nudes - melisa - new zen New Zen 07

Fantastic

***Ali***

Sevens as always!

PDE

I like the very graphical quality with strong lines and shapes although I'm not sure why you broke the symmetry around the calves; it leaves me feeling a bit lopsided against the rest of the shot, and looking at your other stuff i can only assume everything here was intentional so am a bit curious about the motive.

And on that same note I would perhaps have liked to see a little detail in the left shoulder (like there is on the right one) just to give it a bit more defenition.

All just personal preference of course..

Hi Rob, thanks for the nice elaborated comment.

As much as I'd like to go along with your assumtion that everything is intentional, I have to disappoint you and say it unfortunately isn't. Indeed such a shoot is carefully planned and prepared. But once things start, this is so physical and demanding for the model I try to react very fast: I want to keep her energy and motivation and not lose them in the endless minute adjustments required to reach perfection.

And at the end, I chose which images "work" (IMHO) and which don't. Besides, and this is not to justify lack of achievement in the quest for perfection, I think the details you mention render the image interesting. They make you look, stare, consider, scrutinize the picture longer than if the symetry was indeed perfect. You'd go "it's symetric" and then move on to something else. Here your brain is teased and looks for the differences, walking your eyes all over the photo. IMHO little imperfections make things interesting, while perfection rapidly becomes boring. But again these imperfections were not staged. I just knew that with the way I work, they would happen to some degree.

One last tought: human body is by nature NOT symetric (although at first sight it may appear so). So, in a way, it's appropriate that "art" representing it should reflect that.