Taking Decent SL Pictures Without Photo Equipment Tutorial

There's a few cool photo systems in SL that come ready made with lighting and backround textures and all those shoots and whistles.  I even have a few, but generally I'm spur of the moment and don't feel like messing with studios.  I use a few tricks for making a fast set up with the basic sl tools, and I figured I'd share them.  They aren't fancy but they will help you take a decent profile or object picture without sinking the money into a studio.

Step 1

Create a sphere prim and hollow it out to 95.0, the most it will go.  Path cut it to about 50% so that your left with a hollowed out half circle. Enlarge it as far as it will go to 10 meters.

Step 2

Make a large square prim and have it go about as high as half of the large hollow sphere.  Apply a clear alpha texture to this prim.  What that does is provide a invisable base for you to stand on so that  you are centered in the shere when you go to take a picture and don't end up with any ground in the picture or seams in your backround.

Step 3

Create any shaped prim you would like.  Ad light to the prim under the features tab.  Copy this prim a few times and arrange them around the front of your sphere.  I try to get at least two up high and two down low.  Ad a clear alpha texture to the lighting prims.  This step will make sure you have a clear well lit photgraphing area inside of your sphere. 

Step 4

Apply the texture of your choice to the half shere prim.  Under the texture tab of edit, turn on the full bright option.  Without that on you may have some unwanted shadows or glow in your picture.  This creates your backround.  If you want to be able to change textures quickly and plan to use this prim again you can toss several textures to its contents with a texture changing script.  

Step 5

Set out the pose ball of your chice near the back center of the sphere and position it the way you'd like.   Now hop on it!

You can also use a pose stand like this free one Ann Launay pointed out to me.  

Step 6

Start taking pictures! Zoom in and angle your shot using the mouse and the alt and arrow keys, or by using the camera controls. (View tab, camera controls).

And there you have it! Not the nicest studio out there, but a fast way to take a nice picture without spending a single linden!