Part of the great attraction of Second Life is the way people present themselves - sometimes as an augmented recreation of their Real-Life self, or perhaps a wild fantasy. The Avatar may represent the individual very directly, or be more like a super-cyber shadow puppet 'played' to an audience.

In the lifetime of SL, the quality and detail of mesh bodies, skins, overlays, body-parts, accessories and attire have all massively improved, the creators of these items bringing to the resident a near infinite resource for personal representation in their Avatar.

Whatever the representation, it is frequently engaging and beautiful with considerable effort taken in assembling the Avatar. I try to Portrait that in Second Life - watching how the animation selected moves the Avatar, the facial expressions and where they have placed themselves inworld expresses a character.

I use only the lighting present in the venues occasionally augmented with an appropriate Windlight selection and do no post-processing in the likes of Photoshop or Affinity - life is too short! I do however use the filters provided in the Viewer's photo capture and futz with the various tickboxes and sliders to get the DoF and FOV right.

The Viewer I use is the excellent if intimidating Black Dragon on Win 11 with a decent Nvidia graphics card. (niranv-sl.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html)

I was taught 35mm wet-film back in the 1960s by my Uncle, who was a keen amateur portraitist, street and sports event photographer. Some of that seems to have stuck!