My love for Black and White pictures is probably not a secret to anyone who has seen my Flickr stream, I love B&W and Sepia portraits. I will admit, in some cases I use it to ‘pimp up’ a nice shot that did not turn out as great as I thought, and in B&W it suddenly looks amazing or gives a whole new atmosphere to it. For landscapes and such I hardly use it, as I make those pictures to share nice locations and of course I do not see those in Black and White. Also, I love me some colours!

What am I on about? Strawberry’s Monday Meme/Challenge tells us this week:
Share a black & white portrait (headshot) of your Second Life avatar. You can post a raw shot or process the image as much as you like. Don’t forget to leave a link to your image in the comments and also share it in the Blog Memes flickr group.

Woot and Yay!

I choose to do a portrait, completely black and white inworld, so NO filters in Photoshop used afterwards. The only thing I did with this picture was cropping, resize and signed it for the blogpost:

How did I do it?
I thought it would be nice to share on how this portrait was made, with all the tools everyone has. Well, OK, I admit a good graphics card will help a bit too, but basically I did not do anything ‘special’.

Since this was about a portrait, the rest of the environment is not really important. I just stood in the water of my own beachparcel, facing the beach and an open, almost empty, Linden Ocean behind me. There are so many locations inworld that have this, so you do not need a studio or your own beach! And yes, I hardly ever use a studio anyway, as I like to play with lights and all, for some reason a studio limits me. Anyway, that is all personal of course!

Once I got into the pose I wanted, I turned up the graphics to Ultra and (important) pushed the draw distance back to 32 meter. The latter makes anything in the background, which you don’t need to see anyway, disappear and it saves a bit of lag as your PC does not have to load it.
Then I browsed through my windlights and decided to use: Euphoria – Monochrome, as it makes the sea and the sky white. Yay! Fiddled a bit with the position of the sun and the azimuth, pushed up the Glow (Ooh, I love glow….!) and that was it, see pic above!

Of course I dressed up in Black and White for this, and I always wear a very pale – almost white – skin, so perhaps it might not work well with (very) tanned skins. A matter of trying! The only thing I changed in my usual appearance is that I am wearing black lipgloss, since my daily pink lips were too colourful for this challenge :).

Credits:
* Hair – Love Soul – Hair *086* Black
* Skin – Glam Affair – Lucy Snow – 3A
* Lipgloss – [PF] Pink Fuel – INK LipGloss – Shiny
* Eyes – Ikon – Storm
* Ears – Mandala Fantasy Ears
* Collar – (r)M ~ Posture V Collar No. 04
* Dress (yes I am wearing one!) – Maitreya Vintage Lace Gown