I get a lot of IMs from random folk, mostly relating to the blog or naturism in general. I encourage people to make contact. Most are polite and friendly and display an understanding of naturism, one or two are from people who have no real comprehension about what naturism is about, despite us trying to hammer home the message that it’s non-sexual.

One such recent IM was from a relative newcomer to SL, who was enquiring about trying to be a photographer in SL and how to approach potential models and ask if they’d like to take their clothes off 🙂

I’ll come back to this point in a moment.

I advised as best I could, and he then IMed me back about photos he’d seen online, thought they looked great and sent me copies asking about replicating RL in SL, since it’s something we’ve done a lot.

Well, I wouldn’t consider these to be naturist photos, being more of an ‘erotic’ nature, I think, but nonetheless I thought we probably could replicate these, after a fashion, in SL.

A L$1 surfboard (complete with pose) from the Marketplace was paired with a free (L$0) scuba top from Naked Dreams to kind of replicate the photos sent. It goes to show that with a little imagination, and with not very much money spent, it’s possible to replicate a lot of what we see in photos -from a NY subway station to the Sydney Harbour Bridge to a London street or a windswept beach- in SL. Could we make it more accurate? Judging from some of the SL photographic talent on Flickr and various SL blogs, the answer is almost certainly yes. But we’re bloggers, not photographers.

Back to my point on asking people to take their clothes off. Getting back in world I did a quick hop around several ‘naturist’ sims and I noticed there’s increasing numbers of avatars choosing to keep their clothes on in naturist sims. This annoys me, and I’ve blogged my irritation previously. We, the naturist community of SL, expect visitors to our sims to adopt an appropriate dress code, i.e, wear nothing. If you can’t abide by our rules, please go elsewhere. In real life, resolute textiles will be chased off naturist beaches. I think we may be approaching the time when some naturist sims will need to place sim officers as often as they can to eject textile avatars.

Ella