Jason Tag Photography

It’s been a while since I’ve written a post on what I’ve been learning. Not because I haven’t been learning anything, on the contrary. In fact I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had the time to really sit down and write much. So here it goes… What I learned from the last shoot.

One of the things that sticks out in my mind from the shoot with Elizabeth was that she was so comfortable with her body and being nude that she spent the entire shoot nude. Being around someone that comfortable with themselves really helped to make me comfortable. I was nervous going into the shoot but once we started shooting I immediately relaxed and just started shooting.

Elizabeth basking in the sun - Aug. 30, 2008

I shot somewhere around 780 images during our two hour shoot. The most I’ve ever shot on a single shoot. So I have a lot of images to go through. Most of them are good and only a few are great. I started overshooting in order to maximize my chances of getting good shots. One of the common problems I cam up against was about proper exposure settings. My instincts told me to meter off of her skin as it was the brightest part of the images, but that little voice in my head told me that I should be metering off the sky in order to get the right exposure settings. In most cases when I got my readings from her skin the exposure was to dark and when I got reading from the sky there were parts of her skin that got over exposed. So it was a no win situation. After a while I just started to wing it and the exposures seemed to get better. So in a several of the images the highlights are very bright or blown out. It’s fixable in post processing but I’d prefer to get it right in the camera first.

Another thing I learned was a lesson I keep learning over and over again. “trust your instincts!” There were several occasions where I saw something neat for us to play with and I didn’t have any idea on what to do with it so I just ignored it. But later on in the shoot I told Elizabeth about the tree I had seen and she agreed to try to do something with it. I got a few shots from that turned out to be pretty good. So the lesson is if I see it and think it’s interesting I should shoot it. Hence… Trust your instincts!

Other than that it was a really great shoot and we had a lot of fun shooting all over the beach and Elizabeth even stated that she didn’t want to go back to Virginia after this trip. That she’d rather just stay in Hawaii. I totally agree with her and wouldn’t mind if she stayed. I would certainly love to work with her again.