Leapfrogging

Second life is an interesting place, especially when it comes to things like fashion, photography, and landscaping. Anything you want to find, you can.

As I've mentioned before, I was introduced to SL by a Dolly, and while I've never much felt LIKE a dolly, I can understand the appeal of being beautiful and cherished and kept save in a glass jar.

Description: Deoridhe, in red, her heart pierced by an arrow, under a glass doll jar on a stand.

A lot of my SL experiences are confluences of influences. Azriel, of Falln Angel Creations, gives out a heart to his group members. This is shortly after Tomoyuki showed me a fantastic outfit he'd just picked up from Rabbit Kiss (aka Umi Usagi) and inspired me to do likewise. And then, wearing my dolly-pretty dress and my arrowed heart, I remembered a placed that Rowanhad taken me early in my introduction to SL - an entire dolly extravaganza complete with doll stands.

I suppose, in some ways, you could say this was the beginning of what I'll later call my "photoshoots," which are extended sessions of posing and photographing a particular outfit and hairstyle against a thematic and often beautiful background. I'm still working on it, but for a point of amusement, let's compare this early example of a photoshoot to one from my absolute latest.

Description: Deoridhe in a cream colored gown in front of a seascape.

I think you can see the differences pretty quickly.

I chose the one from my latest which has a lot of views, and which also was the one I had to do the most waiting and modifying for. Since this is underwater, I played with the water settings more than I normally do, adding some atmosphere. Also, the skirt is connected to the chest, which means in that pose it went flying off to one side without being shifted significantly. Each time I do a "shoot," it seems, I begin to learn something new about how to edit prims while in pose to make things look better.

I also had to wait for that docile looking jellyfish in the background to get into position and disguise the poseballs in place there.

One of the banes of my slandscape photography is poseballs. They hardly ever look good or blend in, and often cropping to remove them crops other stuff you might want to keep! I really wish people would come up with more decorative ways to place them - making them pillows, or fountains of bubbles - or something else. The text over them vanishes in photography, but the poseballs remain to taunt me like evil taunting things.