I visited ‘Oxygen o2‘, last night…

… it’s a gorgeous, oil-colour-lush destination…

… with lots of dramatic lighting…

… that offsets the dark moodiness of the place…

… the theme is medieval Japanese…

… everything is rustic and beautiful…

… and dramatic…

… there are so many echoes of journeys begun, and adventures crushed by grim reality, here, that the crash and roar of the sea cannot drown them.

These days, I mostly dress out on my balcony. My bedroom is a gorgeous, very cluttered nest of cuteness, actually too cluttered to really move around in…

.. the balcony is far less cluttered…

… and I enjoy the view…

… aware that you never know when you are being watched in SL, I’m seldom naked out here, or even in my room, having had creeps actually materialise beside me in my bedroom on more than one occasion, despite having excellent security, which I can’t quite bring myself to set to evict instantly, not wanting to do that to accidental trespassers…

… so I like to get dressed as quickly as possible. Then I’m all set to either stay home, or go exploring (:

I visited the ‘Island of Jahesa‘, yesterday…

… this is one of those magnificent, ancient places…

… where the scale of the architecture, and the mind-boggling effort and organisation it took to create it…

… was meant to show the little people how insignificant they were, before the might of the ruling elite and their supposed association with whatever fictional deity that elite claimed to be the representative of…

… and, of course, despite those deity being purely the invention of that elite, that elite really did have the power and organisational skills to create these staggeringly awe-inspiring monuments to their own arrogance and cruelty…

… and the little people would have been out of their tiny minds to be anything less than totally cowed by such grandeur on such a colossal scale…

… so it didn’t matter at all that the bloated aristocrats sucking the life from the people and the land represented nothing more than psycopathy and greed…

… their drive to create such monuments to their own hubris had the same result…

… as it would have had, had their invented gods been real. These assholes rose the top of the heap, forced their minions to create these astonishing places, ruled as though they, themselves were gods… until, one day, they didn’t.

I went and had a look at ‘Limitations are Self-Imposed‘…

… this is kind of like the Tardis, small, but big…

… it’s a tiny, spectacularly colourful creation…

… where the colour suggests perspective…

… and depth…

… the silently wheeling birds are, somehow, very soothing…

… and the lines through the colour…

… add a sense of movement…

… as you will know if you are familiar with my peculiarities, I never read the ‘artists explanation’ stuff, I prefer to form my own impression without being told what I’m looking at… so I don’t know what this is all meant to mean, but my perception is that it is about space and movement, and a kind of distant tranquility.

I visited ‘Tilheyra‘, today…

… it turned out to be a high end commercial rental operation masquerading as a photography destination in order to get exposure. If you are one of my few genuine followers, you will know that my number one hate is destinations that invite visitors, then continually threaten you with eviction when you unwittingly wonder onto unmarked, forbidden plots… this is one of those destinations…

… that being said, the sky here is fabulous… a science fiction sky, totally at odds with the conservative homes that are available for rent at eye-watering weekly fees…

… so, their exposure plot worked, but I don’t particularly recommend this place, mainly because I absolutely loath being regularly threatened with eviction on a sim that purports to be a place for people to freely explore.

So, I returned to * La roseraie * and used the ‘Shared Environment’ windlight, which I’d accidentally not done, last time…

… I’m really pleased I did…

… this is a really pretty sim…

… the windlight here beautifully enhances all the gorgeous lighting effects…

… there’s wonderful colour everywhere, and lots of fantasial stuff…

… the creators have put a lot of love into this build, I think, and I think it is reflected in the feel of the place…

… perhaps it’s just all the Fae, here, creating the good vibes…

… but I think this place is really lovely…

… and I love the images I got with the correct lighting (:

Last evening, I visited ‘* La roseraie *‘…

… these kind of fantasial realms are one of my favourite destinations, though this little blue Fae came close to getting herself swatted with her ditzy persistence in buzzing around my head…

… I have noticed this flying whale making a reappearance in sims, lately… they became so ubiquitous a few years, back, that I actually put my own one in storage because she had become a bit cliched…

… but there were a few things here I’ve never seen, before, like some cute little animesh mermaids, and this quite dynamic sculpture…

… it wasn’t till I’d taken 20 or 30 photos, that I realised I’d left my windlight set to ‘mid day’. I switched to the ‘shared environment’ setting, which was very pretty, but totally different to ‘mid day’, and I couldn’t be bothered doing all those shots, again, so I’ll have to come back and do that, another day…

… besides, this setting looked pretty nice, too. For most of my time here, I could hear wonderful, slightly creepy, piano music, a kind of haunted version of ‘Greensleeves’, if sad, dead people ever did a cover of that piece… it was coming from a piano in some ruins…

… it put a kind of dark edge on what was otherwise a cutesy fairyland sort of setting, which was fine by me…

… I would have spent more time, here, but got booted out when they decided to re-set the sim, which is always a bit annoying. I might come back, though, and try the ‘shared environment’, next time.

I visited ‘Raion No Su‘, today…

… this is a fairly eclectic sim, mixing all kinds of themes…

… but the result is quite pleasing…

… although it’s all packed closely together…

… by taking your time…

… and choosing your angles…

… you can isolate many great scenes…

… for photography (:

I visited ‘The Pond‘, last evening. The setting is simple and pretty, as though you have stepped into a children’s book…

… the waters of the pond are beautiful…

… with many aquatic creatures cruising about beneath its surface…

… I circumnavigated the pond. I met many friendly beasties along the way…

… and the zen-like simplicity of the natural environs is very soothing…

… like a lost summer from a Pink Floyd song…

… even though the theme here seems to be the enlargement of small things, it wasn’t till I saw this lost baseball that I suddenly felt like I was a character in ‘Land of the Giants’…

… but there were no evil, alternative universe scientists, just friendly little critters made big…

… I particularly liked all the big bugs…

… but also really enjoyed that ‘lost-summer-by-the-water’ feeling I got from the place.

I set up a new exhibition, today…

… it’s called ‘RL Stuff‘…

… it’s composed of mostly organic, but some found ‘hard’ landscape images…

… its intention is to prove that ‘RL can be pretty, too’…

… it’s all RL images…

… that have been mildly manipulated in gorgeous Photoshop CS5 (: