Ella - Nude on a rock!

Today’s shoot with Ella was fantabulous!  It was so good that I had to make up a word just to describe it!  Ok really.  It went very well and we both had a great time working with each other again.  I just hope that she’ll be able to get back to Hawaii soon so we can work together again.

The location we used was a beach on the eastern shore of Kauai.  A place that is known for it’s natural beauty and a lack of a crowd.  We had a little trouble finding the parking area but it wasn’t too terrible.  Once we got onto the beach I had a feeling that this was going to be a great morning.  We headed toward an area of the beach that was mostly rocks with a little bit of sand.  And that’s where we started the shoot.

After playing with the rocks that were dry we decided to play around with some rocks closer to the water.  Ella got splashed a few times from the small shore break and I tried to time the shots so that we were shooting inbetween waves.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

A very cool tree to be nude in!

We ended up having to duck out of sight a couple of times due to people making their way onto the beach ad going about their activities.  We made the best of it though.  When we saw a fisherman getting his net ready, Ella put on a sarong that she brought with her and we continued to shoot.

On another occasion we ducked into a tree and shot there for a few minutes.  The tree ended up being very cool and no one bothered us at all.  I was glad for that.  I had read a few stories of people being harrased on Kauai for being nude.

Ella in lingerie on the beach

Towards the end of the shoot there was one woman who got pretty close to where we were so Ella pulled out an cute lingerie outfit that she brought.  It turns out that she’s just as beautiful clothed as she is au natural!  Who’d a thunk it!

All in all it was  a gorgeous morning spent in a beautiful place creating beautiful images with a beautiful person!  Not a bad way to spend a sunday morning…

Aloha,
Jason Tag

Ella - Oahu, December 2007

I just got the word that Ella will be on Kauai and she wants to shoot with me again.  You’ll remember her from a shoot I did last December.  She was one of the first models I worked with and I credit her as indirectly  helping me to figure out the difference between glamour nudes and artistic nudes.  So I’m stoked to be working with her again.  she is a tremendously talented model and beautiful to boot!  She’s also fun to work with.  The shoot will be on Kauai,  an Island I don’t get a chance to go to very often, so it’ll be fun to work with her again and go to an amazingly beautiful place.  I can’t wait

One of the things that have come up lately in my shooting is that I keep coming up with shots that are just a little bit blurry.  It’s just enough that when you look through the viewfinder or on the camera’s preview screen, it looks sharp.  But once you get it on the computer it’s not.  It’s been bugging me a lot since I got the new lens.  The other day I finally figured it out.  Since the viewfinder on my camera is smaller than ideal, I use auto focus to make sure that my shots are sharp.  Well, one of the settings on my camera, which is called “Shutter Priority Release” allows the shutter to fire before the camera is finished focusing.  So it looks like the camera is done focusing! I take the shot.  It turns out that the camera wasn’t done and I get slightly blurred images.  Arrrg!

For the upcoming shoot with Ella.  I’ll be shooting with this feature turned off.  It might slow down my shooting a little but in the long run I’ll be getting shots that are consistently sharp.  I’m hoping that this will help me get sharper images.  I’ve already tried everything else I can think of at this point.   Shooting with a tripod, making sure that my shutter speed is not lower than the focal length of the lens..etc etc.   So we’ll see in a few days whther or not this will work…

The other day I was going through the shoot I did with Ella and I realized that I had never produced black and whites of that shoot. As soon as I could, I dove in and started re-editing that shoot and here’s just a few images that came out of that session… Don’t forget to visit her website at everythingella.com!

The only edit made in this images was the switch to black and white

A closer crop of the original image

In the case of the photos above I really like the the first image but I like it because of the color of the kimono but I find the black and white version more interesting.

In the case of the next two shots, I find them both interesting but there’s nothing in the color shot that isn’t there in the black and white so in this case I wold go for the black and white image. I lose the blue sky background but that’s really all that gets lost in the conversion.

However in the case of the next two, I think switching from color to black and white is more dramatic.

In these two I prefer the color over the black and white because there is more detail to be found in the color version.

Of course this whole thing is rather subjective. I guess it really just depends on the image and how each image works best.