Gadgets ‘N Gear: Anatomy of a Shot

I learned to read combing through my Mom’s anatomy texts. There were these cool pages of clear illustrated plastic. You turned the pages to go from skin to muscle to organs to bone. Mesmerizing. I learned then that every part of the body was useless without all the other bits. It was a system, a whole.

Let’s do that with the process of making a photo. Look at the whole, but step by step.

You might remember this shot of Isle, “Remembering Crimson Shadow” from her Friday Focus a couple of weeks back.

This shot was an eight hour labor of love and sometime frustration (even desperation). The story begins Thursday morning with Isle laying out the post’s concept;  A tribute to Crimson Shadow on its closing. She wants to wear the bloody angel outfit from Carnival of Doom, another Rezzable sim that’s already gone, using an emo skin that’s good and sad.

We are chatting  in Live (MSN) Messenger. This is our mainstay gadget for communications, day and night – our “nerve system.”

The workflow on this shot moves in and out of SL throughout the process.

We can’t reasonably expect to shoot on location at Crimson Shadow. Isle’s bandwidth won’t support it, there will be a ton of people around cluttering the shots and we won’t be able to rez pose stands or lights. We decide to use a landscape of the sim as a backdrop in the studio where we have more control over the shoot.

Isle already has the outfit and emo skin, but I need emo poses. It’s time to go shopping for Poses that really say “sad.” I head out in-world and pick up poses from Reel Expression, AnaLu, Leafy and Long Awkward Pose.

I then rez into Crimson Shadow taking shots that might work as back drops. I’m using the Ctl – 8,9,0 zooms a lot. (Some extreme zoom outs get so fisheye, you’d swear someone spiked your drink). I cam anywhere because I’ve disabled camera constraints. I’m shooting to disk, using high res snapshot.

Going through the shots, rating them in Adobe Bridge, I settle on two possible shots as backdrops – a window and pillar and the pentacle on the main floor.

The fact of the matter was there were so many folks in the sim at the time, getting a clean shot of that floor was impossible. The best shot I got had a person clouding in the corner.

It’s time to boot Photoshop. I could have tried to use clone brush on this, but getting a clean clone on a pattern is a LOT of work. I noticed I had a clean, mirror image bit of floor on the opposite side of the shot, with the same tonal characteristics. Select, Copy, Paste, Horizontal Flip, move it over and align it with the pattern, Layer Mask and blend the edges so there isn’t an obvious seam on the fix. I add adjustment layers for Levels and Saturation and tweak. Done.

Time to jump back inworld. I tp to the studio and rez some prims at right angles, upload the backdrop and texture the prims with it, playing with the offsets until I get a nice fit of the curves of the pentacles against each other on the wall and floor. I load the new pose sets into Tille’s pose stand and position it. I attach the PhotoLite and pose stand huds. We’re ready to shoot.

Houston We Have a Problem

Sometimes Isle has rez issues due to her bandwidth limits but today we have the worst rez problems ever. Isle picks up the tale:

<Isle>
After a few logins where I was stubbornly still a cloud, I managed to rez.  Although the background was fuzzy, I could see my own av and Raven well enough.  This time, the issue seemed to be that Raven was only getting a black texture as my skin.  He tried everything he  could think of, including relogging with different viewers, but nothing helped him see my skin.  For once, it wasn’t my fault!  Woot!?

Frustrated and annoyed, we put out a call for ideas and assistance on plurk and in sl.  At this point Codie tp’d into the studio for some brainstorming, to see if she could help, or rez me at least.

Unfortunately, she couldnt rez my skin either… and suggested it was, in fact, *my* issue yet again.  Although I had the texture cached for my view, it wasn’t somehow releasing the info for other avs to receive.  *Sigh*  I did a cache clear in my sl browser, and did a temp file clean up locally on my computer, and relogged.  It worked, and the shoot continued.
</Isle>

We start cycling through poses to find one that works. Isle and I collaborate closely on this. She’s looking for angles that work as am I. We fire snapshots back and forth in MSN and finally settle on a pose and shot angle, the positioning against the backdrop.

It’s time for lighting. First up is Edit Environment. I slide the sun around until I like the positioning of what will be the predominant light source, called the “key light” in the biz. Now I need some mood and fill. I rez two lights using PhotoLite – a low intensity white fill front and center, and a reasonably intense red light to throw some red mood highlights onto Isle’s forward side.

Snap. Here’s the original shot:

It’s a great start, but the whites aren’t all that white, and I want this shot to have much more contrast between the positive and negative spaces. First up – Levels adjustment layer to boost the whites. That drops the color vibrancy, so I put in a Saturation adjustment as well and slide it strong. This shot needs mood.

Almost all digital shots, RL or in SL can benefit from some sharpening. I create a combined layer of all currently visible layers, called Stamp Visible (Ctl-Shift–Alt–E) and use Unsharp Mask to crisp the edges up a bit.

The basics are now ok, but the effect I have in mind is that the sad angel is in a beam of light from a window. I need deep shadows around the figure to get that effect. There are a ton of was to do this, but I choose to rez two black solid color layers and set them at different levels of layer opacity. I then create layer masks and begin painting the masks to put shadows in where I want them. I’m back and forth painting with white and black, adjusting flow rates on the brush and trying to keep the effect subtle. 45 mins later I’m happy.

We’re almost ready. The final step is to frame the shot. Usually Isle uses picnik to frame her blog shots, but her bandwidth is so bad she can’t even load that tool, so the framing falls to me today. I use Canvas Size to grow the edges of the shot, then use Stamp Visible to snap the entire shot onto a layer. I resize the layer so the outer edges are now the shot, and use levels adjustment to lighten it up. I slide it under the real shot, and we have a frame.

I upload the shot to flickr and send Isle the link. She folds it into Live Writer on her end.

Whew.

Gadget/Feature Roll:

• Live (MSN) Messenger – Text, Photo Send
  Adobe Bridge – Photo rating
  Windows – Clear Temp Files
  SL – Prim build and Texturing
  SL Viewer Features – Edit Environment, Zooms, High Rez Snap, Shoot to Disk, Disable Camera Constraints
  Photoshop – Cut and Paste, Flip Horizontal, Layer Mask, Adjustment Layers (Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation), Solid Color Layer, Canvas Size, Stamp Visible
  Tillie’s Pose Stand
  Various emo Poses
  Google, Plurk – Help!!!
  Various Viewers: SL, Imprudence, Kirstens, Shadow, Snoglobe, Emerald, Gemini
  PhotoStage – Gazer, Colored Lights
  Flickr
  Live Writer

A hero biscuit goes to Codie, who hung around through most of this process, gabbing and keeping our spirits up the whole way.