Nature Girl Photography

Female nudes in natural settings are a perennial favorite for erotic photographers. This is because the female body has strong associations with the view of nature as a woman and a mother (hence ‘Mother Nature’). Because the images feature a nude model in a totally natural setting, there is a sense that the scene depicted could have occurred at any time during human history.

The trickiest part of nature girl photography is balancing the impact of the nude with the surroundings. Of course the eyes of the viewer are going to be naturally drawn to a nude figure, so the trick is in playing the nude down so that it doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the frame. Many photographers try to achieve this by simply using a wide-angle lens, so that the nude just isn’t very big in the frame, but be careful doing this as it can mean going too far in the opposite direction, resulting in the nude simply being lost in the surroundings.

A better way to balance the two elements is to not include a full-frontal, full-body shot of the model, but photograph her instead from behind, or include only an element of her body in the frame. It’s really the full-frontal, full-body approach that is most distracting, so anything that isn’t this can be an improvement.

Don’t forget the rule of thirds when composing a nature girl shot. This is the rule of composition that says photos are generally more pleasing when points of interest occur around the four points created by an imaginary grid of two horizontal and two vertical lines laid over the frame of the photo. A classic environmental portrait (which is more or less what nature girl photography is) would have the model in either the right or left half of the frame, with their head at or near one of the top two gird intersection points.

Lastly, if you are photographing in (or processing your shots to) black and white, remember that naked skin will often appear very, very light in tone in a black and white photo – much lighter than a lot of natural environments. This can mean again that the model overwhelms her surroundings in the frame. In order to combat this, you may need to lower the overall contrast on these shots more than you normally would.