Mystique Magazine is a high-budget website devoted to softcore poses of well known models in exotic locales. Their model of the year, decided by online vote, wins a shoot in a glamorous location which, as it’s basically a paid holiday, makes them very popular with talent. In efforts to win the prize many models send Mystique as much traffic as they can.
In the past they’ve been operated in the Playboy mold, apparent in their determination to label what’s basically a web operation as a magazine, but as Playboy fades in profitability they’ve decided to change their approach. While Mystique, like Playboy, used to lock its content away and try to bully browsers into buying, the most successful new adult sites give away a lot of content and hope to persuaded people to join after getting a chance to experience what’s on offer - Kisses and Candlesticks. It works and recognizing this Mystique have ‘borrowed’ a lot of ideas and re-launched with an emphasis on making free content easy to find.
The best thing about their new site is, unsurprisingly, their sole prominent innovation. For their most popular models they’ve posted audio clips, which provide a rare chance to hear what models like… for instance… Kyla Cole - actually sound like.
Kyla Cole audio clips (mid left of page)
Most of their ‘Top Rated Models‘ (just below mid right of page) have audio. As usually these women are only heard pretending to orgasm or reading a script there’s something exciting about just listening to them talk. You feel as if you’re getting to know them in the way you do eavesdropping on strangers at a restaurant. I’m sure there are more but Katia Corriveau, Linda O’Neil, Aria Giovanni, Jennifer Korbin, Divini Rae, Zdenka Podkapova, Rebecca DiPietro, Amiee Rickards and Erica Campbell can all be heard right now and I think they’d be smart to post longer, more podcastable, audio.
Unfortunately in their rush to ape the competition Mystique have started a megapixel race with their competitors. For years Peter “Mr. Luba” Hegre has been advertising images at up to 6000px and Mystique are now posting shots at 3000px (a quarter of Hegre’s size).
The problem is, while Hegre shoots with Medium Format digital back which takes ultra-high resolution 39 megapixel stills, Mystique appear to have simply blown their old content up. E.g. here’s a 100% crop of “Ira Shakira” from Hegre. You can see it’s in focus and shows a wealth of real detail:
As opposed to this from Mystique which is clearly an enlargement/expansion of a smaller file.
There’s no real detail and claiming this is a ‘high resolution’ image is a lie (you can also see the difference in color correction. Kyla’s image is ten shades of brown). If Mystique do have real high-resolution images on the site it’s madness to mix them with enlargements like this which will only upset users and undermine their credibility.
If Mystique give me access to the site I’ll come back with a fuller review and any necessary corrections. For now I’d say enjoy their new library of free material, check out the audio clips and don’t believe the hype. Their content is sadly still no richer than the rapidly aging 800-1000px industry standard.
Is there some theory behind offering the ultra-hi-res images? The only use for them now would be for print, and while the occasional photo may be a great self-made print (especially from Herge’s library), doesn’t that defeat the purpose of signing up for digital content? Are they just being a nice vendor by having the option to make a decent personal print?
Or maybe, just maybe, is someone smart enough to look ahead to the future where ultra-def monitors and TV are one, with their photolog in place to be viewd at the respected quality…
Edco - I think the theory is ‘massive close-ups of vaginas’. i think they’re smart enough to know charging for prints is a loser and people want the option to use images as they like.
Also they’re probably thinking of the future. Already many laptops can display 2000 pixel wide images. When 800px was popular that was the size of many monitors. Now filling a screen is harder.
It’s mostly about cameras though. With that much detail being captured, and no need to scan the results, why not? The ability to effectively ‘zoom in’ on images (which could also be done with some scripting) offers some interesting ‘lightbox’ possibilities.
Sounds like a feeble attempt to impress everyone with his “knowledge”, and a bit of sour grapes, if you ask me!
Personally, I have been a Life Member of Mystique for several years now and I find NOTHING wrong with the photos. Frankly, I find them just great, thank you! Also, there IS such a thing as Too Much. Frankly, who wants to see photos of such high resolution that every teeny, tiny imperfection, scratch, hair, pock mark, dimple and speck of make up shows, like some topographical map of Mars??? They can also be put into a photo editing program and fine tuned to suit individual tastes. So, to Mystique I say, just keep up the damned fine work and tell Mark he is a truly great female photographer with an eye for stunning beauty and the gift of knowing HOW to present it!
David M. Payne, Sr. - I assume I’m “he” of the “knowledge”? Question, if there is a wisdom to limiting image resolution what’s to gain from enlarging stills to 3000 pixels instead of just presenting them at 1000 pixels or whatever their original size is? My complaint has nothing to do with photography and everything to do with presentation.
David, I am going to have to agree with Sam (you can send me that check at your convenience Sam). If your presentation is online then there is NO reason to upsample the images. All that does is take away data. I would rather see a 800px 1:1 crop than to see the same image bicubed up to some arbitrary size, and with the gaussian blur, and all the other love you need to make it decent again.
In my own pinup work, the only time I upsample is to get a particular print size (my focus is on selling prints). And I then carefully study each image to determine the maximum print size I can make. The difference is that with a large print you are viewing it from some distance away. So it survives upsampling. On screen your viewing distance is much closer (and quite possibly one handed). So the difference is much more glaring