I have to tell you, I haven’t been this excited about a workshop in SL in quite some time.  One of the tasks I’ve set forth for myself is to become more versed and creative in using SL as a photographic medium.  It’s just I need a little prodding in that direction and Riptide Furse was just the person to do that!

He offered the workshop three times during the course of the day, 10 a.m. SLT, 11 a.m. SLT, and 12 noon SLT to accomodate as many people as possible.  No presenter or slideshow for Rip…oh no, this was a ‘get in and get dirty’ kind of workshop.  No sooner had we assembled outside the DEN in SL HQs then he gave each of us a FollowMe HUD — BTW, these ONLY work if you DON’T click on ‘ignore’ when the message box pops up (yes, that would be me! LOL I had to IM people to TP me over to where they were — I was just having toooooooooo much fun with what Riptide was showing us and didn’t want to leave!).  We managed to teleport to five different locations during the course of our workshop — sims I had never visited before so that alone was a treat in and of itself.

But here’s the lowdown:

• click on ‘World’
• click on ‘Environmental Settings’
• click on ‘Environmental Editor’
• click on the ‘Advanced Sky’ button
• in the ‘sky presets’ dropdown, explore the various settings

We also checked out the various options under ‘Advanced Water’.

I couldn’t wait to play we my new tools.  Below you’ll see exactly what I’ve done with some of the presets:

1.  preset: Sailor’s Delight

2. preset: Incongruent Truths

3. preset: Gelatto

4. preset: Foggy

Now go out and give it a try yourself. Submit your best before and ‘tweaked’ after photos. And if you have a favorite spot to take just the right photo, please share.