Dimitri - SL Week 5

Spring in Japan is most well known for the Sakura (or Cherry Blossom) festivals. I discovered that there is a sim in Second Life dedicated to the festival now the the cherry blossoms have started to bloom in Tokyo and the real life festivals have started, so I decided to check it out as the cherry blossom festivals are one of my favourite parts of being in Japan.

The map is set up with traditional Japanese style buildings around a park full of blooming cherry blossoms and small ponds. There are many shops, but also a few areas set up simply for sitting down and enjoying the scenery.

Things like festivals are one of my favourite places to take photos, and the sakura festival is my favourite festival to take photos (I have hundreds of photos from the festivals I've been to personally). Because of this, I figured this would be the best place to experiment more with the photo taking part of Second Life.

When I first started playing with the photo taking settings in week two, I found the lighting restrictive. However, when playing around today, I actually discovered that there were more presets than the four that were shortcutted in the World menu.

While the system to navigate these is time consuming and not the most intuitive for me, it has greatly increased my enjoyment of taking photos in Second Life and made the entire experience a lot more enjoyable. They are settings that one would probably use when just navigating in general, but from an artistic point of view, they make for a great variation in taking photos.

While exploring the festival, I came across this building which is much like the sort of building seen at a shrine or temple in terms of what is offered. This particular building offered what is called omikuji, or fortunes. Typically people will get these at the start of the year in the first few days of January when they make the first shrine trip of the year. These fortunes often cover every single aspect of ones life, including self, family, money, work, education and love. However, the omikuji I bought only had one line:

You will inherit a legacy from an ancestor.

Despite my previous aversion to taking avatar photos in week two, I decided to try a couple again with these new lighting presets I had found. I am still not entirely certain that avatar photos would be a way for me to go as opposed to landscape, etc., but the different lighting options does make it a more viable thing to pursue.

I discovered that the 'Foggy' preset is great for making something like haunted or out of a movie like Silent Hill, and I feel it would be really effective on certain maps.

Overall, with the discovery of these presets, I would like to revisit some of the earlier maps I visited, such as the Fairytale map and the sculpture garden, to experiment with these light settings and see what sort of photos I can create with combing everything together, as well as seeing what other settings there are that I can play with to achieve different effects.