crack that wise. Barry Hughart’s three lonely, lovely books set in ancient china are a joy and I wish he’d write more. Julian May’s sprawling Saga of the Exiles has some sparkling imagery and finally treats immortality with a proper appreciation for Geological timescales; I love its scope.

Tim Powers has three crackers and a bunch of also rans. If you haven’t read The Stress of Her Regard, The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides you really should. Colleen McCullough brings ancient Rome to life. Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Majistral books are a hoot, and share with many of my favourite books economy of evocation and damn-the-horses let’s get on with the story pacing. Whilst still immersing you in the world and portraying vivid characters. Love them.

It would be remiss not to mention the more classical allusions: The Prose and Poetic Edda, Njal’s Saga, et al.. As a Welshman I wish I could include the Mabinogion but the combination of whimsy and Christian evangelism leaves me desperate to get back to good old blood, thunder and Thor.

Comics I came to a bit late, although 2000 AD has a special place in my heart for pointing out how much I liked cleanliness of execution in art (Brian Bolland’s pictures of Judge Anderson, for example)

Films and TV had a big impact on me too, but I think at a shallower level than traditional art and the written word. I’d certainly be thrilled to ever produce anything with a hint of Star Wars, The Evil Dead, Conan the Barbarian, Sin City, Mr. Vampire, Alien, a decent Pixar or a good scary Dr. Who story. But maybe because I do film-making for a living some of the time, I think cinema has lost much of its emotional oomph for me.

(It was Conan the Barbarian that had the biggest impact on me, both visually and in terms of sexiness, much more so than the more oft-commented-upon Princess Leia slavegirl outfit. In terms of damsel in distress peril, it was hard to fault Sarah Jane Smith in Dr. Who. Feisty, independent, intelligent but also frequently getting herself tied up and tortured. Win.)

Conversely, I can’t make music at all, but love it. So some of the most visually evocative things for me are pieces of music. I don’t think my storytelling would conjure the same mental images without Beethoven’s sixth, the soundtrack to Conan The Barbarian, Echoes or (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. Funny where we get ideas from. Even thinking of the title of that Blue Oyster Cult song brings to mind sparkling expanses of the California High Desert at sunset – and I don’t know why, the band were from New York! It’d not even really there in their album covers, although they have elements of it.

Oh, and I’m convinced Debby Harry was the model for Judge Anderson.

Anyway, that’s been a disconnected ramble through a few of the artists who’ve kicked me into getting off my backside and actually writing or drawing or shooting or filming or running a game over the years. Our fondest hope is that maybe our work will provide inspiration to someone, somewhere who might never have thought how sexy or interesting a barefoot girl nude or dressed in a satin gown, handcuffed by the side of a Norwegian Fjord might look. Maybe someday we will.

Whose work has kindled the spark in your own creative work?

Restrained Elegance is a Teenager!

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The lucky thirteen gremlins managed to nuke this blog and the forums on our 13th birthday. All is now restored thanks to tech support (actually they fixed it yesterday but Ariel and I were shooting and I didn’t get chance to update the blog afterwards).

Here’s the slightly rambling 13th birthday post I lovingly assembled in hand-coded HTML, old-style, just like I had to do at the start of the site:

Lucky Thirteen?

Hi Everyone!

Restrained Elegance opened its doors on 1st April 2001, which makes today our thirteenth birthday. Ariel and I were shooting this morning, and this afternoon I planned to come and post a little celebratory blog post, about how I’m not superstitious and how 13 is going to be our luckiest birthday yet.

But the server move gremlins seem to be more superstitious than I, and have decided to celebrate the occasion by removing all our news and blog posts. Sigh! We move RE to a new physical server machine every few years to keep up with the steadily increasing volume of material on the site and the increasing speeds of everyone’s broadband connections. Inevitably when we do so we hit the odd snag, but I must say the bugs are a trickier bunch than usual this time around!

To add the cherry to the cake of misfortune, when I logged in I saw that the “Top Ten List” script, which chooses the lists for the day largely at random, had decided to celebrate our 13th birthday with a “boots” list. Hardly representative of the hard work we put in to being the best barefoot bondage site on the web! So I reset the list.

The Gremlins will not get the better of us, our 13th birthday celebrations are going to carry on even more joyously as a result 🙂 That’s why we are featuring a few bonus updates today of sets which worked out a little too short for a regular update but which feature some of our favourite models from the last 13 years: Jasmine Sinclair, Temptress Kate, Sophia Smith and of course our very own Ariel Anderssen!

A lot has happened over the lifetime of the site both personally for me and in the wider world. Here’s a few thoughts, more rambling than I’d intended as I sit here trying to rescue the blog posts…

Businessy…

The site launched when I was on my first long location shoot to Los Angeles. I remember showing the site to Stacy Burke in the internet cafe of the motel I was staying in, and discovering that the site already had its first member- I hadn’t even known it had gone live for people to join! Sitting in the sun in the attic of the house I share with a six foot blonde bondage model (who is downstairs editing some of our videos) it doesn’t seem that long ago or that far away. It’s certainly been tremendous fun!

What surprises me now is how quickly everything moved back at the start of the site. I was really lucky to have hit the last wave of website launches where it was possible to find an empty niche, do relatively simple work and build a big following online. The web has actually got both fragmented and commercialised since then. Fragmented in the sense that there are lots of bits of the web which don’t really overlap; a Japanese Facebook user might never see a single page in common with an Icelandic Wikipedia reader.

Paradoxically, it has also become commercialised in the sense that now a few very big companies dominate. In 2001, Google had only just got the patent for its page ranking algorithms. Now, if you’re not on Google, you don’t exist. There may be multiple online encyclopedias, but only Wikipedia really counts. And there are many kinky websites, but only one Kink.com and only one Fetlife.

I guess this is the way of new media. It starts off as an exciting frontier town like the Wild West, full of possibility but lawless. In time it becomes mainstream, then safe, then strangled by regulations and bureaucracy until it is just the same as the old media. Many countries are now censoring the internet, using whatever weasel words they can about “protecting the innocent” or “so as not to cause offence”: sad but probably inevitable. Anyone can still launch their own website, but there’s less chance of being heard any more and you are more likely to face regulation by the back door from what Google will let you put on blogger or what Visa say you can publish or what Amazon will consider as an “Erotic” book (and therefore remove from regular search results).

What is lovely is that there’s still a place for cottage industry websites that haven’t had to become Kink.com to compete. Sure, we have hoops of regulations and red tape to jump through that we didn’t have 13 years ago, but at least it is still possible to be a one-and-a-half person publishing house and make a living from it. That’s remarkable- thank you internet, and thank you all the lovely members of RE!

Artistically…

I have the opportunity to tie up and photograph around two hundred of the most gorgeous girls anyone could hope to meet (and one or two who you might not actually want to meet again- there have been a couple of borderline mad-women show up for shoots).

I’ve got to realise some artistic ambitions I’ve had since I was young- like the shoots in the Alps, Norway and Sweden, series like Long Term Bondage and Bondage Driving Test, and the chance to shoot stories like movies in a way which was inconceivable on cottage-industry budget back in the days of film.

In that time Restrained Elegance has gone from the corner of my living room, through an industrial unit used as a film studio, and back to take over my house again. Industrial units in this part of the world are just too damned expensive! One of the best lessons I’ve learned running RE is the old mantra of “do what you love” isn’t the whole story. “Do what you love, but keep your overheads low” is probably the best advice I ever got.

We’re poised on the brink of another exciting move, to a new house with even more potential as a photo and film location. Our current house is lovely but you’d never believe it was anything other than a modern suburban house; if we do manage to get the new place it has more character which we think will be very fun for us to explore in bondage photos and videos.

Which is good because there’s a danger of stagnation if we stay in the same place shooting the same stuff for too long. Long Term Bondage and Bondage Driving Test are two of our most loved projects, but putting together a sequel in a slightly anonymous suburban house is not as exciting as planning it in a big old rambling house. We’re trying hard not to get too emotionally involved with the move, there’s still plenty that could go wrong, but if it does happen, we’re going to be so on fire to shoot all the ideas we’ve been putting off thinking about for the last few months!

