Second Life Snapshots: Portraits

A selection of my portraits of avatars in the virtual world Second Life.

Second Life Snapshots : Portraits
Taking screen captures of a virtual environment may not seem the most creative of processes as for the most part they are just a matter of pressing a keyboard shortcut and voila you have an image on your hard drive.
I believe with Second Life you can really take things a lot further. I have taken classes in photography to see where photography in the real and virtual photography can cross over and there are a lot of similarities between the two. 
The major difference is the lack of "lens" within Second Life. However there are quite a few techniques that can be used to replicate the effects achieved by lens. For example, you are able to take image depth shots of a scene to get a grey scale depth map of a scene and then apply effect with that using Photoshop to get the appearance of focal distances.
Lighting in Second Life, again has it's differences and has it's similarities. Main ones here being that all light sources are point lights and there is a limit on the number of lights available to be rendered.  Beyond that the rules still apply. There are a lot of photographic techniques with lighting that can be used for lighting and you even get a few additional tricks in your bag, For example control of the sun/moon.
These aspects are obviously all related to the technical side of photography. The creative side of photography does not suffer so many differences between the real and the virtual. Composition, subject and everything else that makes a photo more than just a holiday snap are all still applicable here. 
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