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.
With thanks, as ever, to the Rose Theatre in Angel Manor for the ability to borrow their lavish halls.
We thought long on this one, considering last year’s performance, and whether we could pull off the publicity factor this year. But finally, tradition won out, and so the time has come once again. The Flickr group is open for submissions of your finest evening gown photos. Who will be the best-dressed avatar on the Hollywood red carpet when the Academy Awards are handed out? Around the Grid is accepting submissions for its 9th Annual Oscar Fashion Photo Contest!!
The contest group will open for submissions once this article is published, and the prize pool has been placed in escrow (so to speak). Time to talk to your stylists, find your hairdresser and book an appointment, call in favors at the jewelry stores, and decide what you would wear if you became a nominee for the little gold man. For those considered outstanding in their evening couture and artistic portrayal, there shall be (15 minutes of) fame, (a bit of) fortune, and hopefully fun in playing the game.
Entry is free; just submit a photo to the appropriate group on Flickr, or leave a comment with a link to your photo. (However, make sure to read all the rules, okay?) The prize pool is again guaranteed at over L$50,000. First place will receive L$25,000. So, if you want a chance at filling your virtual closet at my expense, come on and enter!
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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)
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 photos 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), 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.
=====
We’re not the only ones in the Second Life blogosphere who enjoy sharing others’ photographic work with you. Cajsa Lilliehook has done it irregularly (just like me) in the past, and she recently put up a fresh article on It’s Only Fashion to show some of her current favorites.
They were all good — Cajsa picks good stuff — but one stood out to my own tastes; and quite a bit of her work is just as excellent. Magda Schmidtzau works largely in the artistic rather than editorial mode; and, when she swings, it’s often a sweet one. This was the photo that Cajsa chose for her own article:
Anyone familiar with the Art Deco period may see the resemblance we both noticed to the cubist-inspired work of Tamara de Lempicka. The extra twist here is the futuristic costume and the coloration of the model’s skin; combined with the pose and the background, this makes for an eye-catching and beautiful portrait.
Frida Kahlo has also been an inspiration for Magda; several of her pieces on her Flickr stream, such as this one, are part of an exhibition to the Mexican artist. Magda’s work often uses various forms of post-processing to achieve the desired effect, and she doesn’t confine herself to any particular school or genre: portraiture, landscape, graphical forms, color, monochrome, Magda is definitely an experimenter. The above takes a basic nude model with a headdress of flowers woven into her hair; but then accentuates it with floral-bloom colors and overlays of leaf structure, a background of moving water. The model seems to be an organic part of her landscape.
While this photo has a feel straight out of the Thirties. While I’m imagining this to be in the dining car of a Continental train, it could just as easily be at the window seat of a hotel restaurant. A companion is just suggested by the blurred arm in the foreground, while the depth of field is focused on the model herself. She, incidentally, has a nice pose with the goblet in her hand, which adds to the general beauty of the photo; the one suggestion I would have made, if possible, would be to use a gripping or fist hand for that arm, which would have completed the illusion of holding the glass quite nicely. This is a minor stylistic carp on my part, though.
Even her more straightforward photos show an eye for out-of-the-ordinary situations. This shot was made at an in-world exhibition named Penumbra.
This Resident is an artist definitely worth following, and I urge you to visit her stream and add her to the people you may be following.
Second Life® with Harper, Conan, Jem, Diana and Morgan
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