Witchy introduced me to the art of watching boat races, today. of course, me being me, I had to photograph this gorgeous spectacle. As I’ve never been to a boat race before, nor tried to photograph one, I had no idea how hard it was! These catamarans, once they got going, were blasting through the water, crossing who knows how many sim crossings…
… this made getting good pictures pretty hard, certainly on my first ever attempt to do so…
… getting a camera lock on these rapidly moving craft was tricky, then I’d have to wait for their textures to properly rez…
… panning down was a nightmare, this close to the water, and panning around was asking to totally lose the boat…
… I’d have a shot all lined up, and they would go over a sim crossing, and I’d either lose them, or they would freeze in place, while each boat coming up behind them would also freeze in place, creating jams of several boats, all frozen together in a bizarre lump…
… out of the hundreds of images I took, I have stitched this post together. The sequence of these images probably bears zero relationship to the actual order of the real race, but it makes a nice little sequence…
… and I’m pretty pleased with these few decent images. I found the whole event quite exciting! Not just because I was franticly attempting to get good images, but because, zoomed into the participants, you can hear the sounds of the cats ripping through the water, the sounds of the crew adjusting rigging, and just seeing them perform their art, you realise how technical it all is, these avi’s are really piloting these craft, they aren’t just automatically going through the water…
… and there is huge potential, here, to get some fabulously dynamic images…
… so I’m totally hooked, and will be back for another round of the steep learning curve involved in photographing gorgeous avi’s blasting through the water on their sailing machines (:
Avatar Life 
That looks like a lot of fun! I remember going out on the water in my first year or two.. đŸ™‚
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It’s the first time I’ve ever watched a yacht race. I had no idea it was so genuinely technical. I’ve since learned that SL even has ‘wind’, which the crews are obviously using, or trying to use, to their advantage. I can’t wait to have another shot at photographing a race. I don’t know if other types of hull will be half as spectacular as those cats, though.
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That is interesting! I knew there was racing, but didn’t know it dependent on wind and that. I just thought it was skill of using their mouse or something to move the boat.
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I’m sure mouse skill is part of it, too, they still have to correctly catch the wind. I didn’t see a single capsize during that race, but a friend of mine, when I told her about the wind, said she knew about it because she’d tried a bit of sailing, and had constantly capsized and crashed, so she’d given it up!
Learning about SL ‘wind’ is just one more thing that makes me love this place. Another friend of mine recently bought a helicopter, she lives on an island. She took me for several flights over the water, and I was amazed to see that when the chopper gets close to the ‘water’, the ‘downdraught’ from it’s rotors starts to kick up spume off the water! It kicks up ‘dust’ when it gets near solid ground! How cool is that!? I have yet to grow tired of SL (:
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That is cool! About the helicopter and what it does. I have gone through periods where I get bored, though its on me and not SL. I am glad you have never gotten tired.. still a lot to explore. :))
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