I’ve complained a lot to in-world friends - and even did some complaining to outer-world friends - that it’s *insert swearword* hard to decide on which pictures to display if you can only pick a total of 20. I wanted to show an overview of Second Life. I wanted to not disappoint anyone. I wanted to make sure we’d let all great artists participate. I wanted to keep the themes consistent. I wanted no fuss about ‘you didn’t choose my picture because you dislike me’. I wanted to choose photographs not only I, but a majority of Second Life residents would appreciate. Shortly put: I probably wanted to much.

And yes, we have put a great collection that is representative for SL photography. And yes, we have a lot of kick ass artist’s participating in the exhibition. And yes, I’m sure about the choices I’ve made. Yet I feel bad about not finding a way to include the following pictures, as they ‘rocked my SL world’ too. So, trying to make up for it a bit, these photographs were ‘in the running’ until the last minutes before uploading and certainly deserve an honorary mentioning:

(*click* the pictures to go to their Flickr page)

Andromega Volare’s ‘Last Guest’: Taken at the Van Gogh pub, it has a tremendious feeling of lonelyness over it. The cold blue color certainly helps to that. Makes me wonder, if we are alone in this virtual world, or is it just like first life: despite the large friendlist, we need time for ourselves, to think. Because, despite the abandoned feeling of the place, the pose is not that ’sad’ is it?

‘Even Avatars once in a while feel blue.’ Yes, we do. That and we import ‘the owner’s’ bad mood from time to time. Again the need for isolement, to contemplate from time to time, even in the virtual world that Second Life is. Meta-booze, someone? Self portrait by Loki Popinjay titled ‘Reflections’.

Foxy Lady by Shoshana Epsilon shows a cute - and almost sexy - female from one of Second Life’s most spoken about race: the Furries. If you look at this two beauties - both the foxxy lady and the photograph - wouldn’t you reconsider any prejudgements agains the Furries?

Winner of the RockStar contest, Julitcha strikes a daring and self certain pose. Taken by Looker Lumet, this photograph sure has a rock attitude and stays intersting because of the spots deviding the picture in half. It screams out ‘I’m having a great time’ without loosing it’s dreamy feeling. SL life music kicks ass! ;)

Not really a viewer trick, but more the SL viewer or client playing tricks on us. All the bugs we complain about, sometimes lead to great photographs and even can serve as inspiration for design, clothing, … . The original way to handle SL bugs - not whining about the deco disaster, but making the best out of it -, strong pose and the ‘My Linden Gods, why me’ feeling is why I love this photograph by Rob Danton.

Kean Kelly’s Windlight vol 3 is impressive as well. Constantly testing and experiencing is one of the things ‘typical’ for Second Life, and we all have our hopes up that high for the return of WindLight. Combine that feeling of experimenting with a great composition and lovely color scheme and you get a photograph that ‘has it all’.

The selfportraits ‘Tober’ and ‘I think I took the wrong pill‘ by October Hush are great examples of the effects you can achieve using alt+0 and alt+9 in combination with good post processing. Yet, that talented Neko lady had pictures I liked even more. ;)

Tags: cannery, photography, SLart

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