The other morning, sat at Heathrow at an ungodly hour, I took the time to do a bit of surfing the net, checking emails and so on. And I clicked onto the SLN link, now available in a much more user friendly manner since the upgrade to ios6.

Previously, it has been such an awkward process that I’ve never bothered much with net-surfing, limiting myself to email stuff on the phone if travelling or working.

Being an enthusiastic amateur photographer, I’ve got a lot of camera apps on my phone. A lot of apps.

There’s lots of different filters I can use to tweak photos from RL, and to my delight I was able to capture some of the photos from one of the Fat Tuesday posts, and then manipulate them a little with the camera software I own. It certainly made the ever-increasing toil of air travel a little more enjoyable.

Yes, that really is 5.51 am you see on the last pic. 🙂 And I’d already been sitting for 20 minutes by the time I was messing around with these. You don’t even want to think about what time I had to get up!!!

As I’m always keen to attempt new things, and give my SL photos a different flavour where I can, I expect to use this new discovery more in future, and it will be a fun thing to do when hanging around in wretched airports (as I seem to do quite a bit in my RL)

For those interested in this sort of stuff, the camera bag app features heavily in my iphone pic taking, and was utilised in the photos shown above.

Harry

One thing I really, really like about Su Casa (amongst all the the other things I really, really like about it) is that it also exists as a patron of the arts, encouraging users to display their own artwork. As if we aren’t impressed enough by the endless skills of SL builders and designers, we can be equally impressed by the talents of SL players, and how talented many of them are in RL. I also like how there’s a blurring of the RL and SL where RL artworks are imported to SL and offered for sale.

Currently on display at our new home sim are artworks by Bluesboy Gloster, Susan Paquot and Karla Khondji. 

I’ve got Harry to shoot these in b&w simply because the photos don’t do them justice, and you may well be encouraged to head on over to Su Casa to see these lovely works in all of their stunning colours. Some are even available to buy, providing you with a unique artwork for the wall of your SL home.

Barbara

Did you know that SL has an railway line?

Well, it does, and it’s fairly extensive. I have to say that, as in the UK, the actual trains appear to be an intermittent service, and generally late, but at least they lack the smell of RL rail travel (yuk!) and overcrowding at peak times.

24 stations over a vast expanse of land, as well as various branch lines

I love the concept of the SL railway for the simple reason that it makes a lot of geographic sense, linking different places that, otherwise, would have no commonality. I wish more of SL could be like this, with some kind of transportation that would link various sims. (Of course, I also wish I could jet off to a greater variety of sims, and decide to visit a nearby SL airport where I could tp to the Amazon rain forest, or theAndes, or the Great Barrier reef or…well, you get the picture. I really do wish that Linden Labs would consider lowering the tier costs for ‘non commercial’ sim use, thereby encouraging people to build for the sake of it, and build in a variety of architectural styles in different geographic locations).

What’s great about the railway is that there appears to be no grand plan. People have built houses, railway related buildings, all manner of things around the railway, meaning that the scenery is forever changing, and there’s always something new to see as you travel (by flying, walking, running or even taking the train).

I was recently doing a ‘glamour’ shoot for an avatar, beginning at Dubia Station on the SLRR (Second Life Railroad) and it got silly, the number of photos we could have taken, each with a different backdrop. Of course, it’s not naturist, but it’s fairly sparsely populated, and the model was able to freely strip without fear of annoying anyone in particular. I think we maybe did over a hundred shots, pretty much over the length of 3-4 stations. How many more could I have managed over the course of the entire railroad? Thousands?

I’ve just picked out a couple of shots, and my intention is to expand and elaborate on the whole railroad theme in an article in ‘Issue 8’ of SLN (out soon!). Not naturist by location, but certainly a stunning build to act as a backdrop for photographs.

I note that the station has been built by the ‘Linden Department of Public Works’, presumably builders whose interest in SL is to produce infrastructure. Well, if this is an example of their work, I can only congratulate and encourage them.

Harry