Nude

[Frank Petronio]

Andy, I'm amazed that a headless image it still is a portrait, it's a really great image.

Here's a few odd old ones of Cat.

[Frank Petronio]

Pistol, Sash, and Meagan.

I guess I have a lot more that are only semi-naked, topless, or smaller-format. I only use the one of Pistol and and Cat against the jungle wallpaper these days.

[Vaughn]

Another Redwood landscape with a nude.

Scanned silver gelatin print -- not well done.

[Tri Tran]

Posted this whole series in an older portrait thread, but what the heck...I like this one.
Montana de Oro State Park, 4x5, 300m

Hi Mat,
Very nice composition, love it. It's genuine!

[JMB]

The title of thread is nude and therefore thats what we show but why are we only seeing female nudes does nobody out there take photos of male nudes?

Of course not.

[kev curry]

He wouldn't take them off.....

Maybe its because his feet are fleshy shrines dedicated to Nazism....?

[ustas]

[IMG][/IMG]

Sofi
13x18 Ilford FP4+
Graf-Variable f5.6 on sharp

[David Hedley]

Sofi
13x18 Ilford FP4+
Graf-Variable f5.6 on sharp

Reminds me of Fonssagrives - lovely photograph.

[Hugo Zhang]

ustas,

That is very lovely and classic!

Hugo

[Gary L. Quay]

Here's my contribution, and my 2 cents:
First the contribution. I don't know if I'm breaking any rules here, but I took my CS4 edition of Photoshop out for a spin on this one, and created an image that is heavily edited. I liked the idea of nature and the nude, but just throwing a nude into nature seems highly contrived. I'm not saying that I won't do it, because I never rule anything out. I think that nudes should be in places where they would normally be nude in, and in poses that you would find them in, albeit altered to make the compression caused by the lens to convey the naturalness of the pose. These are personal ascetics, and not meant cast dispersions on anyone else.

Moksha in Branches


Camera: Calumet C-1 8x10 (built in the early 1950s).
Lens: 13" Cooke Series II Portrait lens (Made in 1906)
Film: Kodak Portra 160VC.
Scanned on a Epson Perfection 4870 Photo and edited in Phootshop CS4 Extended.

Now, my 2 cents:
The discussion of whether photographing nude women is art or base instincts masquerading as art seems moot. Even if it is a masquerade, what's wrong with it? People are sexual by their nature. To the average male who produces an average amount of testosterone, the naked female form is really what life is about. We've been putting women onto pedestals and admiring them since cavemen drew them on walls with burnt sticks. Allowing ourselves to see the beauty in the human form is a healthy thing, and suppression of it causes more problems than accepting it. The Europeans seem to understand this better than us Americans: place a taboo on anything, and you get unbalanced responses to it. This is where pornography comes from, as well as some things that most of don't like to think of.

I haven't done much work with nude models to this point. But what surprised me during the shoots was that I was so concerned with the shot and with all of the technical stuff involved with shooting LF in the studio with a live model, that I really didn't have the leftover brain cells to devote to being aroused by the model. I also think it would be unprofessional to allow that to happen.

--Gary