Grid Expectations

I think it was about a week or so ago that Marquez, RL and SL DJ as well as Photoshopper Extraordinaire, paid a visit at Puma’s house. He ended up taking some pics of us while visiting, hehe:

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Okay, so I went ahead and put in an entry in the most recent fashion challenge. If you have a few moments, go take a look at everyone’s pics and rate them! I flaked out the last time, so I didn’t want to miss this one.

I had fun choosing the outfit for this challenge, and even more fun taking the pics in the setting that my friend Ranulph Graves (who, btw, is a pro at Photoshop and I keep pestering him about when he’s going to start a Flickr account) helped me find and set up.

I chose a leopard print strapless dress from Ivalde and paired it with red pailette earrings from Paper Couture and red slingback pumps from Shiny Things. To really give it an 80s Duran Duran music video feel, I used the Romance hairstyle from Cake. ^_^ Photos shot in Insula Maris.

The shot that I chose as my entry:

I actually like this shot better, but passed over it in favor of the previous since the outfit shows up in less detail and this *is* a fashion challenge :p

And here is Ran at Insula Maris… photos aren’t the only things he’ll shoot. :p No llamas were harmed during this photoshoot:

There are quite a number of people from SL who haunt flickr on a very regular basis, and many of them are incredibly talented at elevating SL snapshots to an art form.

I finally got to meet one of these people in-world a few days ago. Her name is CodeBastard Redgrave (is that a cool name or what?!), a.k.a. Codie. We’d been meaning to intercept for a while but because of time differences and obligations, that hadn’t really worked out.

Until now! Codie IM’d me and we were both free, so I asked her to come over to my house in Peraut. We chatted for a bit when Codie informed me that she’d been taking pics of me as we sat. ^_^ Then she asked if I’d be open to doing a photoshoot with her, and I was like, are you kidding?! If you’ve seen the images that she’s posted of her friends, you’d be jumping at the opportunity, too.

Codie suggested going with a tropical theme, so we donned some bikinis and headed out to a place called… um, I forget the name lol. (I’ll update this post when I do get that info, I’ve got it landmarked because I REALLY want to go back and explore the area, it’s absolutely gorgeous.)

I had fun during the shoot, and Codie’s sweet and fun to chat with. Sometimes I forgot to use the backslash when typing and I think I messed up a bunch of her pictures with my hands moving, but for the most part I think I was able to control my movements.

I was surprised that no one interrupted us during the shoot; there were several people in the area and I think maybe a couple of them were mildly curious as to what we were up to as we stood around and posed. There was one guy that stood off to the side for a long time, but he never approached us. I know if I’d come across two women in bikinis just standing around posing in a park, I would’ve been nosy enough to ask outright what was going on, hehe.

After Codie had finished grabbing a bunch of high-res images, she set to the task of “killing” pictures. I don’t remember the exact total but I think she said she’d accumulated about 80 pictures; some of them had to go. She whittled the collection down to a set of 51 photos, which you can view here if you’d like.

She asked me to choose two images for her to enhance in Photoshop — one of just me, and one of the two of us. I made my choices, and then she proceeded to explain to me how she goes about enhancing the images with layers, diffusion effects, the liquify tool, etc. I was really happy about that, because I have a bunch of SL images on my hard drive that I want to tackle but I’ve been unsure where to start.

After a bit, she’d finished the post-processing work and uploaded them to flickr. Yay! Here are the two images: