The mrwillsmere camera: Second Life Lomo

A couple of years ago, i bought for myself a Holga camera - one of those trendy cool toy lomo cameras that every self respecting graphic designer has to have.

Cool factor apart, the Holga proved to be a real pleasure to use, and became a trusted companion. After years of digital manipulation, the idea of having to wait for images to be developed proved to be incredibly teasing. Moreover, the Holga camera has a lot of little quirks that give its images unpredictable results, while keeping some common key factors: the square format, the soft focus and vignetting, the rough grain and fake colours, plus the occasional light leak and double exposure. I became a fervent fan of cross processing techniques that made every image coming out even more beautiful and weird.

So, when i first started to play with second life photography, i tried to imagine a way to obtain that look in sl pictures too. Inspired by similar Photoshop filters, i developed a PS action that could take any sl snapshot and transform it adding the moody quality i liked in lomography while keeping some sort of unpredictable result.
Soon, the action became a very garbled mess of filters and adjustements, but the effect was starting to look pleasing, and i keep adding little touches until i was satisfied with the result.

All the photos I have since now been posting on this blog and on flickr use the same filter. My philosophy, pretty much following the lomo rules, is to take a lot of snaps inworld not caring much about the result, then performing a batch on the snaps with the mrwillsmere action, "develop" the results and choose the best images. In this way, taking photographs in sl becomes something more similar to classic rl photography, rather than mere postproduction in Photoshop.

Right now the action is developed for PS3. I'm trying to port that on PS2 too, but it seems some layer mode (add) are missing and the effect is not the same. As soon as I'm happy with the results i'm planning to release the filter to the community, for everybody to try the fun of second life lomography in mrwillsmere style!

Feedback and suggestions are appreciated!

PS: For a while, i've been posting my photos on this blog.
Lately, I started to use Flickr - it's easier to manage photos and quicker to upload.