The Fish Eye Lens : How to make a good picture. (Introduction and so on dedicated to Amita)

Haha ok so today I crashed and made this capture :

ARGHS!!!!

Amita Yorcliffe suggested (in a comment) that I make a tutorial on how to take good pictures - she even said the magic word pleaseeee (with four e's!!!!) so how can I say no eh? Truth be told I had been thinking of sharing my processes anyway  to beef up my blog content ;-). This is actually kind of a difficult thing for me to do because I'm really quite a disorganised goldfish brain but I'll try my best !
I think it would be interesting to explore the idea and learn from it too!

I certainly don't claim to be an expert in the field of good picture taking given the wealth of talent in the ole flickr pool; I'm pretty average with the occasional lucky break! With that said - how I'll go about blogging about these techniques is, I'll write a tutorial covering some aspect of SL photo taking whenever a crash has occurred and I need to channel my frustration into something more positive than a major rant!

One thing I do believe in is that there are some basic rules about aesthetics that other more brainy people than me have often theorised and written about. These can be learned and applied in your own projects. What is good is always a matter of opinion and style and these change and develop as you become more experienced. So perhaps the bestest no.1 rule in good picture taking is to take a lot of pictures! The rest is as follows.

How to make a good picture (in second life) :

Part 1 - Mistress/Master your environment (Light)

The essential things you want to control in most picture set ups are

Lights, Camera and Action.

So for this blog tutorial I'll write a little about setting up light sources in second life.

Note : 

Phoenix Firestorm Viewer is my viewer of choice for my own Second Life. Therefore the user interface and settings may vary from your own SL experience.

Lighting in Second Life (The Basics)

This tutorial will cover the following points

• 1) Planning the set up of your studio/location
• 2) Making basic lights

1. Planning the set up of your studio/location

While there is no hard and fast rule to setting up your studio,
I find setting up in an East West direction just makes sun/wind light settings easier to understand.  

I will write a blog about my own explorations with windlight settings in a later tutorial.

Briefly, the biggest reason for setting up your studio direction in this illustration, is so that you can use sun position in a controlled manner to create dramatic lighting. If you'd like to get into this straight away - Strawberry Singh has written a wonderful tutorial on windlight settings here

2. Making basic lights
You will need some very basic SL building skills.

You now have a set of photography lights that you can easily modify to suit your needs!