A few weeks back the three first price winners of the Koinup WindLight Contest were announced. Today they were celebrated in world with a live performance of Jax Streeter and an exhibition of their photographs and 7 ‘honourable mentionings’ at the Rezzable ‘Cannery’.

Seeing there works on display in the virtual world was sure as hell impressive, and so was the music and the guests… Miss Ravenelle and Mister Torley ‘Linden’ Olmstead. Woot! I must admit, this was the first time for me to see Torley IRL.. euhm.. IVL and I was kinda stuttering. First thing Torley said to me? ‘Is that a watermelon drink you’re holding?’ :p

Jax Streeter gave the best of his virtual self and played one hell of a set - with ‘Avatar Superstar’ as my favourite song. As promised, I bumped the song 9 times on TheSixtyOne.com and gave Mr. Streeter my underwear layer. He has at least one new fan after this gig! /me hums: ‘No matter where you’re from. No matter who you are. In this world… you are… superstar… avatar. Play like you are. Act like you are. Rezz like a superstar, avatar!‘

More photographs of the exhibition opening in the Koinup Windlight Exhibition Opening Flickr set. For those curious: All photographs except the one of Torley Olmstead were shot with the ‘Pirate’ WindLight Preset.

The winning entries and 7 nominees for the Koinup Windlight Contest will still be on display in-world for a few week, so if you missed the opening, you can still go and see them. Correction, you should still go and see them! Directions: Open your map and search for ‘Cannery’ (or click this SLURL), upon arrival at the Cannery sim, you’ll see a big sign saying ‘Koinup & Rezzable’. Click the TP disk located under it, and we’ll get you right to where you need to be… but you won’t hear a live concert of Mr. Streeter.

PS. A certain Miss Mira owns me bandages for my poor little sour paws. Never ever give me a lighter before telling me to detach it when I plan on typing! ;)

Mr. Jax Streeter performing ‘Avatar Superstar’:

Tags: cannery, contest, jax streeter, koinup, music, rezzable, torley linden, windlight
Categories: Art, Contests, Music, Photography, Rezzable
1 Comment »

On Monday May 5th, the first edition of the Golden Greenies Teddy Awards for Excellent and Extraordinary Achievements in the Fields of Greenieness and Virtual Photography were held at the Greenies Home Sim.

The Golden Greenies are created by the Greenies to give avatars that live their motto ‘Green the Grid’ a more personal reward than L$ can ever be. Getting a Golden Greenie Teddy Award means ‘we utterly love what you just did or created’ and ‘TY!’ so much for sharing it with us and letting us show it to the - virtual - world.

Winners of the Surfline Greenie Holiday Photograph Contest were Kaxu Heron for ‘Best in Virtual Sports Photography’, Zoe Demar for ‘Best Holiday Photograph’ and Iodee Tae for ‘Best Holiday Postcard’. A huge ‘congratz!’ to those three ‘avies’. They all got a 5000L$ deposited on their L$ balance. Kaxu stated he will spend that on getting new poses, we do not know for the others. Zoe? Shoes? Iodee? ;)

All photographs can be looked at in the Greenies Holiday Photographs pool on Flickr, or admired on the Fridge at Greenies home sim. They are fabulous and amazing!

More photographs of the award ceremony itself in my ‘Golden Greenies Teddy Awards 2008′ Flickr pool.

Nominees for the Golden Greenies Awards and the Surfline Holiday Photograph Contest as chosen by jurors Nock Forager, Nobody Fugazi and Vint Falken are:

Miss Iodee Tae

Miss Zoe Demar

Mister Kaxu Heron

Miss Taylor Flanagan

Tags: contest, greenies, photography, rezzable, surfline
Categories: Photography, Rezzable
2 Comments »

Yeah, I honestly promise, I won’t run off with one of the prizes in this Koinup Photography Contest, as I’m on jury duty. And I’m in one hell of a company: Pastrami Linden - one of the original WindLight developers and currently Windlight Team Manager - and Torley Linden - the WindLight uber-fan and well known guru of Second Life Arts and Aesthetics.

