Jason Tag Photography

My new year got off to a great start yesterday!  I shot with a good friend, the ever gorgeous, Serafina.  We had planned on shooting poses that would reflect the strength and power of the body.  I feel that I ended up missing the mark on the idea.  Mainly because the inspiration just wasn’t there to capture the strong poses.  We played with it for a little while but I didn’t feel like It was happening so we just went for beautiful poses.  We we’re getting great stuff in the beginning because Sera is such a good model, but it didn’t feel like I was clicking with it.  Like I wasn’t where I needed to be in order to do the shots justice.

When we changed locations from shooting on rocks and tidepools to shooting with trees and the metal pipe, I got some great stuff that really made my heart skip a few beats.  And that’s why I love working with Sera.  She just does things that are so beautiful and I’m not sure if she knows she’s doing them.  But I see it and I just have to shoot it.

Again It was a great shoot and it was a great way to kick off 2009!

Serafina - Jan. 3, 2009

Serafina - Jan. 3, 2009

Serafina - Jan. 3, 2009

This weekend I was invited to shoot with a friend of mine as a second shooter.  This gave me the opportunity to play with some new ideas without the pressure of really nailing my shots.  Of course you always want to strive to get the best shots you can but at the same time, it’s nice to be able to just play around with different things and see what you get.

We did two shoots, the first on Saturday was a bikini shoot with a fantastic model who had brought some bikini’s she made.  So the images were for her to use as promotional materials.  It was a fun shoot and I got some great stuff.  This was the first time I had really shot with a reflector.  I had tried to use them previously but never had much success with them which is why I’ve totally abandoned using them.  But after seeing the difference that the reflector made this weekend…I will be dusting mine off and seeing what I get.

We got together again on Sunday and this time the shoot was more of an artistic nature.  We had a great time despite the weather being cloudy.  And the light was really not that great.  But we got a few shots in anyway and they came out fairly good.  One of the best parts of the shoot was getting a chance to see a pair of green sea turtles.  What a treat it was to be in the presence of these amazing and beautiful creatures.  When it got dark we decided to play around with some fire shots.  This turned out to be the best part of the shoot.  Once the sun set behind the mountains the sky did very beautiful things…  And so did the model!

Overall this weekend was great!  Now I’m looking forward to next weekend when I can apply what I’ve learned.

Green Sea Turtles at our shoot location

From our fire shoot on Sunday evening

From the Bikini shoot on Saturday

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…

Well I’ve been pretty busy the past few weeks so I haven’t done any shoots this month.  But I decided to go back and revisit a past shoot I did in May.  I never edited it using Aperture So I decided I’d go through it and see what I get.  I ended finding a few new favorites.  Which now makes me curious about the other past shoots I’ve done.  I wonder if I’ll find some new favorites if I go back through those as well….  Here are just  couple of those new favs!

Well September was a crazy month as I wrote earlier.  I’m glad that I was able to do the shoots and work with the models I got to work with.  Now it’s time to sit back and figure out what I learned so I can avoid making the same mistakes twice.

The month started out with me buying a new lens.  The Olympus 14-54mm ƒ2.8.  This lens is defiently superior lens to the kit lens I was shooting with previously.  The biggest difference is in the sharpness of the images this lens produces but also it has a smaller aperture range across a longer focal length which means better collection of light at the same focal lengths as my previous lens. The only drawback I would say is that it had a tendency to focus on the background.  However I discovered that underlow light conditions it takes longer to focus than under high key lighting situations.  when in a low light situation I just need to wait a little before taking the shot. Once I figured this out, things got a little bit easier with this lens.

Another lesson I learned was that I still have to work on steadying my hands when shooting at focal lengths above 50mm.  Of course this is the problem that most photographers spend years working on.  I’m not sure how to fix this except to shoot with the longer focal length and try to be steady or start using a tripod more.  I’ve benn thinking that my next shoot should be done with tripod just so I can figure out how to really incorporate it into my shooting.

During two os the shoots this month I worked with models who wanted direction.  This had been one of my biggest weaknesses since I started working with models.  Since I’m no expert at posing it’s not a skill that comes naturally to me.  I endup having to spend a great dael of time thinking about the body and looking at the models body to determine what poses would look good for her body.  On these two shoots I really felt that I did better than I had done in the past.  I felt that I was able to come up with a pose much faster and was able to communicate to the models exactly where to put their hands, legs, where to look…. etc.  The more I am forced to communicate poses the better I’m getting at it.  I’m still no where near where I want to be with the skill but it’s coming along nicely.  I think I’ll spend some more time looking at images and studying poses that I find in other artwork.

