Tabloid Paparazza

Lludmila was asked to take some wedding  photos recently. There was a large attendance for a popular couple in her group, so lag was ferocious and she crashed four times before giving up at the reception.We shouldn't always blame the lag; it could be our server. Anyway, she took over 150 photos.* Many of them look like duplicates, such as those pictured. But if you look at them closely, each one tells a different story. 

Smile, dammit! ARGH!
Pressed wrong button. Smile again, please!

Avatars are constantly shifting position. In the above photos, the couple are actually just waiting until time to teleport to the reception. Their typists may not even be there. Still, the avatars move. They look this way and that. They are caught being ... natural. Our human brains start ascribing thoughts to them. Timo looks at Galia's arse admiringly - or so it seems.

Lludmila stands quietly (somewhere - her typist has already forgotten where she was last) and watches the minimalist dance between two figures. She takes as many photos as she can in hopes of getting one really good one, but then when she goes back to look - each one has something of interest, something that expresses, if not what two other people feel, maybe what feelings are inside her own self.

Best wishes, Timo and Galia. The ceremony was delightful. I hope you enjoy the photos.

love,

lludmila and marf

*Feel free to peruse the set - although a few were removed. Not sure why. It's not as if there are space considerations on Flickr.

The Beauty of Rough-Cut Weathered Woodgrain

Fox with monocle?

There's another outstanding art exhibit at the Panorama Gallery right now. Detailed photographs of weathered wood in "Fencing In Beauty." The photos are merely numbered, so it's up to you to see more!

"Is it just me, or are there faces in the wood?"

Focus on RMH Avon

I Saw the Figure 5 ... really close up!

Currently on exhibit at the Panorama Gallery is the Photography of RMH Avon. Mostly finely detailed studies of nature (Hope you don't mind spiders! Me, I think they're beautiful ... as long as they're outside) and man-made objects, they bring Real Life (What's that?) into sharp focus.

Be sure to visit!

The Comfty Chair

Cal contemplates the winning photo.

Cal is a real trouper. So far he has been on three grueling photo shoots with Lludmila for contest purposes.  This involves, 1) dressing in something other than brown, and 2) being forced onto silly poseballs or standing around for ages waiting for us to find the just the right silly poseball.  I suppose he wouldn't put up with it at all if his RL person had to be present.  We've made the first cut on one, got an also-ran consolation prize on another, and won the [kusshon] contest!  To thank him for his work, we cut him in on the prizes: a guitar stool that comes with a guitar and strumming animation (as well as other animations - because Cal's RL persona is a guitar person)!

The guitar stool makes it all worth while.

Lludmila got to pick out some things for herself, notably the comfy chair (without the pointy cushions or the shouting that makes it worse) with the sewing, knitting, and tea drinking animations she always coveted but was too cheap to actually buy.

Lludmila loses count. "Goshdarnitalltoheck!"

To celebrate the new line of mesh Pearl Eyes (not pictured - I wasn't organized enough) at the companion store, Poetic Colors, [kusshon] has put out a freebie pair of color-change glasses.  So it just gets better and better!

Lludmila loves these so much, she may never take them off.

Lludmila Makes an Exhibition of Herself

 Exhibition Poster based on old crash photo

Apparently, posting thousands of screenshots on Flickr are not enough, but I had to create a small exhibit of some of my favorite pix of the past, ohhh, two to three years in SL.  The idea originated when I was using an older pc with an inadequate graphics driver that crashed continually.  I thought the resulting images were interesting and friends suggested putting together an exhibit.  I tinkered with the idea for quite a while, but in the end decided that the crash pix weren't that interesting even to me (except for the one above that was Photoshopped to make it more interesting) and not worth the 10L each it would cost (that at the time I didn't have, being a poor and homeless waif in the virtual world) to upload them.

The idea was always in the back of my mind and I talked about it with friends recently and, looking at my stash of Linden cash (now that I am both employed and have a space of my own), decided I could fritter it on uploading about 25 pictures (there goes my weekly salary and then some) that I really liked and putting them in one of the many freebie skyboxes I had acquired.  This meant rezzing the skyboxes, of course, to see if they were suitable.  They were not so suitable as skyboxes for Lludmila to live in, or change in, or whatever she planned to do in them, but I was reluctant to delete them (which explains the struggle I'm in to keep my inventory below 38,000 items).  I chose the large and airy skybox pictured below and began to upload photos.

Photos were not exactly chosen for their artiness, but for my own personal reasons - such as: I thought they were funny, they said something about virtual life, or they were just ... colorful.  They show how much personality you can read in some pixels as well as the beauty produced by some of the content creators.

 Exhibit Opening Gala

It didn't seem like enough just to put something up, so I figured I'd attempt to have a party.  This would require a dance ball and dances.  I'd acquired those for my ill-starred rez-day party and reassembled something that worked.  That still wasn't enough.  I thought it would be fun to have places for people to pose and take pictures of themselves, so I set about poseball tinkering and set them out.  The poses are the best I could do from the freebies I had in order to make the Birth of Venus, Zeus, and a cheeky Psyche at Nature's Mirror.  I had some other freebies where you can pose in a frame.  I topped it all off with a Very Valuable Egyptian Vase from Carla's Workshop.  All I had to do after that was turn something prettier than a headstone into a tip jar (because tip jars are all about extorting Lindens from your friends), set out some champagne, and put up some signage and a teleport.

It sounds easy, but it was pretty fiddly.  I wrestled with Photoshop for a couple of days, swore at the poseballs that weren't working, and left pieces of skybox all over the Awen airspace as I tried to adjust, readjust, and tuck things back in the inventory for the night.

The Book of the Exhibit with photo of the First Visitor

All I ask is that people come by and have a little fun.  Take some photos of your own av and either post them online where I can see them (which requires telling me where they are) or drop them on me in-world, if you can afford the upload charges.  If you do, I'll visit them in the former case and put them in The Book of the Exhibit in the latter.  

Yes, a couple of the photos are for sale.  I figured folks weren't that interested in photos of Lludmila and her other inpixelations, but they might like a landscape.  If you're in a photo, you get it free, of course - just let me know.

I forgot to add a slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Aw
en/102/85/23�http://slurl.com/secondlife/Awen/102/85/23

Making It My Own

FEMA trailer.

The temptation to put something really (wonderfully) awful within sight of my neighbor/s sufficiently squelched, I set about making my little area something I would find interesting. I may have to change the area around every month or so just to keep from getting bored with it.


New free furniture for the downstairs. Previous furniture "damaged" in catastrophic terra-forming accident.

Photos of the landlord have now been removed from the living room (due to too many dart holes) and replaced with a nice antique-y wedding portrait of my grandparents (did I mention that I'm really, really old?). A shop kindly offered this lovely set of grotty furniture which coincidentally went well with that grotty carpet. Ooo, I love the serendipity of it all! Free bookcases take up the rest of the wallspace, making it look that much more like my RL house.
As for the yard, for that we have to thank an exhibit of photos I saw years ago in an outdoor venue. They had been hung by fishing line from the trees along the bank of a river during the spider lily blooming season. The photos as a group turning slowly in the breeze in the shade but glinting shards of sunlight made a more profound effect on me than the artistry of the individual photos themselves. It was almost magical.

Lludmila's backyard and exhibit of old family photos.
I don't have the trees to pull off the exact thing, but it was a happy challenge to my limited skills to have some of my favorite old family portraits to twirl slowly on skinny sticks. I'll leave them up for the month of June, in memory of my dad's birthday. He would have been 102.
Exhibit in Awen.