Click, click...  "And I'm spent..."

Continuing my series of photo shoots featuring the barmaids of Skyrim, this is Hulda from the Bannered Mare in Whiterun.  From a storytelling perspective for the sake of my blog, my Dragonborn have access to their own minor plane of Oblivion where these photo sessions take place.  In the Austin Powers movies it was called "Mojo".  Call it what you will in Skyrim, maybe "Code Magic" but the Dragonborn have the ability to convince almost any NPC to pose for them with the right mods.

I also do a lot of streaming of Skyrim on Twitch, these sessions are like R&R stops to try and inject a bit of balance into the game.  By default even if you're married your partner's interactions are limited to cooking you meals or selling you things from their shop; it's great to be able to decouple from the grim reality of the stream for a while.

Shoot photos; not arrows.

This is a good illustration of what a high-definition skin texture mod can do to improve a character's appearance; Bethesda's vanilla skin textures weren't very appealing.  It really helps to widen your selection of potentially interesting models above what you'd specifically download and install.  I also use a mod called OBody so I can change the Bodyslide types of different characters to different settings on the fly; it was good to give a mature lady a fuller figure.

Plot wise, the Dragonborn has just used an Invisibility spell so the boundaries between photographer and invisible participant are somewhat blurred.  From a practical perspective I use OStim Standalone for couples scenes, but this limits the body types I can use because of clipping issues with larger breasts in particular.  

I use a custom control setup for streaming and taking photos; I had been thinking of putting a "behind the scenes" vid on one of these blogs until .mp4 uploads became unavailable.  I'd actually been creating video slideshows and thinking about making some real-time material before this.  I can't really say I miss the ability though; I wouldn't have tried this newer way of presenting photos otherwise.

Learning how to use the GIMP image editing software to easily create the panel format for the work was a big help.  This kind of virtual photography and exploring how to tell stories is great; I'd kind of reached the limit of what I could do with slides anyway.

My whole blog as a body of work shows how I've learnt things from the basics on up through my material.  I'm still learning; I had a lingering distrust of Depth of Field in games before I started taking screenshots, but since I discovered this feature and ENB it's added a whole new visual element to my output.  ENB and DOF themselves are things I think I first saw in the images of others on this site, and wondered how they managed to get those results.  If you play Skyrim and haven't tried these additions  out I'd highly recommend you do - they've transformed how I've been able to take screenshots.  Google ENB Reshade which can handle both features.