-
Posts
448 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
That hairstyle - woah. Do you remember where it is from? Just saw you answered it already, Mew from Dura. Yay! I love the shot!
-
That was a lot of fun and turned out to be rather insightful too. I've learned a lot about editing and several Firestorm functions I never knew about. @Orwar and I both took a shot of each other's avatar through our own individual lens. With that I present: Orwar as the shopkeeper of a tiny store that might or might not sell magic ingredients. I don't know, didn't dare ask!
-
So this has been an idea I've sat on for a while. I frequently find myself feeling stuck, not making any progress. Sometimes it's a technical thing, other times it's just a feeling of not progressing enough and making the same picture again and again. Be that as it may, something I've always been interested in is to see and hear about how others work, to learn from how they are doing things. Thus the idea was born: Two photographers take a picture of the other avatar, while talking people through the process. This serves a variety of purposes: Frankly, to connect with others about a mutual hobby. To learn from seeing the process and being able to ask even "dumb" questions. To also see your own avatar from someone else's point of view. Would that be something any of you are interested in? I'll make the first step and offer up myself (selfish, I know :P). Who: Nina Kastra (valkalastra) https://flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/ Timezone: CET, UTC+1 -> https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?p1=1229 When: Mostly during the day. I'm flexible - but pushing late into the night or early morning will diminish my already limited brain capacity NSFW: Yes and no. I don't mind but I also don't have Flickr Pro so no upload in that case. Specialty/Niche: Urban, Fashion or Fantasy Additional notes: All skill levels welcome. If you are interested, I'd be willing to optionally stream the process via Discord Livestream. Either way, bring time. I work... slow.
-
I find capturing emotions in SL to be particularly difficult. It's a lot of very subtle muscle movement that's hard to catch with the limited amount of animation bones we've got. You may need to compensate by trying additional expressive aspects. For example, using cold (blue) light with stark shadows that hide the eyes. Body posture can do a lot of heavy lifting, as can do overall lighting and direction. Here's an unedited example of one of my recent pictures. Unedited because I would feel cheeky double posting the end result. Let me walk through my thought processes for it. First, a small cutout from the unedited shot: If you look at the face, it has got barely any expression on it. The head is inclined towards a shoulder and the gaze is cast down, both of which can convey a sense of inwardness or introspection. More or less, like I was in my own thoughts. Overall body language protects the chest with the arms, something we do when we feel vulnerable. Same reason we fold our arms when we get into an argument - we instinctively protect our most vulnerable body parts (read, organs). Sadness is a very vulnerable emotion and so I thought it would work well to cross the arms and then have the hands reach out to the shoulders as if I was trying to hug myself for comfort. Sadness is also often an emotion described as cold and we tend to wrap our arms around ourselves when cold too. Further on, the lighting. There's a contrast between warm light coming from the side and most of the body being cast in shadow. This was meant to create a dichotomy between the warmth outside and the cold inside, almost like these two things don't belong together. Last but not least, I'm turned away from the warmth of the light. Body language is showing a "cold" shoulder towards it. And perhaps in a lucky coincident, the sparkles I forgot to remove kind of added two little glitters on my cheek that might be tears. Happy little accidents, eh Bob Ross? Still what I want to get at: The face shows barely any emotion. It's the same type of boring model/mannequin stare we're all so familiar with. Bodypose, light, mood and scene composition do the heavy lifting to convey the sadness. I hope it worked but at least that was the intent! Hope this helped a bit. Oh, yah. I did use the Lelutka Axis Hud to move the head and eyes. I can't recommend it enough, it's part of every shot I take.
-
That's one possible way but you'd lose the advantages of a higher resolution. I think the preview window is accurate towards the actual end result but it's tiny. So in theory you could configure your depth of field to look right in the preview but honestly, I should probably shut up at this point and let others talk. Sorry, been too long since I used things in viewer. I do remember Orwar making a good tutorial about depth of field in editing, using editing and basically taking one picture normally and one of just the depth information.
-
It's been a while since I approach my pictures in a different way (using injected shaders and dynamic super resolution instead) but if memory serves, depth of field settings are tied to a specific resolution. Thus if you set it up to be just right with your screen resolution - but then go and set it to a higher resolution in the snapshot window, it will mess up the depth of field. Black Dragon at some point had a function (or still has? haven't used that in a while) to automatically approximate the settings, I'm not sure whether any of the other viewers do.
-
Slow day, eh? Yah, you can slam your FPS to 400 and waste energy doing so - quite figuratively burning money for no gain. I'm not getting into the human eye perception argument but I'll toss you this curveball: Monitor refresh rate puts a hard cap on which FPS you can actually make use of. Thus, sure - if you feel like you need max FPS in Second Life as you stutter lag around, turn off vsync, enjoy your screen tearing and then hard limit your FPS at your monitor's refresh rate. Anything more is just burning money.
-
Heck if I know - but if you ever figure it out, let me know. My instinct tells me that since I'm a shopping addict, my main is out there financing my lifestyle. Think about it, there's loot to be had. Wait is that they why ghosted me?!
-
-
Beyond the Selfie: The Art of Photography!
ValKalAstra replied to Scylla Rhiadra's topic in Art, Music and Photography
The colors are sooooo pretty. -
Personally, I've found it easier to meet people around shared interests than to go to meet up places. For example, I've found more acquiantances in the various photography groups, than I have in the Dark Butterfly. It just kind of naturally lends itself towards a shared interest and conversation - which might collide with the desire to be in predominantly female preseting communities. Clubs and such are... fleeting. Random people flowing in and out all the time but I've never managed to make one of these contacts stick, whether they were just really fun and engaging talks or something more adult oriented.
-
I keep wanting to comment and then there's a new picture from you - you're on fire! But been meaning to say: They're all intriguing and I especially appreciated seeing a "normal" picture from you as well. The folding lines in the shot I quoted, I found a rather interesting addition - you even took care to change the light values a bit under the fold. Good attention to detail.
-
https://www.flickr.com/photos/191119559@N02/53581442683/in/dateposted-public/