Unhappy Topless Tuesday

A long and difficult morning in Real Life followed by a fitful nap left me in a really uncreative mood for today's Topless Tuesday picture. After about a dozen shots that did not make me super happy I decided to hit Pixelmator with the last one to see if I could fix bad lighting, bad composition, and a bad pose. Here is what I finished with ...

The original (below) violates lots of rules of good photos, not the least of which is the brightness of objects that are NOT the subject drawing the eye away from the subject. At least I remembered to take off the modesty sea shells. With this composition and pose, though, it is hard to see she's even a mermaid at all.

The un-edited image from my first series of pix of the day.

This is one of the few times a face light might help. One with colors other than white so I'll probably make my own, as usual. I like the Windlight settings but I'd have to revamp the setting (at Cerridwen's Cauldron - SLurl) and work on the pose. Often I'll use an Animation Override (AO) and shoot live versus a modeling pose in a stand. My mermaid AO has so few variations in it's "stands" that I'll have to look into other options. At least the motion kept my Sirena Drip Jet-Orange hair flowing (it's very flex).

Lastly, the avatar is orange but the lighting in no way compliments her. Unless there is a means by which to show that is really her skin color folks might think that the lighting is just bad. All-in-all, a failed effort, I think, but at least I've learned from it. Maybe.

So after a nice supper, a bit more rest, and a tall glass of Mt. Dew (the Caffeine of Champions) I popped back in-world and made a custom face light set, scouted a better location at the same place, worked on the poses, and snapped another dozen shots. Turns out the first one was the best.

The first raw image of the second series.

The final edited shot and one I'm happy with showing.

A tighter cropping but including more of the tail fin to show this avatar is a mermaid and some intensive tweaks of exposure, contrast, color balance, and more (plus some retouching of flaws in the avatar itself) and this last picture is more of what I had in mind for today's Topless Tuesday picture.