Monday, 5th June, 2006

Studio Photography In Second Life

photography secondlife howto

(Because that's what I'm interested in at the moment)

Just wanted to briefly come back to a question that Lana asked yesterday:

The SL ones look great without the background, how do you do that?

Well, like I said, I made myself a little studio in a skybox floating 100 metres above my house. Inside it, I made a (rather large) backdrop that I can change to any colour I want.

Essentially, it's 8 prims all carefully positioned so that there are no seams. When I was first building it, I had unusual shading going on on a couple of them, so I checked the "Full Bright" option (in the Edit -> Texture tab) which made it all uniform.

They're all linked together, so I can quickly change the colour if I want (like the grey in the 'James Bondesque' shot), and I'm thinking of maybe looking at using QuickTime VR images to bring Real World scenes into the photographs.

All I do is plonk myself down in the centre, make sure I'm facing the front, then position a couple of lights that I made...

...move the camera to where I want and hit the "Take Snapshot" key.

The trick is, I think, to use the camera controls very carefully — and also to use the "Zoom In/Out" keys (ctrl-8 and ctrl-0). Sometimes using just the alt-zoom camera control gives really weird perspective

Two little tricks/things/hints that I thought would be useful:

1. In the Debug Menu, there's an option to take a "Hi-res Snapshot". You get stunning images that are just ripe for further play in Photoshop, but the files are around 80MB Bitmaps, so it takes a while.

2. If you use a HUD attachment to control your avatar (I love mine Search for "HUDDLES"), then you need to hide it before you take the snapshot (View -> Show HUD Attachments), otherwise you'll get it in the picture. Or, if you're doing a Hi-res Snapshot, you'll get it repeated all over the place...

Finally, because I am an utter geek who likes to automate process and such, I knocked together a quick Automator action that you can attach to a folder so that whenever you take a snapshot, your Mac (sorry) resizes it, changes it to a JPEG, and imports it into iPhoto

Here's a zipped-up archive of it

You'll need an album in iPhoto called "Second Life" (although you could change the script to whatever), and it uses the Desktop as a temporary folder, so what I do is save all my snapshots in a folder called "Second Life" in my Pictures folder. Then every once in a while, I free-up Gigabytes of space by deleting the originals.

If there's call for it, I'll explain how I make vaguely-realistic looking film-grain in Photoshop as well.

Space To Describe Your Soul

photography

While I'm in a 'photographic discourse' kinda mood...

Here's a little snippet from an email conversastion that I had with April :

why is it that people feel compelled to leave quarter a frame empty at the top of photos? why why why?

Because that's specifically the part of the frame where you're supposed to reveal your soul
It took me ten minutes to type that. And a further ten to type this.
I'm very drunk

We were actually talking about this picture, but you see examples of it all over the Tranniesphere©

I think I know why it happens I think it's because we instinctively put our faces in the centre of the viewfinder, and therefore our bodies take up the bottom of the frame, leaving the top half blank.

The other (slightly related) thing that interests me about general 'snap-shots' is how our brains perceive a scene differently to a camera. You know if you look at something, your brain kinda shuts out a lot of the detail and detritus that's going on around. You still see it, but it becomes irrelevant and so you don't notice it.

The camera though, flattens everything and raises the level of significance of it all to the same level as the subject.

This is why radiators always appear in the background of trannie-photography

you should used a png with transparency, or set the gif's white color = background/transparent...

(1) Transparent PNGs no work in IE. (2) The GIF is set to transparent — it's the CSS on the link that makes it look odd.

Spotted — allow me to fix...

Thanks for that BTW — I must go visit

Aye — Tom had mentioned it and posted a video.

I have a better way of avoiding PNG-problems in IE: Try and convince everyone to ditch it and use Firefox

You evil evil girl ... DO IT DO IT DO IT!

I would, but I'm a bloody chicken

Verbal Assault, Dada Style

random

Large groups of men scare the crap out of me, and so, whenever I'm walking around, if I see one I end to either (a) look at the ground, or (b) puff my chest up and try and look 'nonchalant'.

Even though many people have confirmed my deepest fear — that I look nothing like a girl most of the time — I have a strange self-deluded belief that my flowing locks and 'girly' ponytail somehow mark me out as being a "poof", and I therefore expect some sort of verbal barrage every time I sense danger.

Obviously, this only ever happens once in a blue moon, but it doesn't stop my paranoid head from digging down deep and donning a tinfoil hat.

Large groups of men standing around, or walking, then: scary things. Groups of cyclists, not so scary.

I mean, 'cmon. Most cyclists are ineffectual tree-hugging luddites who bang on about "organicness" and "senses of well-being" and "goodness to the environment" (despite the fact that global warming is entirely due to the outputs of cyclist's puffed-up, self-righteous smugness)¹, not marauding groups of tranny-bashers.

So when I saw a group of cyclists coming up from behind me as I walked along the path by the Castle earlier, my initial thought wasn't "crap — best adopt broad shouldered stance", it was "aw, bless. They must be really hot in those jumpers".

I've been insulted by kids on bikes before, obviously — the little shit that screamed "POOF!" in my ear one day, that was fun. But, as the guy on the bike at the front turned round to face me as he passsed, I certainly wasn't expecting this:

"Cuc-KAW!"

As his compadres and he chortled off into the distance, I was left there purplexed.

"Cuc-KAW?"

Was it some New World slang for "tranny"? Was it some kind of avian mating call? Was it just something in his throat?

Or, as I'm starting to believe, have I just had the glorious privilege of being insulted by André Breton on a bicycle?

¹ @NRT, I'm joking.

Well, in Oxford they seem to

I remember it quite clearly in fact — me, stood distraught at a phone booth, trying to get through to a Hickensian Legend to tell him that my mobile had been stolen...

When from behind the phone booth, I hear the words:

"Cor Blimey Guv"

And I knew I was in the right place

I Am Going To Bed

time numbers random

But I'm going to set my alarm for early, because I want to be awake for 06.06.06 06:06:06. Because I am that sad

I mean, it's not like it'll be repeated soon or anything — it's not like there's a 07.07.07 07:07:07 (etc) looming in the nect year or anything...

11.11.11 11:11:11 is the one I'm holding out for. Personally

was he sort of adopting a pseudo scottish accent at the time?

Ah. Yes. Yes he was. That would explain it.

BTW, 06.06.06 06:06:06 — a singularly uneventful moment in my life, notable only for the intense headache and wobbly body that comes with a hangover. Not the 'end of the world' as some had predicted.