Personally…

The biggest and best thing to come out of running the site for us personally has been meeting and falling in love and getting married. That was totally unexpected, and delightful. There are a few pitfalls to working together as well as living together, we won’t deny that playing BDSM together can be a little tricky when it is also our day job! But it is totally worth it.

One of the things that has made us the happiest over the years is meeting members and finding out what a lovely intelligent, sensible, caring and thoughtful bunch most of you are. The stereotypical “sad man in a basement” downloading porn from the internet couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re constantly delighted to find out how many people view the site with their partners, or who genuinely care about the artistic and technical aspects of photography or film-making, or who participate in the forums and are willing to share their thoughts and fantasies to help us bring them to life.

There are even some members who we know have managed to use the site as a way to unlock conversations with partners about their BDSM desires, which is just AWESOME.

It wasn’t my specific intention to create a “non-threatning” BDSM website, I just thought it was important that it shouldn’t be some anonymous blindfolded slavegirl in a dungeon. The fantasies may be dark or dramatic sometimes, but it is very important to me that the language of the fantasy stops at the scene or photoset story. In the fantasy, he can be a cruel evil man and she can be a helpless victim, but in real life it is two people collaborating to make the pictures or make a hot scene, and one should never lose sight of that, however hot the action.

So here again let me pay tribute to the wonderful models and collaborating photographers: the site wouldn’t be here without you.

Well, that’s more than enough random burblings from me. I hope you have enjoyed our last 13 years, we could never have done it without you, and hopefully we will continue to produce hot stuff that you’ll enjoy with us for at least the next 13 years to come, too!

Warmest regards, Hywel

How paysites work

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Download restrictions, rolling archives, high prices, no ZIP files, no full-sized versions, recurring billing, adverts, banner links, forests of TGP sites leading to more sites… sometimes it seems like adult paysites are a minefield of restrictions and attempts to squeeze dollars from you.

Why can’t they just give us good stuff at affordable prices? Why does it have to be so complicated? Here’s my attempt to explain why.

I know I’ve gone on about this a fair bit recently: sorry. I just read a bunch of quite mean-spirited comments about websites on an adult review site and I don’t think the posters really have any idea of why things run this way in website land. It isn’t webmasters being penny-pinching misers sipping champagne in their chateaux. It’s inescapable market forces acting on a whole bunch of small cottage industry producers (especially in specialist niches like bondage and foot fetish).

It takes time, energy and effort to create erotic photos and videos and share them online.

Even the humblest selfie takes a bit of time. No model wants to appear in a picture looking crap, so assume that they’ve done their makeup, found something nice to wear, practiced the pose in the mirror a few times. Then it takes a few seconds to actually shoot.

Then you have to upload to a website, maybe with a bit of editing (even if it is only resizing). You have to spend a little time letting people know it exists, even if that’s only uploading to Facebook, Twitter and Fetlife.

Bandwidth isn’t free- someone has to pay the data carriers whenever that gets downloaded. It could be paid for by the person hosting the site, or by adverts on their site, or by the person downloading… either in cash, or in data collected on you that can be sold to advertisers.

If you launch a little website that’s at all appealing to people, you will rapidly discover that the appetite for free downloads is very large- and the accompanying bandwidth bill from your hosting company can be a real shock to the system, assuming they haven’t cut you off already.

EVERYTHING you see on the web is paid for by somebody, somewhere, in money or in their time. If you aren’t paying for it directly you are paying for it indirectly because they are selling your details and your clicks to people who might persuade you to pay for it.

This isn’t necessarily sinister- it’s just a bit more personal than forcing you to watch advert breaks on TV. But bear in mind that if the service is free, the service isn’t the product the company is selling and you aren’t their customer. The product the company is selling is access to you, and their customers are advertisers and anyone else they think might be able to make a buck from you. That’s why Twitter has just introduced pictures in your timeline without clicking – it paves the way for automatic display of pretty paid adverts.

