Jason Tag Photography

Yesterday’s shoot with Kristi was fantastic.  I chose a location I had shot at a few times before.  It’s a location that I love because of it’s starkness and it’s beauty.  I was worried about the weather considering that last weekend we experienced a torrential downpour that resulted in several flash floods.  I’ve been watching the sky every day for a week, hoping that it would clear up enough to shoot this weekend.  The weather was cloudy but it was good enough to shoot. And we even saw a spectacular sunset.  I think the first one in two weeks.

The main idea I had going into this shoot was to focus on the “natural”.  Nothing too abstract.  What I wanted was to see her as a beautiful woman in a beautiful place.  Nothing more and certainly nothing less.  This was only her second nude shoot and I wanted her to really enjoy the experience of creating beautiful images in a truly beautiful place.

Something that has been lurking like a demon in the shadows over the past few months was a problem I was having with blurry images.  It took me a while to nail it down but I finally figured out that the problem was.  I would compose my shot, then zoom in to check the focus, and then zoom back out to take the shot.  Whenever I did this, I found that the shot was always out of focus.  So I would re-focus then shoot.  Of course the image would be blurry because the focus was set for the close-up and not the wide shot.  So today I made it clear to myself that I wasn’t going to check my focus like this anymore.  I would do it by previewing the image after shooting it.  This method worked out much better than I expected.  Every shot I took today was sharp and in perfect focus.  So now I feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

The other thing I wanted to correct today was a bad habit of overshooting.  Of course overshooting gets me more images overall, but I also end up spending more time shooting all those extra shots.  That’s time I could be spending on other shots and other poses.  So I decided that I would give myself a 3 shot rule.  If I don’t have the shot after three attempts…  I would move on to another angle, or another shot entirely.  This also worked out quite well.  Although I slipped a little a few times this method forced me to really think about the composition before I shot it.  As a result I think I got better compositions in my shots and felt more confident about each one.

All in all it was a good shoot and we had a great time.

Kristi - Dec. 20, 2008

Kristi - Dec. 20, 2008

Kristi - Dec. 20, 2008