Yesterday I decided to run around taking some shots of interesting locales in Second Life. What I ended up doing , though, was taking a bunch of self-portraits. This is a departure from my usual goal of trying to avoid putting avatars (or people) in my photos (in and out of world), but I’ve found myself increasingly more interested in animal and people shots than scenery. Scenery is static and unchanging, and I’m starting to enjoy capturing things that are a little more lively, temporal, and unique.

While I’m by no means a professional portrait artist in either world, I’d like to give a few quick suggestions on how to take good pictures and portraits in Second Life.

Lighting With WindLight

As with any photo, lighting is key. The best backdrop behind the best model in the world won’t look like anything special without good lighting. In the real world and SL both, we can use lights and umbrellas to achieve close-to-ideal lighting when in a studio, but outside things are a bit more random. Fortunately, in SL, we have complete control over the atmospheric lighting and effects, thanks to WindLight. If you want really special shots, whether portraits or landscapes, I recommend playing with the various WindLight presets until you find one that captures the mood of the Sim you’re using as a location, and/or the essence of your particular subject.

You can fiddle with the atmospheric and lighting sliders yourself, but there are many presets available for download. These can achieve anything from subtle lighting changes to grand redefinitions of the SL environment including adding fog, adjusting how the water is rendered, even changing the color of the sun.

The China China sim, using a hazy, orange WindLight setting

The same sim with a different WindLight setting gives an entirely different effect.

You can tweak any WindLight presets using the in-world sliders, and I recommend playing with the sun position in particular to get the lighting right on your subject. It’s no good to have a fantastic lighting setup if your subject happens to be in shadow.

In one light, he appears warm and friendly

In another, dark and ghostly.

You can carry lighting prims with you, as well, for use in rez-friendly sims. I find that many of the best shots include a little something from an in-world light source. Just be sure you’re sensitive about when you use them, and don’t forget to pick them up when you’re done.

Zoom Level Secrets

The standard mouse zoom acts like any lens in that closer objects (and parts of objects) appear larger. This can lead to unfortunate exaggeration of features of our subjects which happen to be closer to our virtual lens. Noses, cheeks, arms, heads — any of these can appear to balloon depending on the position of the camera and the level of mouse zoom being used. This is especially problematic for photographing non-human subjects with already exaggerated features.

Note how the nose just seems to be bulging out of the shot.

Fortunately, mouse zoom is not the only way to control zoom level in Second Life. Ctrl+0, ctrl+8, and ctrl+9 zoom in, out, and zero the zoom level, respectively. These ctrl+# keys affect the zoom level in a slightly different way from the standard mouse zoom in that they zoom without distortion. Rather than zooming in the standard sense, it’s’ almost like we’re cropping and enlarging our picture in real time — it’s something akin to “digital zoom” in the real world, only without the unfortunate loss of quality.

Here, the features aren't distorted at all, even though it's still an extreme close-up

A word of caution, however: the ctrl-# zoom doesn’t increase the render quality as you get closer, so it’s easy to end up with weird prim clipping in your shots. It can also create shots that look subtly “off” if used to an extreme. Since it doesn’t move your camera, it also leads to a disorienting tendency to accidentally cam behind walls without meaning to. I often set mine to one or two steps in for most shoots, and only adjust further when necessary and with care.

As a side note, the ctrl+# zoom also bypasses the usual restrictions on maximum zoom level, something very helpful for jewelers and others who work with micro-prims.

Camming for Composition

Anyone who’s been in SL for any amount of time has no doubt heard of “camming”, short for moving your camera to explore the environment, rather than moving your avatar. Camming involves holding down the alt+ctrl keys and left-click dragging around using the mouse. It’s a bit hard to get used to at first, but with a little practice, it gives amazing freedom to life in SL and can become faster and easier than moving your AV.

Camming is useful for in-world photography because it gives you near-full control of exactly where your camera is placed. It’s essential for self portraits, or you’d be more-or-less stuck taking shots of your back. I say “near-full” because to move your camera, you still need an object on which to focus your cursor, something to act as a focal point from which to zoom or drag your point of view. For instance, you can’t point your camera into the sky and cam somewhere into the clouds, unless there happens to be a skybox or other floating object in visual range you can piggy-back off of.

I used the floating bottle as the focus to cam up to this vantage point, exaggerating my avatar's small size.

Anyway, camming is what gives us the ability to control the composition of our shots. You may have heard of the Rule of Thirds in relation to the visual arts, and it’s no less valid in SL. Camming to put our subjects in a more interesting place than directly in the center of the frame can lead to stunning shots that emphasize the subject, the location, or elements of both.

If you’re not using animations (via a pose-ball or direct play), camming will also affect where your avatar is looking. This can be a good thing, or it can be frustrating, depending on the look you’re going for.

In this shot, I've cammed around the front of my AV and placed her off center. I used the mushrooms as my zoom point, causing my AV to look up at them, which happened to be just the look I wanted.