The main costs of running an adult website are:

Content

Models
Locations
Clothes, shoes, etc.. Bondage Gear, ropes and chains in our case, too.
Travel, catering, heating, power and other expenses for shoot days

Editing. It typically takes at least as long to get photos and videos into a suitable form for posting to a website as it does to shoot it in the first place. Someone has to do that, so you either pay someone, or do it yourself and hope to pay yourself from profits.
Infrastructure and Equipment. You can’t shoot without a camera, lights, maybe a microphone, memory cards, hard drives to back up to, and reasonably powerful computers to edit everything on. (A five year old laptop won’t cut it, modern digital cameras just generate too much data for that).
Web design. You can get content management systems open-source, but someone has to configure them, do the pretty graphics to make it all look appealing, and do the data entry every time you upload a set
Web hosting. If you are charging people, they expect the site to be up, always. That means patches, data managers, backups, system administrators, data centres… that’s not free.
Bandwidth. This is the other biggie. People are very interested in free erotica: tens of thousands of people might download every free sample you post. When people join they want to download everything of interest to them, of course. The final bill for this can be thousands of dollars a month.
Letting people know you exist. Posting free previews, doing link exchanges, getting on other websites, Google Adwords, social networking… just getting people to know you exist at all takes a lot of time and hard work.

To a first approximation, Content, Editing, Equipment and Web Design are fixed costs. It doesn’t matter if you have one member or one thousand- you still need camera, model, computer, website. (Although in practice the content is likely to be much nicer if you’ve got lots of lovely members helping pay for it).

Web hosting and bandwidth are marginal costs, add more visitors and members and the costs will go up.

Advertising could be either- for example, a lot of websites run affiliate schemes which pay out to the webmaster who send the customer to the site (marginal cost) but also pay to run ads on Fetlife (fixed cost).

Most websites in a niche like bondage have a few hundred members at any one time. The very biggest probably only have a few thousand. Put that in context- a typical Hollywood movie might well be seen by millions of people. They can spread their costs between many, many more people. That’s why a DVD of Robocop might cost £10 where a DVD of an erotic movie might cost £30 and have much lower production value for your money. There’s a far smaller group of people kicking in a few bucks to make the bondage DVD.

It’s worth saying that again. If you pay for something you like, you are one of a small group of people paying to make it.

The only way this stuff gets made at all is because some people are willing to pay for it.

Either to pay to watch it, or possibly pay to do it (at much greater expense, but with resultant complete control over what they make because they are doing it for themselves, then possibly sharing because it makes them feel nice).

It is super easy to make niche erotica and make a loss.

It’s easy to spend £1000 on a shoot day- two models and a nice location will do it. Be a little less efficient that you could be and you might end up with less than a week’s worth of updates from such a day. There’s a limit to how much you can shoot in a day- for bondage, it takes time to tie someone up neatly and tidily, then more time to shoot the photos or videos, then untie them.

It’s easy to get your business model wrong and give away too much free stuff, and be faced with thousands in unexpected bandwidth charges.

It’s easy to spend too long editing a set or video you particularly love and realise that your pay rate per hour has plummeted to a quarter of minimum wage.

It’s easy to keep all the content you’ve ever shot up on the website, and discover that someone can join, download everything with a download manager, and cost you $500 in bandwidth charges in exchange for a $19.95 membership fee.

It’s easy to fool yourself that you’ll make more money if you buy a snazzy new camera and some new bondage gear.

And it is super easy to produce stunning material and not have a clue how to get people to look it, let alone pay for it.

Every niche website is walking a tight-rope across these pitfalls. The choices they make to avoid the chasms of blowing a ton of money and never getting it back explain where some of the apparently-strange website habits come from.

Why are recurring memberships cheaper than one-off memberships?

It is just a rip-off right? I want to join and see everything then go away. Why should I pay more?

Think about what your bandwidth usage is likely to be. In month one, you’ll probably have a good long look through the back catalogue and download lots of things which interest you. In month two, you might explore the back catalogue a little more, but most likely you’ll just download the new stuff. In other words, your first month’s membership is likely to run up bigger bills for the website than subsequent months. So websites try to cover their costs, and give you an incentive to stick around, too.

