It has been a good idea to give out an email address here. Some people are shy to leave comments it seems. I received a very nice email from someone who is apparently quite new in Second Life and who wanted to know how in the photographs displayed on the Booty page, I had managed to stay suspended up in the air long enough to take a picture? This has made me come to the conclusion that it may in fact be quite a good thing to post some information about taking photographs in Second Life.

However before I even begin, I want to put in a big disclaimer here: The woman behind the keyboard is not a photographer. She is an artist/designer who has very good skills in image/non-linear editing software, particularly Photoshop, Flash and After Effects. Also, she was already quite at ease with 3D software, such as 3D Studio Max, before she came into SL. All this gives her a good understanding as to how images ought to be created and assembled and how cameras can be used to great effect in virtual 3D environments, but as far as taking photographs in RL is concerned she is not any better off than the next person – if not indeed worse. There are very good professional photographers in Second Life, she definitely does not claim to be one of them. What knowledge she has on the matter is by having muddled her way through countless trials and errors…

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Having said this much, here is my first tip: Use the camera controls of SL when you are taking a shot. The default avatar viewpoint is way above normal eye level and photographs taken from that vantage point often do not work, do not look natural. At the very least they create quite a bit of foreshortening making all the avatars in the shot look top heavy. 

Simply go to the view menu and activate the controls. The blue circle on the left lets you tilt and rotate the camera and the one on the right lets you pan. The little +/- slider in the middle is to zoom in and out. You can of course also use the keyboard shortcuts: Left click+alt centers the object that you are pointing at, after which you can zoom in and out by using your mouse or touch pad. You can rotate with Left click+ctrl+alt.

Click on image to enlarge

On the left above the photo was taken from the default viewpoint of SL, whereas in the one on the right I panned the camera down to eye level and then tilted the whole thing ever so slightly. I think that this really does make a big difference to the result and it only takes a second to do. Indeed doing this ends up becoming second nature after a while. Obviously you can also achieve really dramatic shots by playing around with these controls, such as in the image below where the camera is actually quite a bit below eye level:

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Tip number 2 would be, to never ever use the default SL sky settings but create your own! This has been covered in another post already, so no need to elaborate any further here ;-)

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Tip number 3 is to never forget to put on your facelight! Again gone into extensively elsewhere…

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To create the floating in the sky photo you will need a posestand or a poseball.

These can be obtained as freebies pretty much all over SL, as can the poses that you need to put inside of them. I prefer to use a posestand which can cycle through as many poses as you choose to put in it. The one used here is something that the main avatar got from one of the boxes at Yadni’s Junkyard. This one, or one just like it, is what you should in fact be looking for: This one can be made visible/invisible through an open chat command and that is the kind that you will need. And such are the dues of newbiedom that unfortunately there is no easy way to all this. You will need to teleport there and dig it out yourself – which will take some time, I’m afraid. Once you find it the rest is fairly straightforward: You simply drag and drop the poses into the stand, disable your AO (if you don’t the poses may take a longer time to load), and right click and say stand. Then you right click on the posestand, bring up the edit palette and raise it to whichever height you want, either by entering a value in the Z axis for position or by raising it manually. You can, of course, also rotate it to achieve the perfect angle. Once satisfied, close the edit palette and then type “hide” in open chat, which will make the posestand disappear, as shown below.

When you are done with  your shoot, this time type “show” in open chat and the posestand will reappear. And then it is just a matter of making it back down to terrafirma by accessing the edit palette for the journey…

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Another neat trick is using a green-screen to create avatar photographs:

Green-screens are aids that are mostly used when shooting film or video footage where the background needs to be eliminated – as would be the case for newscasters when they need to have full screen video clips of the news displayed behind them. If you seat the subject in front of a bright green screen of a hue which is not very likely to be found in a natural environment, you can subsequently key out the green as you are editing the video and insert whatever other footage you may want.

I do not use green-screens very often in SL, since it is of course a cheating of sorts. However when you are taking photos of clothes (and indeed also objects) you may want to display them on a completely neutral background or you may want to put multiple shots of the same avatar wearing different clothes inside one frame. Or you may have your heart set on taking the photo of a particular garment or object in a no build area, where it would be impossible to rez a posestand or an object. If any of these are the case you simply create a 10 x 10 x 0.1 meter box, color it a very bright green and place your avatar/object in front of it, slightly raised from the ground, like so:

After you take the photograph, you will need to go to an image editor – and one that is capable of quite a few feats at that. I will show this in photoshop, but I am sure gimp can do these things as well:

Once you open up the shot in photoshop, you will need to double click on the background and turn it into a layer, so that transparency is enabled. Then, either by using the magic wand tool or by going to color range from the select menu, select all the green and press delete. All that will remain is your avatar’s cropped image. Now, either open a new file and colorize the background whichever way you like or open the photo of the SL landscape that you wish to use as a background:

Click on image to enlarge

I placed clones of myself, wearing many different types of underwear from DarkLour Watanabe’s Neko Gear shop, in front of a shot that I had taken at the IBM Codestation last weekend. 

Now, you will need to exercise quite a bit of judgement if you want this to work properly. If you want the end result to be realistic you need to ensure that all avatar shots as well as the background image are taken from the same angle. Furthermore the lighting angles also need to be consistent. It will help to add quite a bit of haze from the Advanced Sky Settings palette to achieve foreground and background differentiation in the finished image. (Trying to do this in photoshop by applying a blur filter really does not work at all well btw: background blurring is something that should really be done in-world by using the haze settings).

If the clones need to be placed one in front of the other (as is the case here) then their sizes will need to be adjusted accordingly -the ones in the back needing to be around 95 – 98% smaller. I also like to add a very soft, light, subtle drop shadow from the layer styles palette – but really be careful with this one: You could do some serious damage if you exceed the exact required amount.

Click on image to enlarge

I also placed the same clones in front of a dark background to insert into the Booty page. Truth be told the IBM shot is just for the purposes of this tutorial.

You may, of course, want to experiment and place the clones into non-realistic settings and poses, tumbled onto each other in helter skelter fashion, in which case some of the rules of size and consistency of angles and lighting may no longer apply…

;-)

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