Focus

Unlike real-world photography, we can’t set the aperture on our virtual SL cameras; this means we can’t deliberately blur the background. Remember when you take a shot of your subject in front of an interesting background, the background will remain just as sharp as the subject, providing its own challenges in creating interesting composition without making our shots too busy.

The background of this shot is far too busy (and unrelated), causing the subject to lose her impact.

This shot deliberately frames the background using the foreground elements.

Final Thoughts

I could go on about more general photography suggestions on composition, lighting, focus, and so on, but those can be found in other places. I just wanted to jot down some of the SL-specific photography tricks I’ve learned in the hopes it will help others take better SL pictures.

If you like any of these suggestions on how to take a good photo in Second Life, or the if you liked the photos that go with them, or if you have any tips for SL photography of your own, I’d love for you to leave a comment below.

Windlight is the snazzy name for the system used in-world in SL to tweak sky and water appearances. It’s great for taking photographs that have an extra ‘something.’ See the Wiki for a more detailed explanation of what it does.

I use Greenlife’s Emerald Viewer instead of the standard Linden Labs viewer. Among its many improvements, it includes considerably more preset sky settings to play with. I’ve been trying to find one that says “Christmas” to me, and ended up taking one called [Euphoria] Natural High and tweaking it a bit to create something I call Winter Wonderland. I thought, “I should share this,” and spent the next 10 minutes trying to find the file. I finally got smart and checked the Wiki:

Windows XP

* Skies – C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight\skies
* Water – C:\Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\water

Windows Vista

* Skies – C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\windlight\skies
* Water – C:\Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\water

Those directories are both where you can find settings that you create and save yourself, and where you put Windlight files created by others so you can use them in-world.

So, without further ado, here is my first Windlight file to share with you all:
[Az] Winter Wonderland 1

I just found this free script site. I haven’t used any of the other scripts, but the fix for transparent PNGs in IE6 is clean and effective.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of the average user of modern technology from overreaching corporate and government actions. They actively seek to defend us in the courts, provide numerous educational materials to help us know both our rights and our vulnerabilities, and keep us informed about current issues which need attention. It is my opinion that this is one of the single most important organizations of the modern age and a major bulwark against the formation of a Big Brother, Orwellian style government.

Copyright laws in the digital age can be fuzzy at best, with terms such as Fair Use and copyright infringement being tossed around with only a generalized idea of what they actually mean or when they really apply. To combat this, EFF has launched Teaching Copyright, a full curriculum resource for educators to help them provide their students with solid facts about the rights and responsibilities attached to copyright law.

I just found out how to add a favicon (that’s the little icon that shows up next to the address bar) to my blog and thought I’d share. The default for Blogger is the white B in an orange box, but that isn’t very memorable for your readers among hundreds of other Blogger sites.

Customizing Your Blogger Icon

1) Find an icon to use. It should be fairly simple so it is clear even at a small size. In case you need a place to start looking, I ran a quick Google search for icons and ran across IconArchive. Pick a category from the 32×32 pixel ones farther down the page, then find one you like and right click >> save to my computer. (I edited mine down to 16×16 pixels using my image processor, but I am told that 32 pixel images will work as well.)

2) Upload a png or gif version of your icon to your hosting site of choice. (I use Photobucket for things like this. I hear Picassa is also good.)

3) Go back to your Blogger dashboard and under the Layout tab, go to “Edit HTML”. You’ll see a line like the following not far down the page:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

4) Right under this line, copy and paste the following. (Replace /png/ with /gif/ if your image is a gif.)

<link href=’URL of your icon file‘ rel=’shortcut icon’ type=’image/png’/>

5) Get the url of your image from your image hosting site and paste it between the quotes over “URL of your icon file.” (On Photobucket, hovering over an image brings up a window from which you can copy the “direct link.” Methods will vary depending on your chosen hosting site, but right click >> copy image location usually works.)

6) Choose “save template” and view your blog. You should see your shiny new favicon next to the address bar and on the browser tab. If you don’t you may need to refresh the page or clear your cache from Tools.

I got a lot of the above info from this site.

So today I did some more work on the Raglan Shire Lag Education Center (no, I’m not calling it Bob). I still need to add some more props, notecards with further info, and at the end, a certificate of completion. I’m hoping to get it done tomorrow after church.

Let’s see, other stuff… I need to box up my gifts for the Fun in the Sun (FITS) and Bedtime Stories hunts which both start at the beginning of next month, though at least I got them finished earlier this week. Here’s a pic of the hat I made for FITS. I’m especially pleased with the texture work I did on the sunscreen tube. :D Bedtime Stories image to come when I get it done.

I need to spend more time in Qavimator over the next few days for both Seawolf and Tiny animations. I just learned that the Optimize for BHV option gets rid of all the extra keyframes that get locked down when you save and reopen the file, so that’s opened up a whole slew of possibilities! *does a dance, saves it, reopens it, and EDITS it!* Yay!

And now I must try to sleep so I can get up early for church tomorrow. Wish me luck, I’ve been oversleeping the past few weeks. O.O

~Az