Go! Go! Go!

This past week OnLive announced an adjustment to the pricing for their SL Go service, adding the option to subscribe for a month of unlimited usage at $9.95, and lowering the cost to $1 per hour if you choose to buy credits for hourly access. I had tried the twenty minute free trial a week or so ago, but at the time the $3.00 per hour fee was a little too high to consider giving it another try – I know how I tend to use SL and the last thing I wanted to do was watch the clock and worry about wasting time and money. An entire month for a flat fee is a much more appealing option, and they note that you can cancel anytime. Now that a month works out to about the same cost as a couple of magazines, and provides just as much entertainment value to me, I think it’s worth 9.95 to give everything a proper trial run and get to know how it works. Having spent several hours using it I find I like it a lot better than I did immediately after the trial.

Calas Galadhon is always a good place to enjoy the scenery 😀

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Windlighting

I was writing in my last blog post about how I need to remember to write down my windlight settings, then after I posted I saw that Strawberry Singh’s blog challenge of the week asks us what windlights we like to use! She’s psychic, I think…  I guess this is the universe adding an extra reminder for me to pay attention to what I’m doing.

Compared to many of the talented SLers who post their work on blogs and on Flickr, I am far from a master photographer. That doesn’t stop me from taking pics constantly, though, and being able to play with the atmosphere via the windlight settings is wonderful. I still tend towards a lot of Photoshop or Light Room processing (or occasionally Pixlr Express if I just want to add some instagrammy style filters), but that’s never as much fun as moving the clouds around, getting the sky just right, or changing the look of the water. For this post, as I did with the batch from my previous post, all the pics I’m including are unprocessed, uncropped, and just standing on their windlight settings alone.

I was thrilled to see that as of Sept. 1 the Calas Galadhon Park sims are open again! Could there be a better place to take some lovely landscape pics? These are some of the most beautiful places in SL, and always a great choice for photography or sightseeing. If you drop by please consider leaving a donation towards the upkeep, and to show the sim owners that we really do appreciate their work providing such a lovely group of sims for the enjoyment of everyone.

Calas Galadhon under the Greed2 preset.

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Exploring Second Life

I’m a little late to the party with this weeks blog meme, but even without a challenge I’ll always jump on the chance to share pretty shots.  Strawberry Singh‘s blog challenge for this week is to share some of our favorite places in SL, so I began looking through my landmarks and thinking about the places I like to visit. This quickly turned into me being nostalgic, and a little sad when I tried to look up a landmark on the map and found that it was no longer on the grid. Like many people I was in love with all of the sims that AM Radio designed, and I’m delighted to know that The Far Away is still on the grid, I will definitely be revisiting it.

Here are the instructions if you’d like to join in:

Meme Instructions: Share 1 to 5 of your favorite places on the grid. I feel like exploring and discovering new places. Share places you think everyone should visit and also tell us why they are your favorites. Don’t forget to leave a link to your post in the comments (on the original post here)!

I was tempted to dig into my old images and find some of my favorites, but instead (with one exception) I thought I’d take a fresh look at some of the places I’ve always enjoyed  I typically edit pics because I like to play with color or add filters,  but I left all of these untouched except for cropping (again, with one exception) just to see how things would turn out using only windlight settings. These are in no particular order.

 

Calas Galadhon

Of course everyone knows about these sims, but I have to mention them anyway. I love all of Calas Galadhon.  I love to wander around, and look for interesting camera angles, and just sit sometimes and imagine that I’m really in this lovely setting. This pic was in Dimril Dale, and I think (it’s a couple years old so I’m not totally sure) that I used the viewer depth of field and the only extra processing was the vignetting (and probably cropping.)  This is one of my favorite images out of the SL pics I’ve taken over the years.  I am really looking forward to seeing the sims open back up in September, this is one of the places that the hub and I have had a lot of fun exploring.

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