30 posts in 30 days

There’s No Place Like Ctrl+Shift+H

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If you aren’t a resident of Second Life, you’re probably scratching your head thinking, “Huh?” For those who do inhabit SL, you know it’s a reference to the keyboard shortcut for “Home”. It’s also the name of the sim I visited yesterday, and it is truly lovely.

Originally, I went to Empyreal Dreams with the intent to photograph some of the artwork there. It is an interesting concept, as described on the Destination Guide:

Empyreal Dreams is a collaborative project between two creators based in England and The United States. It aims to visualize famous poems and literature using Second Life as a canvas. A teleportation machine greets the visitor with destinations available to: The Raven, Emily Brontë’s The Bluebell, The Ancient Mariner and Les Misérables.

However, once I arrived, I could only find the teleporter to “Les Misérables”, and while it was an amazing display, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. It was rather crowded, and while I don’t mind sharing my space with others, I didn’t want to have to derender their avatars to keep them from appearing in my photos 😉 Instead, I simply wandered outside…

Empyreal Dreams is housed on the Ctrl+Shift+H sim. The main theme of the sim has an old-world feel, and I was captivated by the gentle music and the lovely build. You can rent space in some of the cottages, if you would like to set up shop there. There was quite a bit of activity on the sim with the explorers of Empyreal Dreams spilling out to ramble about, as I did. I found a spot rather removed from the main area, though, and while I had the occasional friendly passerby speak to me, I was able to grab a few shots. I have to wonder what they thought of this woman flipping through pose after pose, imagining her to be some sort of puppet on a string. Ah, the joys of location photography! Perhaps that’s why they steered clear of the area where I was shooting 😉

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I wandered off after a while and found another beautiful, but different, place on this sim and happily snapped away. But I’ll leave that until another post. For now, just enjoy the beauty of Ctrl+Shift+H.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Curves – The Nature Of A Woman

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In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

When I look at photos of stick-thin women, I have to wonder, what is the appeal? What is more boring than a straight line? The gentle curve of the hips, the breasts, the shoulder and upper arm, soft and gently sloping, defines the feminine form. That women – and especially young girls – are conditioned to eschew this natural phenomenon causes more harm than can ever be expressed in a simple blog.

The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt this week is Curves. This photo not only shows a modern version of a curvaceous woman, but the framed print harkens back to a time when this shape was considered ideal.

There are other examples of curves in this picture, but the nature of a woman cannot be overshadowed.

Please click on the link above to see other examples of “Curves.”

Single Frame Stories: Creativity – Lessons From A Dead Poet

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Surprisingly, this week’s Single Frame Stories prompt, “Creativity”, pretty much stumped me. I’m not an artist. I take photographs and play around with processing them, but I am hopeless at creating anything from scratch. I have my own style, but it’s nothing ground-breaking or heart-stopping. It’s just what I do. It fills my time and it helps me relax. I just get in a zone and don’t see anything else. My senses are heightened, and they are fixed on what I am doing – trying to create my interpretation of the scene I have captured. Results may vary.

I was going to wimp out and skip this prompt. But then, ironically, I stumbled across this quote:

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~ Sylvia Plath

So…feeling chastised by a dead poet, I intended to go into Second Life today and travel the grid, trying to find something that could tell the story of Creativity in a single shot. I was actually anxious about it, wondering what I could possibly come up with.

And then, I remembered a photo I had taken at Runestone, but hadn’t used in my original post. This painter’s easel has been at Runestone for as long as I have been going there. And it’s one of my favourite spots. I can never walk past it without grabbing a palette and putting brush to canvas, pretending to recreate the scene of the house across the water, playing at being an artist. When I opened the photo, I knew I could show in one shot how I feel when I am working to finish a picture: focused on the object, with everything else around me a blur.

I hope I succeeded.

If you want to participate in Single Frame Stories, you don’t have to be a blogger. All you need to do is upload your interpretation of Creativity, in a single photo, to the Single Frame Stories Flickr group. You can open a free account there, if you don’t already have one, and participate in this remarkable project. The deadline this week is Friday, so there is time to display the work at the Single Frame Stories SL10B installation. Go ahead…give it a shot. You may find yourself in the zone, too, once you’ve overcome your hesitation to share your creativity.