Lovely Penny Lee was the first model to try out our gold and red sari. I like the elegant way sari's drape, but it was quite a voyage of discovery to figure out how to sex them up a bit. Bare breasted certainly helps, as does a matching red hemp rope web. And at least for once the bare feet are totally in keeping with the cultural inspiration (I do love a Bollywood barefoot babe).

Since we were doing a possibly-too-out-there-to-be-commercial bondage experiment, I decided to try two lighting schemes as well as two cameras. The files with _reh_ in the name were shot on the Hasselblad, with traditional flash lighting (Dr. Octobox as the key to camera left and a strip softbox to fill from camera right if I recall correctly). The shots with DSC in the file name were taken on the Sony A7RII and lit with a combination of ambient light (the blue daylight behind) and an LED continuous ring-light, nominally also set to daylight. I tried to match the colour up a bit in Aperture in post-production, using the Hasselblad colours as a guideline, but stopped short of doing massive secondary colour corrections (which the shots could possibly have done with). The Sony colours aren't bad, but the ring LED is quite yellow compared with the daylight, and has a green spike (common for LED) which I have mostly dialled out but which left the background going quite purple as the LED light fell off. Its also lacking the far red end of the spectrum- noticeable mainly in the relative lack of richness in the red rope, ball-gag and red detailing on the sari.

The ring-light look is however stylish and quite "intense" feeling by comparison, automatically producing a more dramatic look with fall off to dark at the edge of the frame, stark but flattering light on skin, and hints of the classic ring light halo edge effect. I think the Hasselblad shots look more like a page from a fashion or glamour magazine, the ring light shots more like a still from a low-budget gritty thriller. Both very useful tools to have in one's photographic style toolkit for creating the right mood and impact. The main thing I learned though is not to mix the LED ringlight with other lighting sources (at least not without a colour meter or stopping to properly tune and filter colours looking at test shots on a decent Mac screen rather than back of the camera).