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I used to prefer Koinup, the European site devoted to photos from virtual worlds, as recently as a year or so ago.  Frankly, I always seemed to get more attention from people on Koinup than I did on Flickr, and I was acquainted with Pier, its Italian founder.  At one point, though, the owners chose to sell Koinup to another group — possibly, based on information from the site, because running it was clashing with more paying jobs — and the new owners have chosen an apparent policy of malign neglect.  Site difficulties take several days to fix with no information on what’s going on, which is insanely frustrating.

Just as importantly, the group section has become filled with spammers listing groups that have no function other than taking up space, the owners won’t delete any of them despite repeated complaints from several accounts, and it’s been impossible for months to use the group search function to sift through all these bogus groups — it returns a “site error” every time.  I’ve developed a “workaround” of sorts, though — a far from satisfactory one, but it will at least hop you past a lot of chaff for now.

Click on this link.  At the moment, this should jump you past most of the junk in the general group listing, page by page.  For the moment, it drops you around page 75 of the listings, but I won’t be surprised if that changes over time (at least if spammers are still adding “groups”).  If so, start upping the page number by 5 or 10 each time until you hit a point where you’re getting legitimate groups again.  You’ll need to go through by hand from there on to find anything interesting, but it’s better to take off from a mostly good point than to have to go through dozens of pages of the southbound output of a northbound ovine.

Please, if you’re a member of Koinup, please feel free to reblog this article, and spread the word.  If I knew how to contact Koinup’s current owners, I’d encourage you to drop a link in a letter on them, and maybe we can get some actual work done on the site, and bring back another venue for sharing our SL photos — as well as photos from all the other virtual worlds.

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Every time Second Life has a crash, or burps or hiccups, or just simply is scheduled for a restart, there is a vocal group that starts howling to the moon, complaining about how Linden Lab should get its act together and get these problems fixed.  After all, something should never be permitted to interrupt their work and exploration, and this is a sheer piece of arrant effrontery, etc. ad inf., ad naus.  What they’re really complaining about, of course, is that their convenience and enjoyment is being interrupted.

We’re talking about computers, of course:  complex boxes of intricate components and traceries, running on electricity and insanely baroque slabs of software.  And not just one computer, remember; Second Life — in fact, most large Internet-based services — are run on thousands of computers, all laboring to cope with the simultaneous demands of dozens to hundreds of individual clients every minute.  Is there any wonder why sometimes things seem to chug, and why these machines run hot, and sometimes need a restart, or that they can melt down and die?  The only system guaranteed to run perfectly every time is the one created by someone farther up the technological hierarchy than we can reach, outside of prayer.

Why do I waste bytes taking on this old bugaboo?  Because I’m experiencing it on a site that’s only distantly related to Second Life.  I do most of my photo exhibiting on Koinup instead of Flickr these days, because I get more of a response on the Italian-based service.  Unfortunately, Koinup seems to have been down (at least to me) for something like 24 hours now.  (If anyone else is having the same problem, please let me know.)  It frustrates me; but is there any reason to bitch about it?  Not really, because I use this as a free service (sound familiar, most Second Lifers?), and they have their problems like any other computer service.  Hopefully they’ll get things fixed up very soon; until then, I need to hang on to my patience and wait.

It may not even be Koinup with the problem.  Every browser I’ve tried so far says some variation on “the connection was reset” or “the address can’t be found.”  Can Koinup’s address have become lost in the DNS server’s database?  Curious….

UPDATE:  June 7

I still don’t know what was going on, but I’m glad to report that Koinup is back and functioning.  I may get a message from someone about it; if so, I’ll append a supplemental to this.

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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. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.

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.

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Copyright 2012 by tenma Andrew; all rights reserved. Click through to view original at Koinup.

As the final Contact Sheet of 2012, take a look at this stark, basic image photographed by “tenma Andrew” on Koinup.  (Click through for the full size.)  Why is it beautiful?  The simplicity, the almost noir-type theme, the clearness of the composition and the pure artistry of the entire concept.  This has all the qualities of some of the best RL monochrome film photography of the past century, and I salute tenma for this work.

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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. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.

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.

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Copyright 2012 by Miuccia Klaar; all rights reserved. Click through for the original work.

I’ve just run across Miuccia Klaar’s work on Koinup, but what I’ve seen so far impresses me — a body of exhibited work that’s young (63 pieces at this writing), but with a lot of talent, a painterly eye, and a way to get fantastic effects from her tools. For instance, see this piece, Endless Summer, which uses a texturing overlay done by Lenabem Anna. The final effect makes this “photograph” look like it belongs on an exhibit wall in the Metropolitan or the Whitney Museum.

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Writing from Hoover, Alabama.

News comes through Reuters of a magnitude 6 earthquake in Italy today. I know at least one Italian Resident, Pier, the master of the Koinup photo hosting service; and there are many others. You might want to check your own contacts, and pray for their safety.

There will probably be a move to gather support for victims. Around the Grid will watch for news, and let you know what you can do to help.