So show us your best WindLight settings! Did you know WindLight can not just do great scenery but also give your virtual photographs an incredible sense of depth? If you shoot at early morning, or just before sunset, the ’sun’ is low, which means you get great shadings on your avatar, what gets rid of the ‘flat’ overall lightning (diffuse) we had before WindLight. Personally, when shooting in evening light, I like to tone down the redness a bit - or boost the blue. But of course, that’s personal preference. ;)

Rules are simple:

1. In order to take part in this contest, you must have an account on Koinup. Registration is free and takes only a few seconds.
2. All the submissions in the contest must be tagged with this tag: windlightcontest (copy this tag and paste it in your entries)
3. Submissions can’t be photos already hosted on Koinup. So please, publish new works!
4. Each participant can submit only two photos. But pay attention to this: If you enter two submissions, use two different WindLight settings and shoot them in two different regions. (Note from Vint: If we need to play ’search for the two differences’ on your submissions, you did not follow this rule correctly! ;))
5. Some kind of post-processing is allowed, but remember: the contest is about WindLight. Excessive post-editing with psp (and other photo-editor) won’t be appreciated.
6. Photos have to remain on Koinup after the end of the contest. Obviously you are free to share them also on other websites!
7. Entering the contest implies the acceptance of these rules.

Here you go if you want to re-read the rules, or get a Koinup account. And take a look at your competition here.

Not a photographer, but still want to create and/or win something? I’m still offering a 10k L$ bounty for best trademark parody. You may photograph, build, sing, do acrobatics… whatever. As long as it’s original and close to hilarious! ;) Oh, and the Greenie Postcard contest deadline is postponed until the 27th of April, because the Surfline ft. SLSA Surfing event got postponed too. Happy contesting to all! :p

Tags: contest, koinup, photography, windlight
Categories: Contests, Photography
5 Comments »

I had it lingering around for months now, a shiny, powerful and beautiful looking XFX 6600 GTS. I did not plug it in yet, because, the old one, a Sapphire Radeon X600Pro did not perform all that bad and frankly, I was being conservative. I know that by plugging in a new graphics card, the world around me would change drastically. Just as with real life, virtual life is how you perceive the world around you, and as ‘touch’ and ’smell’ functionality is still disabled, ‘view’ is one of the most important. But the outlook for the next official client - the RC 1.20 - left me no choice.

Thanks to Veyron’s extremely handy gift (the 6600 GTS)* and some excellent Skype support by Loki Popinjay - mainly mental, telling me I would do OK and not ruin my entire system - I now have a kick-ass graphics card ‘inside’. And oh my, what does the work look shiny and bright!

I still have a lot of settings to trial-test, but in the short run, it did seem logical to let the graphics card in charge of decisions where it comes to anisotropic filtering (wiki explanation on this), and not pick ‘let application decide’. A test with the exact same graphics card and in-world settings (except for a minor shift in daytime):

And this is how ‘my’ virtual world looks now:

A guy that knows how to dress and make is own clothes! Yeey, for Chez!

Toying around with the Glow settings. (No lecture, please, Mr. Poultry)

Shinyness has never been this shiny before. Wow.

One of the Alienhearts DJ’s.

The Club Haze opening. 63 people, Woot!

* With this great gift, Mistress Veyron acquires the first (and probably only) week of Vint-ownership (see comments here). Details to be arranged in IM. ;)

Tags: graphics card, hardware, photography, vint falken
Categories: Photography, Vint Falken
37 Comments »

Always wanted your photograph on display on the Greenies fridge?

The Flickr group Greenies Holiday Photographs is created especially for the gathering of entries for the Greenies Postcard Contest.

There are 3 themes, and you can submit a max of 3 photographs/theme:

1. Best Postcard (tag: “surfline_postcard”)
2. Best Holiday Photo (tag: “surfline_holiday”)
3. Best Action/Sports photo (tag: “surfline_sports”)

For an entry to be valid, the photograph must be taken at one of the Rezzable Surfline sims and must contain at least one Greenie.

The best entry in each category (as decided upon by Nock Forager, Nobody Fugazi and Vint Falken) shall receive 5000L$. The winning photographs will be put up on the Greenie fridge for a month with a note saying who created them. Rezzable is allowed to use the three winners for promotional purposes when attribution is given.

