Jason Tag Photography

Katlyn - 11/8/09

Yesterday morning I had the privilege of shooting with the lovely and talented Katlyn.  I’ve shot with her before and it was such a joy that we wanted to do it again.  This I picked a wooded location that I haven’t shot at in a very long time.  In many ways it was like seeing an old friend again.  There were some changes to the location here and there but it felt good to be among the trees again.

Katlyn - 11/8/09

We started first with my favorite banyan tree.  I love this tree because each model who shoots with it sees it a little bit differently. and poses with it in different ways.  Because the ground was still wet from freshly fallen rain we kept shooting at the banyan tree very light and stuck to only one side of it.  I would have liked to shoot more with the tree but I had other plans for her that morning that involved an old buidling in the woods nearby.

Our second location was an old stone structure off in the woods.  The reason why I love this place is that the light tends to come from above in a diffused pattern.  Everytime I have come here I have never seen direct sunlight hitting the structure or the trees.  The last time I shot here was with Jillian and that now feels like ages ago even though it was just 7 or 8 months ago.  This time we stuck mainly with the back side of the building shooting in a crumbling doorway.  we later moved inside the building and shot with the other 2 doorways.

Katlyn - 11/8/09

The main thing I wanted to test out on this shoot was using my sb600 speedlight in conjunction with natural light.  Seeing how I might mix the sunlight with this artifcial light to make my images a little more interesting.  perhaps picking up details that normally would have been lost.  What I found is that because I am triggering the speedlight with my camera’s on board flash I got highlights in the eyes without the flash regeistering on the model or the rest of the scene.  I liked that because the eye detail is better than if I had just shot with natural light.  Also I found the extra bump in light level made it easier to shoot in the darkness of the tropical jungle environment.  all of the light we had that morning came from and filtered through the canopy above us.  so the speedlight gave us the much needed sidelight to get more details from our scene and the model.

One thing I realized after we finished shooting was that I could’ve probably shot the speedlight through a diffusion panel and gotten the light to be a little softer looking.  Then I might’ve been able to use the flash as my main light and the sun as fill light.  Now I want to start playing with that idea and see where it leads… maybe I’ll need to buy a softbox?