When I saw Curio’s new skin for Halloween, I knew I had to have it.  Normally, I don’t wear Curio skins because they don’t fit me as a Latina, but I buy them and keep them in inventory for different shots or if I want a completely different look  This one, I knew I wanted the Nebula one and I wanted to do an alien shoot.

Without question, the poses I went for were from Del May.  Those poses always are unusual and fun to work with.  I ended up using three of them.  Karma #1, Coppella #2 and Resigned.  They gave an ethereal, floaty feel to my alien that meshed well.  For lighting, I used Lumipro in a butterfly configuration.  I very deliberately didn’t use the liquify tool in Photoshop because I thought the rough edges on my alien make it look that much more strange and different.

One of the things I love about SL is the way creativity flourishes.  In my RL, I am a writer and poet so it was a natural for me to mix that with my SL photography obsession.  I find it gives an incredible depth to poems and storytelling much in the way illustrations do.

Currently, I am working on a book in SL of poems and images and it’s been a great challenge to find poses and props that will produce an image to go with the poetry I intend to include in that book.

Prop and posemakers, my hat is off to you because I have been able to find some pretty wonderful things that have given my poetry an extra layer it doesn’t have in RL.  I’ll be including the poems from the book and the images that fit it once in awhile. Here’s the first of the series here, though not necessarily the first in the book.

Three a.m. in L.A.

sometimes
you can hear roosters
and you think
“why? it’s the city.”
then you just
wanna
kill the rooster
so you can sleep
because its sound
is so alien
that
it gnaws at you,
pecking at your soul.

the traffic
planes
the occasional helicopter
or a siren
the summer wind
an eager mourning dove
cooing before dawn
are normal sounds
in L.A.
like the swish
of rubber tire against
a rainy and pot-holed road

but a rooster
is not

Three a.m. in L.A.
is a time for reflection
of the words
that come tumbling
out of your head
bursting through
like Athena’s unusual
birth
springing from the head
of Zeus
fully armed for battle.

it is time
for going back to sleep
once the words
are safely
on paper

drifting off
to the soothing
lullaby
of traffic
planes
the occasional helicopter
or a siren
the summer wind
an eager mourning dove
cooing before the dawn.

May 2010 sometime round 3:00 a.m.

Background – Hollywood Blvd. on a rainy night (RL photo by me)

Bed – Glitterati

Bunny slippers – CDC

Hair curlers – N-Joy

I once knew this avatar named Fin. One day she wore this dress and as she was turning, I just snapped it. Something about the flow of it caught my eye. In photoshop, I turned it in on itself to make almost a butterfly, then added her face.

I loved the look, almost abstract, kinda modern.

This is a shot I took of a tree at Artfox Daviaux’s beautiful tribute sim to the movie Avatar, Sanctuary Eiwa. There was no post processing. This was taken with the SL camera in midday sky setting.

Taken using the SL camera at Japan Tempura Island looking up as part of a color study. No touch ups, no post processing. Simple midday light. No Windlight settings.

This is my friend Whip, who happens to be an amazingly talented RL artist. He makes great SL furniture too, when he’s not dealing with the hundreds of women falling from his SL sky.

I took this a long time ago when I first got the Pl3. Whip made the background and I have no idea what pose it was or who made his coat. He doesn’t use that skin anymore or that shape. Too bad. I think the hair is Amacci and I know his eyes were Pulse.

The Mighty Sentinel prop from Virtual Props and Poses
Hair: Ilanya
Jewelry: Amari

This was another of the shots I took in the Click French Bakery prop by Flix Saiman. His use of textures is just beautiful. Notice how the light on the glass shines through even though I’ve desaturated all the color out and made it sepia. The dress is Eshi Otawara’s Flowers upon Flowers.

I took this using the Click French Bakery prop from Flix Saiman. The dress is Eshi Otawara – Flowers Upon Flowers, which I think is one of her most gorgeous dresses. I enabled Shadows in SL and used a sepia photo filter in Photoshop. No other re-touching was done.

I ended up using this and the other photos in this set to create a rather large film sculpture in SL that tells a story of a forgotten film.

Had so much fun with this dress that I couldn’t stop taking photos of it!