I started thinking about my best environmental nudes, which I might define as a nude in which the landscape supports part of the story. Doing nude/portrait work it's just enough to find a corner where we can translate inspiration from whatever is around us but I'd proffer that "the environmental nude" demands more of a setting.
Pictures pass by constantly that showcase amazing detail and I once spent a very educational night with an art student who ruthlessly pushed me to crop deeper into each image. I find that I tend to have a holistic need to portray my subjects as complete people and tend to let backgrounds go to waste other than as a suggestion. I also suffer from a need to hand-hold the camera, perhaps succumbing to an impulse to be the Great White Hunter and stalk my prey. It does nothing for sharpness. I am continually disappointed. Likewise, my penchant for placing the subject in corners, leaving them outside the focus box on my Nikon cameras. In theory, one can focus, lock, recompose and maintain that focal point but in reality it seems to work poorly, particularly as I then will forget and trigger my back-button focus as a reflex action and shoot several frames before realizing it. Excitable.
There are some archiving projects that I need to undertake but we are just finished with winter and the rest of the world seems to beckon — those will have to wait for the return of darkness so I might hide away and think of warmer days. These are simply the shots that were at hand, favorites from a half dozen adventures.
