`If you look through your viewfinder and see what you have seen before, don`t take the picture. Find new ways to look at your subject.`

The nude is something that attracts many people to photography. Capturing the nude has long been recognized as a key of depicting the human form in an artistic manner. Earlier, during the 1800`s, nude pictures were depicted in the form of paintings or drawings. Change in the field of nude photography came with the technological changes in the camera and the camera design. Lighting plays an extremely vital role in nude photography. One should know what kind of lights to use to accentuate what emotion and what body part one wants to portray and in what manner, so that it does not look flimsy or erotic but artistic and bring out the emotion through the human figure. In India, nude photography has got not much exposure, though well known fashion photographers like Vikram Bawa and Madhur Shroff and some others too have tried their hands on nude photography and have been successful too.

It is not difficult to try and frame nudes in your camera too. All you need is a model willing to pose, an innovative mind and spontaneity. One needs to think how he or she is going to take a nude photograph. What kind of nude pictures do you want to take? There are as many different ways of approaching the nude as there are good photographers of the nude, and it is important to spend as much time as you can study nude pictures. Good nude photography - like good photography in any other area - means always looking for something different. One needs to aware of the difference between looking at the subject and looking at the picture. Learning to see the image in the viewfinder or on the ground glass as a picture is easy to write but took me years to achieve, and even now is easily lost. One of the things that make the nude a difficult subject is that it is so easy to get emotionally intense about the body in front of your camera and react to that emotional intensity rather than making the picture represent some of that feeling. Edward Weston was one of the greatest nude photographers. His early work was in a pictorial vein, often keeping the model at rather a distance, although only a few examples have survived. The great advance that he made around 1920 was in moving in closer to his model and seeing his subject in a much more formalist manner, as composed of planes and textures, shapes and forms. The nudes of Manuel Alvarez Bravo are very much concerned with telling or alluding to some kind of story. Bill Brandt`s work with nudes in the 1940s and 50s was groundbreaking.