The horror, the horror.....

You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em.

I've seen horrors … horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that … but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face … and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God … the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.

Brand newness from a couple of my friends at Stuff, it's not open yet, but will be soon at AYUMI mainstore at Dreamer, the outfit is brilliant, and includes everything you see in the pictures, apart from hair.

2 of the pictures here I played with the exposure and offset, to make it look slightly darker and retro, the other picture i played with overlays, and blurs in an attempt to get the rainy look to them

Shadows!

For those of you who have downloaded the latest Kirsten or Cool viewer and have the graphics that can achieve them, you can now get Shadows in Second Life! lucky you.

My graphics however, are utter shite and I cannot :( So I just make my own using photoshop.

There are two methods that I use to add shadows to Second Life Pictures, by creating an overlay layer and painting using a fat soft brush a vague outline to where a shadow should be, using blur tools and reducing the opacity to suit. The other method is taking a duplicate layer, cutting out your object and making it black using some blur then laying it on your photo as a shadow, and reducing the opacity again. The two photos added show the methods I have used.

Ears.....

I don't often wear prim ears in Second Life, although I own a fair amount, puppy ears, elf ears, neko, rat and usagi ears. I really like all of them, but for some reason I don't tend to wear them. Anyway, the ears and tail are from Eat Rice! and outfit from Sn@tch. The skin I got for free, courtesy of Minnu Palen after I found a rip of hers and told her about it, hair from Deviant Kitties.

Regarding the photos, the poses are from Torridwear and taken in my studio, backdrops from Distressed textures and processed in Photoshop :)

How to take better photos....

Something that makes a huge difference to the photos you take is the clothing and attachments, I tend to wear short or 'up' hair for photographs as although I love long hair, it really limits the type of pose you can use, Similarly with clothing, lots of prim clothing tends to flick out at odd angles, so keep in mind when deciding on what to wear. Bling, it shouldn't have to be said is hellish, and should be illegal! ;P

Shoes can also be an issue, regarding alpha layers, if a shoe has a particularly clumsy invisiprim attached it can mean you have to disregard a lot of props or poses as the prim can 'cut through' your clothes.

Choosing the right pose, that doesn't distort your skin/clothing and suits the look of what you are wearing is vital, rather than a static 'rabbit caught in the headlights' look,

A few tips I have picked up......

Working in Second Life, I have picked up a few tips regarding taking Photographs, so I am going to share a few with you.

In your preferences, under Graphics, go to Hardware options, and tick Anisoptropic Filtering and set Antialiasing to 4x, set your graphics for as high as it will go, if your computer can handle it, set it on Ultra, tick all the boxes in bump mapping, shaders etc.

In your Advanced menu (ctrl alt d to enable) click High rez snapshot to disk.

Ok! now you are initially set up!

Now, if you are out and about in world, play with your windlight settings to get just the right effect, move the sun, the moon, increase or decrease cloud cover, have a play around, save your settings if its one you like. If in a studio settings set your world to midnight so you can control all the lighting,from intensity to colour to create shade and tone.

I think probably above all else what is important in SL photography is the poses, whenever I get a pose stand, I immediately bin all the full perm freebie newbie rubbish poses in there, as they tend to be badly thought out and make your photos look cheap, with wierd arm or leg glitches, or distorting the midriff. If you can't afford to buy poses, most stores have free poses to pick up as a taster, or massive sales every so often.

Second Life in pictures

I take a lot of pictures, and probably only upload 1% if that, I constantly reject ones, stuff that just didn't quite work or that I'm not 100% happy with.

I took this one a few weeks ago, for a contest (I didn't win) for a 'famous image recreation' thing, the thing is, this type of thing is my favourite, making a Second Life image in the style of a famous RL picture, I've done a Christine Keeler, Kylie, and I'm going to start work on a Flashdance one this week.

The picture above is Photoshopped very lightly, basically a little cleanup and adding the smoke, I am still learning Photoshop but I love it, changing the feel of a picture through layers and light/shade.

First post......

I've been working on some store posters for a friend of mine, AYUMI clothing, she's great despite the fact she keeps moving her store and has so far refused to make bum cleavages, the bitch!

I've been having a few graphics issues lately, but I think I've mostly sorted them, after fighting with the computer for ages, downloading updated drivers and praying to the SL gods for things to rez in a timely manner.

Anyway, anyway, these are her clothes, including her cleavage, which comes in all layers and loads of shades, and a little secret is, its her real life cleavage, so theres a bit of megalomania in the creating the world in her own image going on ;-)

I'm kidding of course, she's lovely.