You are definitely right: Second Life photographs are absolutely NOT screenshots. Screenshots are also used to emphasize something wrong, out-of-the-ordinary, or for marketing and advertising purposes. What we do is completely 3D art, or how I call it, 4D. (due to it being real, the “forth dimension” is realism) It’s like calling movies like Ratatouille or The Incredibles, a “screen capture of what Blender can do”. No, it’s an animatronic feature film.

((Boy, looking back at my comment, I sound like a smart 24-year-old graduated from college :-D ))

I totally agree that SL photography are not screenshots. I continue to be impressed with the incredible images talented SL photographers are able to render. And then I look at my own snapshots and realize the huge difference between someone who takes photos to simply document their doings and someone who has an artistic eye and vision to capture things that my untrained eyes just do not see and my untrained camera cannot find.

A physical camera catches light reflected off of objects and the film or whatever media records the photons. The resultant image is a depiction of the “data” given to it. In Second life our light is not generated by the sun, but by a computer that processes then renders data that is displayed luminously via a screen. We can then “freeze” the movement like the shutter of a camera and present to you a “snapshot” of the action.

Simply because a scene does not exist in the real world does not make it any less compelling. What we experience in the real world may not be real to someone or something else. Ha ha, kinda deep, but when you come down to it, it’s all art in some form or another.

GoSpeed Racer

Very interesting points, Vint, I should do a follow-up. :)

I like the description of a pole dancing avatar as an object revolving around a cylinder … reminds me of the good ol’ days :)

Nice to see Mr. Au, as always, is open to reasonable persuasion.

Judging from NWN, he has taken many good photographs himself in SL.

The results I get from SL bear some similarity to the results I get from my digital camera in RL. I have in mind both the subject matter and the composition in either media. Not just any result will do.

When I hit “Print Screen” for a screenshot, I am not concerned with composition since I have no control over that.

I would argue as well that with the addition of Windlight that SL photographers have detailed control over the image much the way a photographer has control over aperture, film speed, etc. Tweaking the RGB values of the sky, or setting the time, horizon mist, etc. is a lot like the effect you’d have using different gels, apertures, etc.

You could argue that this is partly what differentiates SL photography from “RW” photos…that in photography, there is a lot less leeway in controlling the real world. However, much of what constitutes control in current photography is accomplished in the darkroom (aka Photoshop) and so manipulation happens once the image is taken rather than when the image is shot.

Regardless, it circles back to the broader question of what constitutes real, and I’ve argued that the sooner we lose the language that draws a distinction between real and sythetic the better off we’ll be - the Metaverse will soon be as equally layered on top of the “real” world through augmented reality as it is an immersive “other”.

In photography the manipulation of image already has us distrusting what’s real. Truth, perception, identity and representation are challenging in reality, so it’s convenient to have synthetic worlds in which to have these arguments by proxy.

Divisions between how “real” synthetic worlds are and the activities therein distracts us from the deeper question of how will we define real in the first place.

An object is an object. Pixel cylinder that looks like a pole or not.

SL “snapshots” don’t simulate depth of field or exposure time. That deprives us of some of the tools RL photographers use… but those are the only differences I can think of, aside from things that RL photographers envy us for _not_ having to worry about: various flavors of lens aberration and distortion.

So.. we can’t pan to follow a moving car or bicycle, or do long exposures to get impressive lightning or fireworks photos in SL. OTOH, that would be a pretty CPU intensive thing to implement, and LL has a lot bigger fish to fry.

“Milena, now it’s just +150 prim objects and not to much clothing textures revolving around a cylinder! ;)))”

Yeah I remember after some time there was only skin texture left :)))

I just went over this topic on the Herald when my Daequix got pooh-poohed over an article on Second Life artists - she’s a Second Life photographer.

When I met Dae for the first time, she was just a nurse (as though there’s anything “just” about being a nurse - she’s my hero) and I was the glamorous artsy sort - going to galleries, sculpting, fiddling pictures in photoshop (I did my time in the darkroom, blessedly at a time after the chemicals became a little more friendly than they were in my granduncle’s day - he died of side effects from long exposure to them) while working in film and tv effects. Since poking our noses into second life though, I’ve watched her blossom, hungrily pumping the internet and me for tips and tricks for using the various tools needed to create inWorld. While I’m getting pulled in a dozen directions by inclination and contract work, she has become very focused on her skinmaking (Daeskins, check em out!) and SL photography, which grew out of her photographing her skins for box art. She amazes me with the care and control she uses to create the images she works on: finding the right hair, the right pose, the right setting/lighting/angle. She’s learned my trick for creating ersatz “greenscreens” so that she can control the figure vs the environment. She is an artist. plain and simple.

I think SL photographers suffer from 2 strong biases: “SL as a Game” and “What constitues Art/Photography”.

