Taylor Swift surprised everyone with her first bikini shot exposing her belly button to stop the paparazzi from making thousands of dollars off of her, Yahoo! News reports via Good Morning America.

The pop star told hosts Nick Grimshaw and Ed Sheeran on the BBC Radio 1's Breakfast Show that she technically did not release a photo of her belly button just to shock the world.

The "Shake it Off" singer was on vacation in Hawaii with the HAIM sisters.

They all went whale watching, thinking they were safe from photographers, but then they spotted another boat carrying paparazzi out in the middle of the ocean with them.

"My security gets out the binoculars and sees that they have a huge long lens camera," she said.

"At which point, we go back to the beach and realize, 'OK, so they got pictures of us in our bikinis.' I don't want them to make, like, $100,000 ... for a bikini shot.

"And so we're like, 'Get up on the bow of the boat: We're taking better bikini shots so that they don't make as much money on theirs."

She later found out that photographers were stalking them the entire time on their vacation, but they had not noticed until they went whale watching.

"I've never seen such stealth-mode paparazzi, like, long-lensing it up, three miles away," she said.

Taylor Swift wanted to keep her belly button a mystery, until photographers sabotaged her goal.

Swift told Lucky Magazine, "I don't like showing my belly button. ... I don't want people to know if I have one or not."

She also talked about the demands of being in the spotlight.

"I was a singer-songwriter," she said. "I wanted to make music. I didn't know that came with this expectation that your whole life is owned by the general public and everything you do is dissected, scrutinized and questioned."

The "1989" singer is now better at blocking out the noise while committing to her fans as she is preparing for her tour.

Related