Second LIfe Destination Guide

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.

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.

Putting Me In My Place

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Yesterday I ventured in to Second Life with three goals:

1. To clear out the Arcade items cluttering my platform from my shoot a few days prior.
2. To post my SL Movie poster at LEA11 in Berry’s Monday Meme Gallery.
3. Do a landscape shot for my blog.

I managed to clear out the Arcade items (although not organise them in my inventory 😦 ) and popped over to LEA11 to put up my poster. I even managed to knock poor Vaneeesa off the platform when I changed the width of my poster to 170.5 metres instead of adjusting the rotation to 170.5 (sorry again, Vaneeesa! *grimaces*) So far, two out of three down…I’m doing great!

Then I hit the wall. I opened the Destination Guide and TP’d to three different locations, trying to find a landscape to shoot. Despite rezzing issues, I attempted several shots in all three places. I adjusted my camera angle, Windlight settings (even going so far as to edit the water and sky settings), flew or ran from area to area trying to find just the right location to shoot and just generally wore myself out attempting to do what I normally don’t do.

After a couple of hours of this (intermittently, getting up frequently to rest my back and un-numb my bum) I started going through my shots for processing. Overall, I took over 100 photos and they were all…well, to be blunt…CRAP. Sighs. I tried to do something with a couple in post-processing to make them blog-worthy, but alas, you can’t make a silk purse out of…CRAP.

It’s for days like yesterday that I worked ahead for the Avatar Blogger Month. By the time I finished I was disheartened and exhausted. So, I took a day off.

Today, I went at it from a different angle. Yes, I wanted to find a pretty location to shoot, but I decided to add me into the frame. This time, I was happier with my results.

I headed to a sim I have frequented over the years, Runestone, and I wasn’t disappointed. If you haven’t been there, here is the description in the Destination Guide:

Runestone is a special place to relax and enjoy the sights and sounds of nature. Dance, meditate, or cuddle with a loved-one, visit the quaint cottages, or explore the garden with its waterfalls, rope-swings, and hidden pirate’s cave.

I was much happier with these photos which include me, but still show off the lovely location. In fact, all I did was crop these pictures.

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I’m not saying I’m going to give up on landscape photography, but until I master it, I’ll just have to keep putting me in my place.