The contest starts *now* and ends on the 15th of April. The winners will be notified before the 22th using Flickr mail and in-world IM.

What hangs on the fridge now? Of course, these do not enter the contest. I’m sure you can do better anyway!

Tags: contest, greenies, photography, rezzable, surfline
Categories: Contests, Photography, Rezzable
2 Comments »

Really fun, what Christian Contini did: he took a Second Life avatar, and photographed this avatar under different angles. This photo source material ended up as a first life hologram. This can’t be that hard to do? Keep your horizontal camera position steady and rotate around your avatar? Best you can do, is to cut the avatar out from the background, and keep that static, to enhance the 3D effect. Yet, I’ve never come across a service that allowed printing holograms from self-supplied photographs.

Woot! I must admit, I’d love to give this a try myself. It looks like an awesome - and even a bit a ‘nostalgic’ - way to import images from a 3D virtual world into first life. I want business cards like this. And portraits of my favourite befriended avatars to stick in my wallet. And a ‘Second Life’ trading card game with holographic images and cards such as Queen Tateru, Governor Philip, Watermelon Torley, Warrior Dandellion and Jester Prok… . :d

For more on the technique used, see below this video.

‘If not sure, mail Tobie‘, this is going to be my new (virtual) life motto. ;) October pointed out to me that I used the terminology ‘hologram’ wrongly here, and she’s right. Yes, I must admit, it does not look much shiny and rainbow coloured.

So if it’s not a hologram, what printing technique is used here? Lenticular printing: Each image is sliced into strips, which are then interlaced with one or more other images. These are printed on the back of a piece of plastic, with a series of long, thin lenses moulded into the other side. The lenses are lined up with each image interlace, so that light reflected off each strip is refracted in a slightly different direction, but the light from all strips of a given image are sent in the same direction (parallel). The end result is that a single eye or camera looking at the print sees a single whole image, but an eye or camera with a different angle of view will see a different image.

An explanation with graphics that make it all much more obvious, you can find here. Same question stays, it will probably be very hard to find an affordable price for small quantities of small lenticular prints… ? Jeej! Mr. Contini hints that it is something you can ‘DIY’ with a semi-decent homegrown printer. ;) *goes to read his full explanation*

Tags: hologram, lenticular, mixed reality, photography, sl to rl
Categories: Art, Photography
10 Comments »

Here goes my first entry for the Koinup ‘Exotic’ contest. It’s what I like to call an ameliorated, better shaded and thought of version from one of the Squid series. I figured exotic did not need to be oriental, belly dancers or naked ladies with sunsets. Exotic is everything we can do in Second Life that we can’t even dream of happening in First Life. Well, or things that we would do everything for to prevent it happening in First Life. *images squid taste* Yaakes!

Anyway, I would be much obliged if you would take a look at it in it’s full splendour, leave a comment - or two - or if you add it to your Koinup favourites. Photo-whoring? Me? Nah… ;) And if you have a photograph in the contest too, let me know, I’ll return the favour.

Tags: contest, koinup
Categories: Contests, Photography
No Comments »

Update: I submitted my first entry. I would be much obliged if you would take a look at it in it’s full splendour, leave a comment - or two - or if you add it to your Koinup favourites. Photo-whoring? Me? Nah… ;) And if you have a photograph in the contest too, let me know, I’ll return the favour.

Use Second Life photography - or snapshotting, if you really must - to show what is the most ‘exotic’ thing of your Second Life and get L$ 20,000. Not that hard, you say? Well, you first need to convince the jury - notorious SL blogger/journalist Hamlet Au, Mario Gerosa and the Koinup Community that yours is with the three best submissions.

C’mon, everything is Second Life is different from that sphere our humans reside, so this can not be to difficult? Just find the thing that’s most exotic to you: be it prim breasts, a baby furry or having texture teeth and still having to brush them. Just don’t go with a silly picture with a obviously non-exotic belly dancer and palm trees, will you? ;)

If you’re all new to the SL photography stuff, use the ’snapshot’ function and read up on my tutorials on how to actually use this. If you’re not familiar with photoshop or the gimp, you might consider reading up on how to prevent objects you do not own from appearing in the snapshot.

