Hi All

I queued this post a few weeks ago hopefully everything will be back to normal in time to celebrate our 25th anniversary!

Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting it. 25 years ago, on 1st April 2001, RestrainedElegance.com gained its first-ever member. I found out sitting at the pool in a motel in a dodgy bit of Los Angeles, next to the airport, relaxing after doing a shoot with Stacey Burke. It was perhaps my tenth shoot, and I’d decided to open a little website to maybe bring in a little cash to help pay the model fees, maybe a bit more camera or lighting gear. Possibly even one day enough “beer money” for a short holiday, I though.

It was a bit unexpected – the site hadn’t been meant to go live until April 4th. But the payment processor got it sorted early and the first members signed up before I even had chance to announce it. (I wish it was still that easy to get attention for a bondage website on the internet now!)

25 years later and I’m posting pictures to celebrate the anniversary shot on digital cameras whose resolutions would have seemed like science fiction back in 2001 (for video especially – we spend ten years at our Annual January production meetings talking about how to make the videos look more like the stills. Mission accomplished.) My work has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, but many of the same of the people from that first year are still here, still supporting and (hopefully!) still enjoying elegant barefoot glamour bondage.

It’s been an amazing ride, totally unexpected, I never expected to go full-time let alone have it as my career for the next 25 years. Thank you all so much, and here’s to many more years of barefoot glamour bondage we can make together. Models, photographers and members make an unbeatable team!

Here’s some of the things we have in store for you this month:

And we’ve got a bumper crop of archives this month to celebrate as well, of course. I *think* I’ve got one
set shot in each year for the 1st April – although my record keeping has changed a lot since the early days and
camera metadata was not always set or preserved through the processing chain so I’m not 100% sure. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong!

Hi Everyone,

One bit of our workflow as producers that people probably don’t think about is scheduling. It takes me a couple of days a month to line everything up on every platform, pre-queue the publicity tweets, add everything to Clips4Sale, the eStore, the RE members’ pages, do the archives, queue the monthly previews, and all.

Obviously, I also need to decide what to schedule. And that means deciding which sets – out of approximately three years’ worth of material that’s shot but not yet edited – I process first. I try to keep up a good mix of stuff that was shot very recently and stuff that was shot a while ago, rope sets vs. metal sets, clothed sets vs. nude sets, and keep a good variety of models.

Processing those sets is another overhead people probably don’t think about. Stills sets are relatively quick. I can get through five sets in a day. Videos are slower, I rarely manage more than two videos a day, and some videos take multiple days to edit.

I also have a separate priority stream for customs, because people who have paid for a custom deserve to get their edited films and photosets as soon as possible. Which means that sometimes I end up with a bunch of updates with less variety than I would usually choose, and limited time in which to edit more videos to space them out. Which is what’s just happened in the wake of my last batch of shoots. I had a lot of processed videos with the same models (Lauren Rice, Bunnie Stevens, Cherry English, Lucy Lauren, Zoey Ziptie, Zoe Page) which I’d normally space out a bit more. But because I’ve been shooting I’m also a bit short on editing time. So please bear with me as I release the customs from those shoots first, even if the videos are a bit similar. It’s because some customers ordered similar videos with multiple models, and I had to edit them first for custom delivery.

I did shoot more varied stuff with those models, and have plenty of unseen material with other models too. I’ll be back to more regular editing and scheduling shortly as I come to the end of this run of shoots.

I know sometimes people worry we are going in a different direction when a bunch of similar content goes up at once. Normally it is just that I’ve had to edit the customs first and didn’t have time to edit other stuff with which to space out those updates!

A little late, sorry, forgot to schedule the post! Here are some previews of what’s coming your way this month.

Archives:

What’s coming up for Restrained Elegance members in February? How about:

Archive updates: