Today’s blogpost is my participation in Berry’s Monday Meme, in which we are asked to show  our screen and how we see the world – including the interface and all HUD’s and other tools we use to enhance our Second Life and photography.  It is always cool to see what other people use, and why, and how their screens looks! I do not consider myself a professional SL Photographer as such, but of course I do love to take pictures (why else would I have a blog and Flickr!!), but compared to many other talented people I am merely a ‘snapshotter’. Which is fine with me, as I really enjoy what I do and that is what it is all about, right?

I use the Firestorm Viewer, this one to be precise: Firestorm 4.5.1 (38838) Oct 28 2013 00:03:49 (Firestorm-Beta) with Havok support.
With nothing changed in its skin and no exotic colours and whatnot, I like the look and feel of the official LL Viewer, so my FS looks like that. The only reason I use Firestorm is because of the Phototools Menu.

I have the buttons arranged in a way I find them most handy: friendslist, inventory, outfits, world- and minimap on the right, phototools and everything related to LM’s and destinations on the left, and the rest at the bottom – of which I mainly use the preferences and the snapshot buttons.

(click image to enlarge)

This image is how I see my SL!
I do not use many HUD’s. In fact..I only wear my AO………and that is about it. Occasionally I use the Anypose (free) HUD to position my eyes, hands or use it to position someone else’s eyes for a picture, but when I don’t need it I do not wear it.
I do not have a radar (I do not even use the built-in one from FS) as I cannot be bothered to get chat notifications on who enters the sim or when they leave. When I am exploring and taking landscape pictures the only thing I have on my screen are the two Phototools menus, but once I have defined the windlight and everything is how I like it, I minimise the menus – as you can see on this image: all menus, the two HUD’s and the animation I use are minimised in the top right of my screen.
I do not use the camera-tools as I zoom and play around with my mouse and keyboard – saving another menu on my screen and I find it works best for me :).

As I have explained before, I am not good in Photoshopping (I do not even have the ‘real’ Photoshop but I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 7, which does everything I want it to do), my pictures are pretty much how I took them inworld – I enhance only some light, sharpness or blur and crop them.

I love to play with DoF and those who know my images on Flickr know I am kind of fond of bright pictures and glow…so yeah, I use glow a lot too. DoF and glow make it almost unnecessary to process pics in Photoshop as well.

Some examples of my ‘raw’ (unedited) images I have on Flickr, that I personally like a lot, and which show my love for extra glow :P: