Photographic Arts

Learning to take pictures in Second Life (SL) is difficult to master as the avatars tend to move either where your AO puts it or arbitrarily according to where your cursor on your PC is!  However the pictures turn out, it is fun to take them, share them, and post them in blogs, Flickr, or wherever your picture taking creativity takes you.

Early Days

As with any other art form in SL there are those photographers that are one cut above the others, either because they excel at PhotoShop or they have the patience to wade through the lag to take that perfect picture.  I remember my first picture, it was amateurish at best, and so to PhotoShop I went.  

Up to that point I had never done anything in PhotoShop, but I had some videos to watch and I got extremely lucky!  I was very proud of my first doctored picture, however, having no real talent with PhotoShop for a long time, I began looking for someone with the talent to take pictures of my avie.  It took me six months to find a skin maker who transformed my idea of Atlantis into the Elf I am today.  

After that I visited a friend of mine, Roxi Richez who is an absolute wonder at Second Life pictures combined with PhotoShop and I was thrilled with the results.  My favorite picture that she took of me, is of course, my profile picture, which appears in this blog and on my many other profiles pictures.

When I first started taking pictures, I would take them, share them, then doctor them in PhotoShop, and then hang them in Elven Enchantment Museum and Art Gallery, honoring my wives, friends and associates.  There were romantic pictures, noobie pictures, and gruesome pictures all shown in my museum at different times.  I found an astonding amount of gruesome pictures to show off in the Museum for the month of October!

The Grove at Halloween

Taking "the" shot in Second Life is just as hard if not harder to do then in Real Life, but once you have "the" shot it was worth the aggravation that you went through to get it.  I remember taking this picture, it was Halloween and I took hundreds of pictures for this one shot of lightening striking  during a thunderstorm on the grounds outside of my Museum.

Scenery pictures can be difficult to take as you have to have the correct graphics resolutions on your computer.  Some of the SL pictures that I have seen taken of Second Life, you would swear they are really from First Life.  

Some of my favorite pictures are romantic ones with my sweeties or settings where I "accidentally" got "the" shot!  

At the Four Seasons Plaza

Then there are those crazy SL photos you took because you couldn't believe you were "ruthed" or you were not rezzed properly and you turned into a pretzel!  As photographer interacting with a software to take my photos sometimes I see things abnormal things, but I take the picture to see if they are worth keeping and sometimes, I am surprised!

When I took the picture at the right, which was at the Four Season Plaza, my vision was blurring everything; my avie's torso, kept disappearing, and I saw myself walk around in a wig and a skirt; I couldn't see the buildings then when I sat down to take this picture my "vision" turned odd and I snapped the above picture, which I didn't think would turn out, but I like it!

Whether it's your 1st or 1000th picture in Second Life our collage of photographs, bring to mind of things past, enjoyable moments, and hopefully warm our hearts with happiness and smiles.