Flash Intro & Backgrounds

Hi, I just want to give a little quick introduction for the photography side of this blog, Seedus will be handling the Style section and I'll leave it to him to provide that intro.  :) I’ve been a SL photographer mainly focusing on fashion for the last year and half or so. Second Life has really allowed me to explore a real life interest of mine in photography, of course the love of fashion and so a new hobby was born. For the “Flash” part of Style & Flash, I will be musing about my process of doing photography in SL from setting up the shot to maybe a few Photoshop tricks I’ve learned along the way.


For the first post, I decided I wanted to talk about backgrounds. Whether you shoot on green screens, studio backdrops or on-location, backgrounds can add as little or as much you want to the picture. Lately, I’ve been shooting more and more in my studio on a green screen for the fashion pics, mainly to keep my sanity if the background needs to be changed and I won’t have to painstakingly cut out the models from an on-location shoot. It’s happened.

But since I can’t bring myself to pay for access to good stock backgrounds in RL, I focus on zipping around SL and taking background shots of my own. There are so many beautiful builds in SL and by shooting my own backgrounds I can get the angle and lighting exactly right that I would need for the picture. Also having the background separate from the model, I can more easily have different processing steps for the two to usually bring the model and the clothes more into focus. Add the factor that many of these gorgeous builds don’t allow rezzing of posestands and/or running of scripts, which means that it’s just easier to shoot in the studio if the picture involves models.

For example, for an upcoming issue the theme is modern art. I’ve already seen pictures of the clothes so I have an idea of what I will be working with and I then opened up the SL Destination Guide and started poking through the entries to see if anything strikes my interest. After a few “oh that’s interesting but won’t work” spots, I landed at Cetus.

I’ve been to builds like this before and I might have even been to Cetus before but still it took my breath away and I just started snapping away (generally a good sign that I really like the spot). I’m still debating on whether I will be able use the snaps I took at Cetus for the upcoming shoots, of whether or not the background will be too busy and I usually don’t post the snaps I take for background use on flickr, mainly to keep things fresh when I do use them. This has led to a large amounts of files that I’ve had to organize into subfolders on my harddrive so that I can easily find them again. At this point Senna’s voice is telling me that I really need to create a backup system for my harddrive because now that I think about it, it would be upsetting to me if I lost all of those. Some of the builds no longer exist and so I would not be able to recreate the snaps. Hmm.

So I just want to encourage all the SL photographers out there, to explore SL more and use more SL backgrounds in their pics. There’s a huge variety of really well done builds that can fit most needs.