How to get your 20k L$:

1. Submissions will be taken from February 14 till March 6.
2. Submissions must be uploaded to Koinup. Register here. (*coughs* Can I have an affliate program, please? ;))
3. Maximum 2 submissions / avatar participating. (I guess those are avatars, not humans.)
4. Add the tag ‘exoticcontest’ to you photographs.
5. You may use WindLight and post-process. (I guess the photo editing freaks have a slight advantage here. Although that’s a bit equalled out by WindLight. I’m confusing myself here. Disregard all this.)
6. Submissions can’t be photos already hosted on Koinup. (This kinda sucks. I uploaded my best already to Koinup. So no shoe-boxing it is.)

Two of the winning photographs will be chosen by jury duty, one by Koinup’s measuring system for popularity, which is - to me - as obscure* as Flickr’s interestingness. I do assume that the sooner you submit, and the more you ‘network’, the more likely you are to fetch that price.

Good luck to all, may the best win, you can look at your fellow competitors’ works by searching Koinup for the exoticcontest tag.

* not in a bad way. I just didn’t figure it out yet. ;)

Tags: contest, koinup, photography
Categories: Contests, Photography
2 Comments »

When trying to help Adrian Sloane with the ‘WindLight’s reflections and water ripple refuse to work’ problem, I decided the wisest thing to do would be to first check if it still works for me and reflections not showing was not a general error.

After I finally found some water - I was stuck in Veyron’s basement, not being able to find the way out, even twice, because I crashed and ended up there again the first time I made my escape - I could not pass up on this great oppurtunity to show off the pussy I bought with the full CSR stamp card I got from Nock and which Wrath was suprised about I chose it over a BlackOps Machine gun.

Do me a favor, and go tell Hamlet Au over on NWN that this is a Second Life photograph: I even froze my - virtual - behind off to take this selfportrait! The original is 3200×2400 pixels and, even more important, it is a Diffuse-Glow-Free^TM image. ;)

And for those who need to see the film negative before they believe this: here you go.

Tags: photography, second life
Categories: Photography
4 Comments »

Being noticed, let alone blogged by NWN is always a huge honor - and traffic generator - so, before I forget: ‘Thank you, Mister Au!’ But I must admit, my 5 seconds of SL fame over on Hamlet Au’s blog did leave me with a sour taste in my mouth and hurt feelings in that vulnerable little neko heart.

As on New World Notes, Mr. Au comes up with everything besides the terminology ‘Second Life photography’ to label what we do: SL screenshots, which are images that are processed through Photoshop and I’m an ‘image maker‘. Now I can’t force him to say ‘photographs’, but I think as you refer to people that Photoshop clothing textures as fashion designers, avatars that swing theirselve around a virtual pole to make some l$ as pole dancers in stead of an object revolving around a cylinder and people who line up virtual objects as builders, it is only rightful that you refer to those who make the biggest part of their - virtual - income out of taking portrait shots of avatars, as photographers.

Why SL photographs are NOT screenshots

But as said, I can’t force anybody to do so. I do can give a solid reasoning why Second Life snapshots or photographs, call it as you please, are not screenshots:

A screenshot, screen capture, or screen dump is an image taken by the computer to record the visible items displayed on the monitor or another visual output device.

1. Second Life snapshots are - unlike to screenshots - not a true recording of the visible items displayed on the monitor or another visual output device. The UI such as chat windows, inventory window, edit windows, … and the client itself are left out using the options in the snapshot feature inherent to the client.
2. Second Life photographs are - unlike to screenshots - not limited to a certain resolution. If you take a screenshot, you are limited to your monitor’s resolution. Using the snapshot feature, we can take screenshots up to 4000×3000 pixels and more.
3. When someone sets up a scenery in Bryce, 3D Max, Poser, … and exports it to jpg, you call it - although it’s just a bunch of textured meshes - an illustration, 3D art, but definitely not a screenshot. Where does this differ from Second Life snapshots, where often the whole scenery is as much thought of as it would be in any other 3D designing program?

Tags: photography, snapshot
Categories: Opinion, Photography
16 Comments »