Jason Tag Photography

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 Rose - 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…

On Sunday my Macbook froze and when I tried to boot power down and boot back up it gave me a screen with a folder icon with a question mark on it. Yikes! I freaked out! Tried to to boot it up but it just wouldn’t boot. I called a friend of mine who is a Mac Expert and he tried to walk me through some ideas that he had. Nothing worked. So I took it in to the Apple Store to see what they would say. Sure enough the drive had a catastrophic failure. THey still have it because the new drive hasn’t come in yet.

Now it’s been 3 days without my mac book and I sorely miss it. I picked up a Mac Mini just so I could get some work done as well as editing shots from my shoot with Rose but I miss being able to edit photos or my site, for that matter, from anywhere. It’s amazing how much I miss the portability of the laptop when I don’t have it with me.

The mini has been a great so far and I hope that it continues to be a great computer for home use but it can’t replace my laptop. I hope it gets fixed soon cause I’m goin’ nuts without it! They said 3-5 days but I’m hopeful that they’ll call me tomorrow to say it’s fixed.

I guess I’l have to wait another day

Yesterday I did a shoot with the amazingly beautiful Rose. I’ve known her for a few years although we don’t get to hang out as much as I’d like. I was quite nervous going into this shoot because she’s one of my friends. Most other models I’ve worked with I’ve become friends with because of this experiment. So I was worried that she’d be uncomfortable or that it would be weird for her to be seen nude by a friend. I was also worried that I wouldn’t be good enough or that somehow the shoot would go horribly wrong and she’d never speak to me again. Well that was my fear talking, the same fear that kept me from shooting nudes for 15 years.

Well all my fears were proven unfounded. It turned out that because we were friends that we already had a rapport and there were no trust issues. We had complete confidence in each other and that turned out to be a nice bonus on this shoot. This shoot really felt like we were just hanging out and the shots were secondary.

We shot at a location that I hadn’t scouted previously so I was also worried that the location wouldn’t be all that great. So it ended up being a surprise and it also became a shoot about discovering the shots and the moments as we lived them. My favorite way to shoot. that way there can be no preconceived notions and it’s really up to me and the model to find the shots.

We found a couple of really cool trees to play with and on fallen tree that was a lot of fun to work with. We also came across power line towers that were also neat to pose against. There’s just something about metal and skin that I find interesting.

We had a lot of fun and I hope that I’ll be able to work with her again soon.

Aloha,
Jason Tag