Why don’t websites leave everything up forever?

Same reason. The more material there is up, the more bandwidth charges you can potentially suck up in month one. If that gets too much bigger than your membership fee, the webmaster will plummet down the chasm of making a loss on your membership… and will go out of business, sooner or later.

In fact it is even worse than that. If all the content stays up forever, you can join once, download everything, go away for five years, come back and hoover up five new years of content. In effect, you’ve decided not to pay anything towards shooting that content- your membership fee will probably barely cover the bandwidth charges for such a big download.

What about daily download limits? I’ve got a fast connection, why can’t I download it all now?

Same reason. The bandwidth limit will be set to ensure that the website doesn’t lose money on your signup. It has to be, or the website will soon be gone.

What about all those annoying advert-laden sites?

It’s another way to cover some of the website’s costs. If you are interested in the theme of the site but won’t spend money there. Maybe you have a policy of NEVER joining paysites… but maybe you do bondage in your real life. Perhaps a bondage gear shop might tempt you to spend money. They’ll kick back something to the original website or pay per click they send them. This business model works for Google, by the way 🙂

What about badly-designed websites? What’s the excuse for that?

You may not know it, but most fetish websites are run by one or two people. If they aren’t good at graphic design and website layout, they’re probably trying to scrape together a site without any expert input. These days we’re used to slick commercial sites like eBay, Apple, Amazon, etc.. They were clunky as hell in the early days, too, but with the vastly higher customer numbers of mainstream business, they can afford teams of professional designers and programmers to make their sites so cool.

Actually, it is amazing how well HTML and CSS have been designed, because even amateurs can put together really nice functional sites. It’s surprising that more sites don’t look like they are stuck in 2001.

There’s also another reason. Bad design like not providing stills in ZIP files and having awkward, multiple mouse click navigation is that it slows your browsing down, which cuts down their bandwidth bill. It’s just another way to walk the tightrope of avoiding making a loss.

Our choices

We based our choices for our websites on what we like ourselves as customers. I don’t join erotic sites as often now I make my own, but I am at heart a paysite customer.

I shoot the content I was looking for- bare foot, bondage, colourful, kinda clean, a mix of metal and rope bondage, the prettiest models I can find and the nicest locations I can afford. We try to be as efficient as we can without compromising on quality.

I hate download limits, because I’m busy. I’m more likely to use my entire download allocation in one go, then look at the stuff I’ve downloaded later. So I try to make it easy to do that, with ZIP file links right there on the index pages.

The corollary is that if we have no download limits or speed limits, we CANNOT leave all the content up permanently. So I’ve set the amount of content so that if you download all of it in one go in the first month, I at least avoid making a loss. That’s why we have a rolling archive and sets stay up for a certain length of time on the members’ area, not forever.

As I’ve said before, personally I prefer that. I think it draws sets to my attention that I might never have noticed languishing on page 117 of dusty old updates and makes everything feel more lively. It’s like getting a random back issue free with each month’s new edition of a magazine.

I’ve tried to make the design as clean and easy and pretty as I can, within the limits of my skill and my abilities as a graphics designer. My University friend Ian has helped out a lot behind the scenes developing the content management system which runs the site (when we started there were no open source projects like Joomla or WordPress to use). The site could do with a freshen up… it’s on my to-do list once I’ve processed January’s updates, and done December’s shoots, and answered all the emails.

It is a minor miracle of the Internet age that it is possible to purchase erotica that twenty years ago would have been either unobtainable or twenty times the price. (Just look at the number of photos in a typical men’s mag vs the number you get on a typical website in a month if you don’t believe me). It is only possible to do by spreading the costs out amongst everyone who would like to see the material. So if you see a site you like, please join it. At least for a month. Maybe two. That way, it’ll still be there in a few years’ time, the next time you’re having a look around 🙂 🙂 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

Forum Move (Soon, Hopefully)

EleganceStudios.com : HywelPhillips.com

Cinematography – Photography – Fetish Fashion