I’m a photographer. And I’m a scripter. It’s pretty much all I do in SL when I’m not making sweet ♥♥♥ to hordes of cute girls. Joke apart, there’s one thing I don’t want to interfere with my artistic creativity, and it’s a freaking photo rig.

For a year now, I tried about every system I could get my hand on. Basically, be it photosphere, or photobooth, they all pretty do the same lame thing. If I need a backdrop, I will edit a damn prim and stick a texture on it. I know I’m dumb sometimes, but I can do that. And I see no point in anyone of you buying a photography system to do that. It’s very lame, and it’s a loss of money and time, because it is actually quicker to do it by editing. They are just very expensive pose stands. Really, they are. So I just stopped caring.

For a good while now, all my pictures are taken with my sticks and stones rig. Pretty much a black background, a prim for eye gazing, and a bunch of light prims that I rez and manipulate by editing them directly. To date, I never found any system that was of any use in making my life more easy for anything.

Well recently I met Poid Malkovich (a sweetheart) that introduced me to Anna Tretiak (another sweetheart). Anna, along with her partner Serenity Mercier, are Ananke Media Systems, maker of the spiffy new PhotoStage system. Anna gave me a PhotoStage system for testing, which I gladly did.

Here is the first picture I shot with PhotoStage:

Apart a few minor annoyances, PhotoStage is extremely powerful. It’s strongest point, IMOHO, is the ability to rez and manipulate gaze points, lights, and also special effect generators, straight into the scene, and manipulate them with ease through a HUD. It also allows you to record the actual positions of things to be recalled later on demand. The HUD is incredibly well done and offers very advanced options and fine tuning for about everything.

The baddest point I can think of is that once hidden, the posestand cannot be unhidden by voice commands. Anna agreed and told me she was implementing a voice command system to go with the HUD. Which should fix the problem.

I must admit this is the first time I actually use a photography system that does NOT imply more manipulation than what I usually do with the edit tools. This was a very strong point for me, as the learning curve was quickly absorbed. It’s not perfect yet but I would say it has more good features than bad points, and actually makes me want to use it.

I won’t comment furthermore, I will just let you enjoy this little video that should give you a damn good idea of how it looks and feel.

CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO DEMO

Kudos, Anna and Serenity, you girls rawk! People, I encourage you to go and grab a PhotoStage now, it’s the best studio system I had a chance to try until now.

You can also visit Ananke Media System’s blog here.