Second Life Photography

One of the features added to Second Life some time ago is projectors, lights that shine on things. Bryn Oh used a headlamp thing for use by those visiting his latest exhibit, which is a projector. But, we see little use of projectors as lights in SL. Or maybe we just don’t notice them.

There is the problem of many people probably not having Sun/Moon + Projectors enabled in their graphics preferences for performance reasons. That is a problem for those building places. They want the majority of visitors to see their creation as built. So, they often skip using Projectors for lighting. But, for photography performance is generally not a primary issue and what the camera sees is up to the photographer. Everyone will see the photograph as captured as in general everyone’s computer settings are similar. So, there is no reason not to use Sun/Moon + Projectors. We just want to light our scene to create the image we want.

In RL photography lighting is a big part of it. For portrait photography it is somewhere between a science and an art. Lighting is used in capturing most all commercial images too.

The first I’ve heard of people using lights in SL photography is in the article Bloody Gorgeous in the PrimDolls blog. Notice the link there to Deoridhe’s Flickr images: Bloody Gorgeous.

5 thoughts on “Second Life Photography

  1. Stefan Buscaylet’s LUMIPro is, in my humble opinion, the definitive photography tool for SL and pioneered the use of projectors in photography in Second Life.

  2. Heh… you should visit BSG74. It makes full use of light projection and the shadows it casts for effect in some areas.

  3. Thanks for the link!

    I usually use wearable projectors, because I don’t have rez rights on most of the sims I photograph on. One of these days, when I’m feeling frisky, I’m planning on doing a guide to my lighting system, because I think other people will find it useful; in this case, the windlight was a reddish one, but I also used a combination of dull and bright red on the lights (if you look along the right side of my body in the picture, you can see the dark red light) in order to try to add some drama.

    I’m leaning toward projectors these days instead of regular lights because projectors are directional and can be narrowed, making it easier to achieve corona or chiaroscuro effects.

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