I’ve been surfing for porn. (In a good cause.) We’ve started shooting content for two potential new web site projects, one bondage, one foot fetish & striptease. The foot fetish one is mainstream glamour, just with lots of shots where the soles of the feet are visible. Hey, that’s what I like to see, maybe other people will too.

I thought I’d do my market research, hence the porn surfing. If it is close enough in style & content to be a competitor, I should find it hot, right? Bonus.

An evening or two later, I have some conclusions.

1) Mainstream porn is over-abundant, especially hard-core. If you just want to see fucking, you can get months of viewing content for free or nearly free. Even if you are into bondage or foot fetish, you’ll find plenty of content from the last 30+ years recycled as web content for next to nothing. The content’s lame on the BDSM/foot front because it degenerates into hard-core at which point the makers seem to have forgotten the theme of their film and fall into “porno shoot” mode. So… finding porn, easy. Finding good niche porn- not so easy.

2) 99% of it is shockingly badly lit. Net result is pretty uglifying on all the stars and the locations. Even where they’ve got a gorgeous cast and have sourced a nice place to shoot, they rarely make the most of it. I want everything to look beautiful; crap lighting means it never will. I want everything to look like it was lit by Wally Pfister (it is a bit dated now but check out his early work on softcore “thrillers” like Secret Games).

3) Mainstream porn is primarily video, with stills as a afterthought if at all. The honourable exceptions are sites run by ex-stills-photographers. (Turns out these are the ones I like). I like video but have a preference for really evocative, sharp stills. I can make my own story in my head to the pictures, whereas a video needs to be much more skilfully presented to do that. Which leads to:

4) Mainstream porn is badly edited. Stills are either auto-airbrushed to plastic fantastic, or not retouched at all. In an ideal world that wouldn’t matter, but models have to be on their feet all day and so blisters and dry skin are an occupational hazard- which I don’t find sexy in the photos. I found myself importing some of the photos into Aperture to retouch them myself from frustration!

5) Mainstream porn videos are even more badly edited. I don’t claim to be far up the learning curve as a film-maker myself. But I know that one rolling take with vertiginous hand-held camerawork and shoddy zooming in and out does not make for compelling viewing. Which leads to the cardinal sin:

6) I found most of it boring as hell. Wading though screens full of confusing pop-up special offer crap to see badly resized thumbnails of muddily lit videos of badly-dubbed grunt and groan. Holding a single dull shot for upwards of ten minutes. Cutting between two static cameras every few minutes. All the action played out in real time sounds like a selling point, but actually is yawn inducing.

Do what the movies do- cut out all the dull bits and show me the bits that are either critical to the progression of the scene, or achingly beautiful to have my eyes linger over.

Did I find some good stuff? Yes. Hot Legs and Feet has lovely stills. Their videos still look muddy and a bit slow, hope we can do something different here. The content is more hardcore than my usual taste, but nicely shot if that’s your thing. The solo girl sets are sometimes exquisite. We’re going to have our job cut out to compete. Hooray! Seriously, it will mean we can’t be lazy or complacent – having a high quality competitor out there will force us to do good work.

Femjoy is lovely as always, and their videos at least have nice lighting. But DAMN, they’re boring to watch. The content is only co-incidentally foot fetish- it is really about open-leg nude poses, but happens to have a lot of barefoot girls on it. And their website layout is great. Might pinch a few ideas. Memo to self, though- try to have something happening in videos, especially if shooting slow-mo.

APD Nudes is photographer Iain T’s site. I like his work so much I got him to shoot some stuff for Restrained Elegance. Love his set design (I know I don’t have the knack, which is why we hire locations rather than build them). It is more stockings and shoes than barefoot, but I’d love to get something of the same classy look-and-feel.

There were others that looked interesting, but SOOOOO many more that just made me shudder. So it turns out I’m quite a fussy consumer when it comes to porn. I hope that’ll make me a more discerning producer, too. Sod following the crowd, incidentally. If I can’t make stuff I’d like to see myself, I might as well go and shoot corporate videos and weddings.

An early test shot to see if we can use video lighting to shoot stills. Unfortunately, the answer is no, not reliably. Camera shake and subject motion, high ISO noise and shallow depth of field make it too hard to achieve critical sharpness.

Same room, but lit with strobe and shot with the Hasselblad. Much more control in general, and much easier to achieve sharpness where one wants it.

It is the lighting, not the camera in this case. Canon shot, but in daylight (with diffused on camera flash stills). Lovely!

One other observation: porn is not just badly lit, it is overwhelmingly brightly lit. I guess that’s in the belief that the customer wants to see everything (and probably by the end of the film/photoset we do). But there’s not much allure or tease when everything is lit up like a searchlight.