Jason Tag Photography

After looking through my shots from my second shoot with Sylvia, It’s time for another installement of “Lessons Learned”.

One of things I noticed about shooting with a model you know, is that you know what to expect.  The first time I worked with Sylvia I had no idea what was going to happen or even how it was going to turn out.  Incidentally it was also my first nude shoot.  This time I found that I had a good idea of the shots I was going to get.  Each model is so different in terms of how they use their bodies, how they move and how they pose.  Knowing how her body moves and how she uses her body was certainly a big help in coming up with the shots and knowing what angles to use for her.

We started off the shoot at a beach that is a favorite of hers and thanks to her, it’s one of mine.  I am sworn to secrecy as to the location of said beach.  So all I can say is that it’s on Maui.  We started off doing a few shots with a tree that had some interesting curves to it.  I especially like the contrast between to rough texture of the tree and the soft texture of Sylvia’s skin.  We played with a few ideas around the tree.  We spent a few minutes working on one idea that I think we ended up having to scrap because it just wasn’t working.

We moved further down the beach later in the shoot to a place where there was an interesting bush that had a hollow area in the middle of it.  It proved to be quite interesting and challenging at the same time.  I found that I had to really get into some funky positions in order to get the right angles.  At one point I found myself laying down half on grass and my other half on sand.  I don’t who had the harder positions, Sylvia or me!

We found an interesting log and played with it for a while and later in the shoot we moved over to a rock area that gave us some very interesting shots.  And then we saw this piece of driftwood that was just incredible.  I knew we had to do something with it.  The sun was still a little harsh so we shot other stuff until the sun dropped a little lower in the sky.  and then got the shot that I posted in the previous post.  I love this piece of wood because the sun and ocean had stripped the bark off the tree and the exposed wood was very close in color to Sylvia’s skin.  This goes back to the earlier shots where we were playing with the contrast between rough tree and smooth skin.  Now we we’re able to play with the similarity between skin and wood.  My only regret is that I would have like to get some closeup shots of her skin next to the wood.

Towards the end of the shoot Sylvia had me run down the beach to check an area that we wanted to shoot.  There were too many people around sowhen I got back to tell her this, she was lining up some sea shells.  She asked me If I had a Macro lens for my camera.  I didn’t but using my shortest lens I tried to see how close I could get to the shells.  I was able to get a pretty good macro shot and so she had an to do a shot that just had in it a shell and a nipple.  We did it and it didn’t feel quite right.  It was interesting how smililar in shape the shells and her nipples were but it just didn’t work. I couldn’t figure out the angle to shoot it at.  So I offered another idea.  We lined up a series of shells in between her breasts.  I  put the camera low over her body and pointed it looking towards her head.  ven though you can’t see that she is nude in the shot you can tell that she is and you can tell exactly where on the human you are with out seeing anything.  It’s one of my favorites form the shoot.  This shot was also posted in a previous post.

One lesson that was pretty blaring for me was that I need to work on understanding how to see a pose and know what would make the pose better.  Other lessons in the past have been quite easy to learn but this one I think is just going to take practice and time.  I will continue to work on it probably for the rest of my life.  A noble pursuit!

After the shoot we went into Paia and had dinner at a great Crepe restaurant.  I don’t remember the name of it but the food was fantastic and so was the company.  It was another beautiful day thanks to Sylvia.

Aloha,
Jason Tag