One thing I’m finding is that I’m making less techinical mistakes with the camera.  So I’m getting more good images versus bad images with every shoot.  However the more I shoot the more I realize that the things I have to work on now are becoming more about my interactions with the models and about the actual art itself.  Learning how to communicate my ideas effectively and understanding how to work with the models in a better manner.

Spinning Image

Do not attempt to adjust your monitor… the image is spinning, not you.

What you see in the image above is the result of something strange that started happening recently.  It’s happened a few times which is why I’m writing about now.  It actually started on a shoot I was doing with Ashleigh at the beginning of September and showed up again on my most recent shot with Sarah E.  What’s happening is that I’ll start framing my shot, then I’ll press the shutter release halfway to get exposure readings and to have the camera’s autofocus get focused.  I zoom in to make sure that the camera focused properly.  I start to zoom out and that’s when it happens.  My finger slips and bam!  I ust took a really weird picture!

It only hapened twice on my shoot with Ashleigh so I figured it’s an anomoly.  But when it happened again during the shoot with Sarah I thouhg that maybe something’s happening to make me take the picture prenmaturely.  Of course I could just be over-thinking again.  But If it happens on my next shoot then I’ll know it’s something I’ll have to work out.  Below is the image I was trying to take…. enjoy!

Sarah E. - September 10 2008

The only drawback to having done 4 shoots in the past 2 weeks, is the amount of editing work that needs to be done. I’ve finished editing the shoot with Elizabeth and Julia. At the moment I’m putting together a gallery of the shots with Elizabeth and will be updating the members area later today. After that I’ll be able to start editing the shoot I did with Ashleigh on September 6th. I hope that by next Wednesday I’ll be able to finish editing the shoot with Sarah last Wednesday. It’s a lot of work…but it’s also a lot of fun so I don’t mind so much…

Sarah E. - September 10 2008

I had another shoot today. This time with the extremely beautiful Sarah E. She was a model I had worked with early on and she ended up moving to Florida before I had the chance to work with her again. She was so much fun to work with and hang out with that I was rather bummed when she moved. So imagine my excitement when She wrote me saying that she would be coming back to Hawaii!

Sarah E. - September 10 2008

Today’s shoot we went to an area that I had scouted before but I was unsure about whether it would work as a location to shoot nudes. It’s a popular hiking trail and is usually less popular on weekday mornings. We we’re very lucky that weren’t interrupted by people walking by or stumbling in as we we’re shooting. We only ran into other hikers as me moved from one part of the location to another. Sarah wore a sarong to cover herself between setups. So none of the hikers ever caught her in the nude. Very lucky indeed.

Sarah E. - September 10 2008

This shoot was done with the new lens and I have to say that it performed well. I think I figured out the issue with it not focusing properly. I was re-framing my shots before it was done focusing! I feel rather silly about it. So today what I did was let it finish focusing then I checked my focus to make sure and then I took the picture. I’m glad I got it figured out I was worried that I’d have to take the lens back since it is quite a good lens.

We spent a great deal of time playing on and around trees, we also spent some time shooting in the stream that meanders through the location as well. We both had a lot of fun and I’m sure there’ll be more with Sarah in the future!

Tide Pools

It ended up that I had two shoots yesterday. The first shoot of the day was a sunrise shoot that turned out to be pretty awesome. We went to a location that I had shot at before. Although this time we hiked down around some tide pools that I had never seen before and got some great shots. The model looked beautiful against the volcanic rock and the ocean.

The ocean was a bit rough and a few times we had to dodge some waves crashing against the rocks we we’re shooting on. Later in the shoot we moved to a beach that was totally deserted. So we played in the shoreline and got some really cool shots there as well.

Banyan Tree - Sept. 6 2008

The second shoot of the day was with Ashleigh. I loved shooting with her so much that when the opportunity to shoot with her again came up I took it. I knew we would create some really beautiful and interesting images. We shot at a wooded location that I’ve haven’t shot at in a few months. We really had a lot of fun walking around the area and finding fun things to shoot with.

On both shoots the new lens performed beautifully. I don’t see a big difference with the shots but I can say that it made a big difference during the shoots.  I’ll write more about the lens a little later.

All in all it was a great day for shooting and both models and myself had a great time.

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.