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Not long ago, I featured an artist named Lanay in number 40 of Contact Sheet, admiring and praising her work.  Now it appears that I have a history with her that I must meditate on.

Lanay declined adding her chosen photos to the Contact Sheet group on Koinup.  I didn’t understand at the time; most SL photographers enjoy the additional notice and invitations to groups.  Since then, I’ve added “faves” and compliments to other of her pieces, and included her on my contact list of photographers that I regularly check up on.  Today, though, Lanay sent me a letter explaining why she had declined my offer.  About two years ago, I had seen some of her earlier work on Koinup, and I apparently sent her what must have been a pretty nasty piece of text, saying that she had too much derivative work in her pieces, and threatening to turn her in to the Koinup owners if she didn’t pull them.

Now, I am not normally that kind of person.  However, once in a while, I have managed to insert my foot very far down my oral aperture, and I decided I’d better check on this.  The difficulty is that I have deleted all my sent Koinup mail from most of 2009; and, of course, Lanay’s pieces from that time are gone.  I know myself, though, and I do have the occasional tendency to shoot from the hip — fortunately, fairly rarely, I’d like to think.  But when I do commit one, it tends to be a lulu.  This sounds like such a moment, and I’m accepting full responsibility for the situation.  I could have handled it much differently than I did.  I did not, and for that I apologize to Lanay, both in private and here in this public forum.  And I must consider, and try to remember, my actions from that time in the court of my conscience.

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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. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.

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.

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For the final special edition of Contact Sheet focusing on new Koinup talent, here are two newcomers (to the column) with excellent grasps of light and color and their uses.  First, take a look at these samples from “Lanay” that I’m adding to the group.  (Click each thumbnail for the Koinup page.)

    

These pictures glow like jewels and radiate color and interest to the eye, drawing you into the composition.  Lanay is a long-time photographer, judging by the size of her portfolio, but I wish I’d found these long ago.

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And second, “Sythos” is very much a newcomer at this stage, with only some 100 pieces on Koinup — but he looks to have a good grasp of the power of the camera.  He seems fascinated by the potentials around the new vampire RPG sim of Venexia, but that isn’t the end of his work.

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It’s been a pleasure featuring so much talent over this past month, and I thank Pier for suggesting this series of columns.

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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. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.

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.

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This is a quick one, but the artist featured here from Koinup deserves lots of attention.  “Belleza” has only 17 photographs on her stream, but almost every one is excellent.  A combination of working with her material, quality post work, and an artist’s eye brings out the best in what she is doing.  Observe:

These are just two out of the collection.  Make sure you check out all of Belleza’s stream!

Please share this with someone:

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. Click on the links as necessary to go to the required blog, Flickr or Koinup page. Please go to these artists’ pages in any case to leave comments, (as well as comments here), if you have an account on the appropriate service.

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.

=====

Portrait photographs can be underappreciated.  What artistry is there in taking a closeup shot of a person’s face?  But the truth is, there is a lot more to it than that.  The clothing of the model, the appearance, the lighting, and other factors contribute to the quality of the final product.

You can control many of these factors as the photographer.  But one major item, the model, is often in the lap of the gods.  In this case, “photoliv42” on Koinup got extraordinarily lucky:  a client with wonderful taste in clothing and hair, and a green-eyed face alight with mystery and mischief.  photoliv42 added in some post-processing to enhance the appearance, and you have these below.  I’m making them as small as this because I want you to go photoliv42’s pages and admire them in all their glory, then click on lots of like buttons (grin).  To get there, click on the thumbnails, and I hope you enjoy as much as I do.

Both photos are copyrighted 2011 by “photoliv42,” and all rights are reserved by the copyright owner.

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Koinup, the European-based home of virtual artwork, has announced that you may now set your copyright permissions on your works for Creative Commons allowances. The new capability, which you can set either on upload or on each individual item, includes full copyright and all five standard CC settings (Attribution, Attribution NoDerivs, Attribution NonCommercial, Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs, Attribution NonCommercial ShareALike).

Creative Commons, in case you’ve been under a rock somewhere, essentially lets you determine what kinds of allowances you will grant on usage of your work.  If you want a full-on copyright, with all rights needing to be cleared through you, you make it the standard All Rights Reserved, and the usual © symbol will be placed somewhere in a legal disclaimer on your page(s).  But if you’re willing to share the work to some degree, you can specify, once you’re familiar with what each of the Creative Commons allowances entails, by making the appropriate settings on your upload.  A different symbol can then be placed on the page, usually something like this:

(as you’ll find in my sidebar very high up the run); or

(you’ll find this on Flickr).  Clicking on the graphic will take you to a page at Creative Commons.org explaining the rights in detail.  This provides a highly versatile method of allowing others to use your work while still keeping control of it in the end.

To help promote the new capability, Koinup’s owner, pier, has opened a new group called Pile-Up, which is aimed specifically at artists sharing their work with others for the purpose of modification and derivation, then republishing it in the same group in the new form.  If you have a Koinup account, consider joining the group and trying your hand.  If you don’t have a Koinup account, perhaps it’s time…. (grin)