So, now I have a personal home photography studio. It’s set up in the sky, in a big earth globe in a device called an empod. I have slowly grown to collect a huge number of small photo studios – photospheres, 2 prim backgrounds, and props to use. And lately I’ve invested in a couple of more professional photostudio systems including stands etc.
And rather than lay them out onto the spare beach sand I have out in front of my house, I wanted to have a private place I could go to, and be able to strip off to change clothes without bothering my neighbours with my nakedness. Now, I can spend some time learning how to improve my own photography within SL.
So, up in my earth globe, I’ve selected a few photography professional studio to set out, and now that I am starting to make some movements with improving my own second life photography skills, I am starting to take an interest in windlight presets and SL Photography in general.
Windlight Instructions
As a noob, I often heard about windlight, but never quite worked out what it was, or how to get to it. So, if there is somebody out there thinking something similar to me, here are the quick instructions -
1. Windlight presets can be found all over the net. You can normally download presets for free, and copy these over to your second life directory. This is normally, for Windows PCs, located along the following path -
C:\Program Files\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\skies
Note 1 : If you are using an alternative viewer ie. Snowglobe, this viewer is set up in a different program files directory. Any presets loaded into your Second Life viewer will also need to be loaded into your alt. viewer directory.
Note 2 : If you are on a Vista PC, even as an admin, you will still need to okay the administration panel message when copying files into these app_setting folders.
2. Once you have some presets, you can access these within a second life viewer via the World » Environment settings » Environment Editor » Advanced Sky. There, you can search for the presets from the dropdown for sky presets.
Note 1: there are also water settings to play around with, should you want some startling effects for water based shoots.
Note 2 : and to get a better understanding of windlight, I’m trying to play around with the environment editor sliders and saving my own also.
3. Vista users, when saving their own created windlight presets, will save to the following directory -
C:/Users/username/AppData/Local/VirtualStore/SecondLife/
This is not the same directory for where other presets copied from other users should be saved (as per No. 1 above).
Photography Classes
Unlike classes for how to be a professional designer, or on professional modelling, Second Life doesn’t have a large quantity of how to be a second life photographer classes in-world. In fact, I only found two which are active at this point – SOMA and the Koinup / Orange Island group.
Koinup and Orange Island Photosessions
Koinup and Orange Island have recently led some Photo Sessions in-world also, on Thursdays. At Orange Island, you will find a photo gallery and challenges, and this is worth viewing. The latest session, due on 9th July at 11am SLT, is about colour theories, with photography challenges. Read the updated Orange Island blog for more details. The Photo Sessions group on Koinup publishes photos taken only at those sessions, which is an interesting challenge for photographer newbies like myself also.
Ideally, I would love to take on an apprenticeship with a professional photographer in second life, perhaps working freely with that person so that I can learn to better my own work. However a search did bring up one active course in-world, and having stumbled upon it, I’m really enjoying it.
SOMA Photography Classes
SOMA School of Design is currently offering free Beginner’s Photography Classes at their campus. These began last week, with Part II of this class last night at 9pm, with the initial classes working as an orientation towards photography in SL.
Although for July, SOMA has suspended it’s more normal live classes on designing and using photo editing software, the free photography classes are still running. You can TP into SOMA to subscribe for updates and notifications of when classes are running, and whether the photography classes may be put on again, as an orientation towards more commercial classes or simply to better understand photography and snapshots in Second Life.
I’ve walked away from these classes with a hud containing graphics and notes on the most important aspects, and with a lot more knowledge of how to apply my own photography already.
Photography Resources
Here’s some resources I am using to teach myself about SL photography and windlight settings -
- SOMA School of Design – for photography in-world classes
- SLurl : Koinup and Orange Island Photo Gallery (for Photo sessions); Website : Koinup’s Photosessions Group; Website : Orange Island blog.
- Windlight at the Second Life Wiki
- Torley Linden’s Guide to High-Quality Photography
- Torley Linden’s free to download windlight presets.
- Ana Lutetia’s Blog – Ana shares her own windlight presets, and even provides these as a download. She has some excellent ones for the studio, and outside.
- Secondskin Labs holds an exe file containing a lot of the free to use windlight presets, including Ana Lutetia’s ones, and those created for viewing some AM Radio second life builds.
- Torley Linden’s video tutorials found on the second life website are perhaps some of the best to advance our photography skills. Search under “snapshot” to find all of these.
- Some basic tutorials listed on SLTutorials.com for snapshotting.
- Vint Falken’s blog holds some excellent SLPhotography tutorials onboard.
- Flickr, of course. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of Flickr second life groups for images, contest entries and supporting events and blogs. The biggest group is one called Second Life.
- Snapzilla – the image side of sluniverse.com. Snapzilla is solely for second life images, and all SL residents can upload these. Registered users can create albums, add tags or manage their images.
- ProfileSLive.com also runs an active forum on SL photography.
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