There are many folks, both in and out of world who still view SL as a game: It’s online, it uses 3d graphics, etc. They cling to the vision of the person who “chats” online as, at best, someone hiding from the miserable realities of their day to day life (”Probably some fat chick who can’t get a date”) or worse, some xenophobic antisocial brain that can’t hack the real world. They can often see their own interactions through the same lens (”It’s just pixels - none of these people are real - so I can behave any way I like!”) And so, they can dismiss pictures of inWorld events in the same way - they’re just screenshots of stuff that’s in the “game”.

What they miss is that SL isn’t a game: it’s an environment. A gestalt environment where everything you see is an element of the person who made it, set out there to be combined with other people’s elements, in the end, producing a world that is influenced by every person who touched it and even by those that simply view it.

They might be better off calling them simply snapshots rather than screenshots - then at least they could be more accurately dismissing them. A snapshot is a photograph taken casually with no goal other than to simply capture something or someone who caught their eye. Like vacation photos.

What separates a snapshot from an art photograph? That’s point #2. Art. I’ve been blessed having had the opportunity to visit some of the great museums of the world (Some I’ve almost lived in). In many of them you’ll see, tacked alongside of the masterpiece they apply to like DVD extras, sketches or studies. Reference pieces that an artist will produce in the crafting of the finished work. Often in charcoal or graphite on parchment or board, or sculpted in terra cotta. Castoffs, of no value at the time to anyone but the artist. Of no value because they weren’t carved from stone or cast in bronze, or painted on canvas with a fancy frame. Because THAT is what signified art at the time. Photography was viewed, when it came on the scene, as intrinsically less artistic because it was simply a mechanical process. Over time, it finally became accepted as an artform - this is not to say that people weren’t attempting art with it before it was declared an artform (look back into the 19th century and you’ll see plenty of people attempting to use the camera to evoke and capture something more than the reflection of light off of objects) - but that it took generations for people to finally accept it. The same holds true of any new movement - from impressionism to expressionism and beyond. Film suffered the same fate - dismissed as simple dumb show entertainment compared to Theat-ah, even though artists had been experimenting with it since almost inception. This isn’t to say that Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t apply to all of the above and more, and I in no way endorse the “it’s someone’s expression, therefore it’s art” school of thought. There’s plenty of modern art - photography included - that I lump into the “excrement and spirograph on shopping bag” school that completely misses me. I had a friend who qualified it well “I don’t want to spend more time looking at it than the artist put into thinking about it “(I would include in that the schooling and thought that lead up to capturing the moment). That all said, I do think that, to invert “art is anything you can get away with”, that art, like religion, SHOULD BE a personal valuation: not a checklist compiled by someone else, but your own personal relationship with the piece in question. It’s swell to read up on theory: if it helps you enjoy a piece more to know that the painter posed the woman in the portrait with her hands crossed in a certain way as a secret “gang sign” to say “I nailed her!” and the monkey in the corner means “and she swallows”, but for me, the connection is if I feel the painter captured something beyond just the recorded image. There was a sculpture in one of the galleries at the Louvre…just one of many crowded in a gallery…but it drew me and I realized what it was: he sculpted this piece because this is how he wanted to access her…it was made to be touched. The limbs arranged so, the curves bending for no obstruction. In that moment, I connected with him across some centuries of time. Was it art? Who knows…but it was hawt! *G*

So SL photography I think needs it’s own word. It is kin to photography, never a doubt, and kin to 3d modeling as well - it incorporates the uncontrolled aspects of photography (just how the sky will be, what the artist who made that tree chose to do - all depending on how much of SL the photographer is incorporating vs setting the tableu up from scratch, producing all the elements themselves) and the absolute control of the 3d artist (again, control being an interpretation - there is also control in picking models created by others to use for your scene, just as a producer picks which director or actors or writers to use, regardless of how much he allows them to improvise. When Pollack lets’s the paint fly from the can, he’s making a creative choice to let gravity and momentum do as they will).

For those who cling to a rigid quantifiable set of proofs for art - how about this: Dae took the cover of Architectural Digest Italia’s special “Arts” issue with a portrait of an avatar. There. A highly respected journal calls it art, so you’re safe from the mockery of your peers in calling it art too.

They’re not screenshots.
But they are not photographs as well. There is not much light processing in the making of it, and, Vint you know that, technique and approach are pretty much different.
it is 3D digital art. It’s just that we need shorter (one word) name for it). Sometimes I use SLography… but question is if that is going to go into wider use.

[…] 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 […]

Vint - isn’t “beauty in the eye of the beholder?” So if I think your work is a photograph - then it IS a photograph. And if someone else thinks it isn’t…who cares. I have taken a only a few shots in SL, but have been told that they (OK, some) are great photographs by other AVs. Some have even used them as their profile photos. To me that is a great compliment. I really dont’t care personally if someone else calls them screen shots or photographs or Crayola drawings - they are some form of art that is appreciated by others. And that is what art is all about. Love your stuff. Best - Dani

[…] 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 […]