scott_blair1

What makes a good male nude? Same thing that makes a good female nude: the subject. The photograph should give us some insight about the person we're looking at. As you say, so many female nudes are silly. They usually look like "found shots" of discarded headless mannequins draped across chairs, beds, or just the floor. I don't know what rock you are talking about, but your photograph is of a bare ass. As is typical of so many female nudes, there is no face, no person. Plenty of gay men, as well as straight women, enjoy photography depicting the nude female, so there is no reason gay women or straight men wouldn't enjoy photography depicting nude males, if there is artistic merit. This looks either like a personal fantasy, a desire to splash around the surf in the raw, or like a photo of someone's lover, straight or gay, it matters not. I think it has artistic merit, but it says much more about the photographer than the subject, and I usually prefer it the other way around. Overall, it's nice work.

Damn, I was going to say magnificent. I can't decide which is more beautiful, the portrait or the dog. Even the lighting is masterful. I knew when I saw your name it was going to be good.

This image is all about atmosphere. In one sense it makes me feel like I am there in the present, walking among the ruins, yet in another sense it makes my imagination run wild, and I am there when it was alive. The colors are cool and serene, yet saturated.

Every one of these in this folder is a gorgeous composition.

I like the creative way you have dealt with distance here. On two levels, too. The stong contrast in the foreground and the haziness of the opposite shore; the bicycle against the railing in the foreground, obviously incapable of delivering you across the water to the great city beyond.

You never know how a picture will affect someone. This looks like tobacco, and brings memories of wonderful smells in musty old barns where the tobacco had hung to cure through the winter.

What a delicious sense of humor. Is this some sort of oblique reference to Numbers?