Friday, August 05, 2011

A New Style for SL Fashion Photography?

Today is the second Friday in a row that New World Notes has made a point of featuring fashion blogs specifically because of the quality of the photography. Last Friday Hamlet featured Suri Yangtz's blog, and this Friday he featured Brie Wonder's Token Chic.

If you take a look at the blogs or the NWN posts, you'll notice something they have in common: shadows. If you take a look at Elysium Eilde's gorgeous Photographing Second Life blog, you'll see shadows there, too (in recent entries; she recently got a new computer and turned shadows on). It's very different from what one usually sees in fashion blogs--they seem to do their very best to flatten out their images and destroy all depth cues.

When Windlight came out, there was an uproar--how dare the sun actually cast shadows, like in RL! Many created Windlight settings designed essentially to undo Windlight and make things as they were before. Some simply turned off Windlight (see Mariko Nightfire's "Walking With Windlight" posts here and here.) But perhaps these blogs Hamlet has praised ("...so vivid and mysterious and tinged with silent contemplation, they remind me of a waking dream", "...so perfectly composed and luminously beautiful, they are more like paintings, than screenshots") mark a change. (I won't do it! I won't write "paradigm shift"!)

Is it a style issue, or just that shadows are now easily turned on in the mainstream SL client, the client doesn't have some earlier nasty bugs with shadows, and people have new computers? Heck if I know. I just like the results!

No comments: