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.

If you’ve been reading for a while now you know that I usualy write a post-mortem article about each of my shoots. I haven’t done one of these for a while mainly because the last few shoots I’ve been working on my confidence as a photographer and artist.

This was Ashleigh’s first time posing nude. I figured that she might need a bit more time to get comfortable but she was quite comfortable with her body. She also had a very good sense of the kinds of poses work well for artistic nudes. It was a joy to work with her and I even felt quite confident in talking to her. Normally I’m a basket case in my nervousness around beautiful women but on this one I had no problems. As we worked we talked and just had a good time together.

The first shots I wanted to get we’re at Pele’s Chair. I wanted to shot here first because I thought that this might be a popular destination and I wanted to get some shots here before any people showed up. Fro the moment I first saw Pele’s Chair I just knew I had to shoot nudes there. I knew that the contrast between skin and the rock would be amazing.

One of the first shots with Ashleigh

We started off with basic poses. Just Ashleigh sitting on the rocks with a sarong covering her body. At one point she pointed out a cool rock in an area below Pele’s Chair that she wanted to shoot on. So we climbed down and did some fun poses there. When I turned to look around the area for more ideas, I spotted an area that reminded of the famous shot with Raquel Welch where she’s wearing the loin cloth. So I asked her if we could try to do a shot like that and it turned out to be interesting. I don’t know if it comes close but I like what we did anyways.

Trying to re-create the famous Raquel Welch poster

After Pele’s chair we hiked back down to the beach area and started looking at ideas when a hiker started walking towards us so we moved farther down the rocks away from view. We did a few shots of her laying on the rocks near the ocean but the hiker started freaking me out a little so we made our way back to where our stuff was and headed to some tidepools.

At the tidepools we learned just how powerful and unpredictable the ocean really is. There was a great looking rock I wanted to shoot with. She climbed up and got into position. I got a few shots, then she moved to another part of this rock. I got one shot when a huge wave crashed, soaking both of us, including my camera. All I saw was a flash of white and all I just prayed that she was still on the rock. She was but she ended up getting a small scrape on her knee. We got away from the water very quickly. I felt bad that she got the scrape and we spent the rest of the shoot trying not to get it in the shots. I just hope that it doesn’t leave a scar.

Posing nude on metal tubes

For the last 45 minutes of the shoot we shot using the large metal tubes I found there. I thought they might provide from an interesting background. I think the shots we did with these tubes are my favorites from the shoot. I just liked how the tone of her skin and the tone of the rusted metal was interestingly similar while the textures are opposites. We shot in, on, and around the tubes and had a lot of fun with them.

Overall we had a great time and I now feel like I’m more confident in my exposure settings and in working with models. Good lessons to have learned.