Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws and/or allowances under the Creative Commons. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog or Flickr page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here).
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links
to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com,
or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
Photomanipulation is something I’ve rarely taken the time to practice. And that’s a sad thing, because some of the best photos I’ve seen in 11 years of Second Life have passed through a paint program over and beyond simple cropping. tralala uses a nice bit of post work on this shot, over and beyond the basic monochromatic effect. She appears three times here — and it would have been six times, except for the size of the photo; but you can insert the proper image yourself at the right of the composition.
I can’t cover up my feelings In the name of love Or play it safe For a while that was easy And if living for myself Is what I’m guilty of Go on and sentence me I’ll still be free
When I first saw this pantsuit on a recent visit to Sascha’s Designs, the first thing that popped into my head was “Carole Bayer Sager!” And why Sager, you ask? Because I remember a book of photographs by Kenny Rogers from some 20 years ago, with a photo of Carole and her second husband, Burt Bacharach, both dressed in white. Carole said in the book that white was her signature color (though I’ve seen her in photos wearing other colors since), and this has simply stuck with me over time.
Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws and/or allowances under the Creative Commons. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog or Flickr page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here).
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
=====
Here is a pair of lovely photos from Trinana Peach on a common theme (and in a common gown).
Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws and/or allowances under the Creative Commons. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog or Flickr page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here).
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
=====
Copyright 2017 by Coqueta Georgia; all rights reserved.
This photo by Coqueta Georgia captures a moment of action wonderfully; the archer defends herself despite a moment of surprise, getting an arrow off just seconds before the swordsman gets within his own range. Whether or not the shot is successful is up to you to decide….
Jem sent me some photos she’d squeezed in recently, but didn’t have the chance to write up. As it happened, I’d recently re-read Norman Spinrad’s Child of Fortune, which I recommend to you at some point; and the size of some of the flowers in LEA15’s Gardens By the Bay reminded me of that book. If you don’t get the context of the quotations, I suggest you buy the book. It is fun, it is erotic, and it will make you think about what our society could be like if we tried out the social philosophy of Sunshine’s Second Starfaring Age.
It’s that time of year again, when all the world begins turning green — and I’m not talking about how close spring is to officially starting. Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day; and, as you have one red-haired cailín on hand here with a severe case of Celtophilia, and another lass willing to go along with her — well, here we are again. We don’t quite have shamrocks tucked behind our ears, and we won’t be swilling green-dyed beer anytime soon, Second Life or Real Life. (Green beer’s an Americanism, anyways, and barbarous at the best of times.) That doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with green stylin’.
Contact Sheet is an irregular column of selected photographs and portraits from Residents of Second Life and other virtual worlds. All rights to featured images are reserved to the artists under appropriate copyright laws and/or allowances under the Creative Commons. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog or Flickr page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here).
Suggestions are appreciated; please send descriptions and links to me by in-world IM, notecard, E-mail to harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
NOTICE: Some of the photos/links may contain nudity. Viewer discretion advised.
=====
We’re reasonably open to suggestions here, as I mention above, for photographers to include in Contact Sheet. I listen to my colleagues from around Second Life as well (witness Cajsa Lilliehook’s article that led me to my last column, on Magda Schmidtzau), and my co-bloggers on AtG. It was Jemmy who dropped a Flickr stream link on me for this artist. enna exonar hits my love of the Andrew Wyeth æsthetic frequently (though not constantly) in her photos: minimal and distilled. Her published body of work is small currently — one page of Flickr stream — but it is excellent.
new home_002
This captures a sense of loneliness quite nicely, with a brutal starkness that makes you ache a little in sympathy. Nothing is here but the model, the tree and some beach grasses, aside from the single spray of flowers. Empty sky and a sun shining in on the model from ahead of her drives the point home; but the flowers could symbolize the hope that someone will come to fill that empty void of sky in her future.
cloudy beach
A similar aloneness is found in this beach scene, again with the model gazing out into the distance near what looks to be a shore-based navigation light. There is no relief to this loneliness, though; the small, hopeful spray of blooms is absent here. All that is present is the woman looking for something or someone that has disappeared, the wash of the sea, and the flight of seabirds that could be either coming or going.
enna explores: dusty day
I added this photo in larger to allow you to see the detail. (As always, click on the photos to visit the artist’s pages and leave comments.) enna likes this piece of land with its windshaped trees, and those trees, along with the lighting, made me thing of the paintings and engraving of Gustave Doré. Some of his better work has trees like this that make you think of ents or other tree-beings, bending over and getting ready to stride off into the distance.
The last three are profile shots of enna herself; and there’s no extraordinary reason why I selected these, other than I simply love them. She captures the image of herself almost perfectly.
“…All flesh is grass, and all its glory is like the flowers of the field….” — Isaiah 40:6
And this, of course, is the flip side of Mardi Gras — Shrove Tuesday, in places that observe the liturgical calendar originally put forth by the Catholic Church, was a time to clear your house and life of rich and good things before the penitential season of Lent. Mardi Gras and Carnival celebrations derive from this, as a last night of revelry, of getting the anarchy out of your system before buckling down to the forty days of penitence and meditation leading up to Easter.
That was yesterday; it’s now time to embark on a most spiritual journey. As I have written Ariel Sherman in my stories, she grew up on a planet with a state, conservative-Christian-oriented religion, but was never much of an adherent to it. After her soon-to-be husband freed her from the pleasure house where she had been converted into a cyborg, she adopted his Anglican-inspired faith (St. Michael’s Cathedral, Vidran, planet Videra, in the Anglican Communion of the Human Diaspora — thank you, David Weber). For Ariel and Adam, this would be Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.
Bienvenue sur le Rue Bourbon, dans le ville de La Nouvelle-Orléans! At this time of year, the biggest parties of the world are held in Mobile, Rio de Janiero, the Caribbean islands, and especially to American minds, in New Orleans, where Mardi Gras provides the traditional closeout to the church calendar season of Epiphany. Jem and I took it a little farther than short tops and tons of beads this year; it looks like we should be on a float for one of the famous Crewes!
And no, Peter Minuet, we won’t flash you our boobs for beads. (Laughing)
Second Life® with Harper, Conan, Jem, Diana and Morgan
If you like what you read, then please consider linking back. We also link to other Second Life blogs we think are good. You may also retweet any individual article on Twitter, when looking at that article, by clicking on the "Tweet" button just above the Comments section.
Around the Grid is willing to provide unbiased and unreserved reviews of Resident-created and -sold, non-pornographic products, especially fashion and hairstyles, and of Real World books on Second Life. Submissions for review should be sent in world to Harper Ganesvoort.
Book publishers please contact harper.ganesvoort@gmail.com for instructions.
All submissions become the property of Around the Grid.
We reserve the right to not write about a submitted item at our discretion.
Archives
Join 1,603 other subscribers
Episcopal Relief and Development
Please consider donating, especially in times of disaster, to Episcopal Relief and Development, a worldwide ministry of the Episcopal Church in the United States. 100% of your donation goes to relief work; no administrative costs are taken from contributions.
Around the Grid 