Peter- This image touched me deeply on a couple of levels.

First off the balance of medium darks and medium lights is really fabulous in this shot. I am not sure that it could be a better exposure than this. You have maintained all of the textures of the trees and the grasses that are so necessary to tell the story of this place.

Secondly, the composition has me reeling. I suppose one could say that your lucky to find a place with such a platform for your model that just happened to set perfectly in a landscape that could not have been arranged any better than it is right now. That is not to say on any level that luck had anything to do with the success of this photo.

But the shapes of the light and dark masses of this composition are so pleasing and the way the shapes are repeated in this bit of nature are just wonderful, The lighter triangular shape of the hill in the foreground is echoed in the darker triangle set in the opposite direction in the middle ground just behind the light one. And then there is the lightest triangular shape in the background for the triple appearance of the triangle shape, which is only made more solid by the fact that there are three, count them, three large trees surrounding your model like some marvelous natural parthenon.

And then of course there is the a fore mentioned model which is dwarfed by the immensity of nature such that she could be a tiny fairy. Her pose is beautifully and gloriously celebratory, which seems so entirely appropriate here.

The really incredible part of this image that really caught my attention was this light spot that the model happens to be residing. I have been painting landscapes this summer, and they have typically been scenes that have distant horizons, but some where along the line in the last month while i was heading back to the truck to get a new panel to paint one, my eye was grabbed by a very similar light in the dark woods behind where I had been painting a lake... Now unfortunately for me the subject in the light in my woods was a fallen tree and not a beautiful nude model, but the similarities in compositional effect were equally seductive to me.

This photo would be brilliant without the model... it really would be. She is certainly a bonus that is quite worth the price of admission, and she does serve as a splendid surprise for those that care to explore this wooded hillside. And I love that it could work very well without her and I am even more happy that it still works with her in there without feeling the least bit divisive.

Thanks for making this image so perfectly.