Backstroke, Clark Dry Lake

All in all, the swimming thing works better with water.

:) Very funny caption.

Yeah; people who do nude photography take it way too seriously.

well if you had not posted this upside down...would it be the breast stroke??

I am enjoying this on the uncalibrated laptop...looks as though the contrast is to my liking! I also like the composition mucho....she almost mimicks the mountains in the background...nice...juan

Excellent composition...the vast expanse of the mountains and sky give a great perspective to the photo

A new concept for me: note the blotchy sky. I did a darkroom print of this one and it was very smooth (after all, it's a 6x7 neg). For some reason, which I now believe to be grain aliasing, my scan came out a lot like the way this photo looks on the web, with an almost pebbly sky. I tried a new scan with digital GEM, which appeared much improved, but still not as good as what I did years ago in the darkroom. On the other hand, I was able to do dodging and burning on this image like I could only dream of in the darkroom.

Yep - grain aliasing is part of the problem, it's one form of wave interference. In signal processing if there are data frequencies (eg grains/inch) > half the sampling frequency (eg dots / inch of the scanner or pixels / inch of the final image) the interaction produces lower frequencies (lumpy grain) - the same kind of process that makes Moire fringes and wagon wheels going slowly backwards in cowboy films. The solution is to sample at much higher resolution or very slightly blur the image (= anti-aliasing filter) before scanning. Even if you scan at hi-res you still have to smooth (selectively blur) the sky and skin areas before down-sizing the image, or the problem comes back. Making the effect worse, there seems to have been some edge sharpening (seen at the skyline) which could be automatically applied in the scanner software or may be done by photo.net's compression process.

 

Anyway, back to the pic...

 

Lying nude in the mid-day sun surrounded by the expanse of the lake-bed she seems strangely at ease with her isolated situation. Being in harmony with the landscape (as Juan says, she almost reflects the shape of the hills) creates a strong feeling of peace and "rightness" making it, for me a very powerful image. The monochrome film brings out the connection, the classic 1/3s composition vertically suggests comfortable stability and the centred position horizontally emphasizes the stillness. It all goes together very well.

 

Best wishes, Jonathan

I wondered if a slightly higher contrast would add impact (I also tried the selective softening which looks OK to me) - what do you think?

Excellent composition of the woman and the background. Congratulations!

 

Tommy Yeargin

!!!!!!

This is great!  I love how the whole scale of things work, Medium Format?

Thanks! This was taken with a Pentax 6x7. I can't remember if I had a tripod as well, or a Sherpa to carry the whole assembly.