Could you tell us a little about your experience as a student at Visionaire Institute: the curriculum, instructors and assignments?
CS: I remember hearing about Visionaire and immediately I wanted to get in to the program. This is what I had been searching for after so long of doing things on my own. I met WrenNoir Cerise early on after that and she introduced me to HPMD, which is a phenomenal sim, but also to the concept of composition, organizing a picture just so and creating a harmonious balance to everything. I met Nariko Okawa later and she and Wren form this perfect yin and yang. Nariko is like a shot of honesty and I loved it. She looked at my Flickr and said “You have hit a wall. You want to do more, but you don’t know how. The pictures that took you 5 hours before now take you 5 minutes and you don’t know what the next step is.” And I was like YES! And the next thing I knew, I was enrolled in Visionaire’s Fall 2015 semester. It was a unique experience with the class on voice via Skype, with classes both in-world and sometimes just zooming through Flickr to find examples of whatever the subject of that day’s class was. I learned so much from the course and that was truly my stepping stone to begin doing the more I had been longing for.
How has your photography improved as a result of taking the course?
CS: It has, absolutely! I still look back at those pictures Nariko looked at, a blog I was doing, and where I was at the end of the course. After a class on Movement and Motion, the picture I did was the first in my SL history to get more than 99 likes on Flickr and I remember being so proud and happy and excited and I wanted to do it AGAIN! Eventually I found myself through a series of events beyond anyone’s control having to stop the blogging I was doing when my father got sick, but as I found myself not having to blog so much so often, I was able to take my time and really invest the time and energy into pictures I wanted to take and could focus on, rather than having to turn out x amount of pictures in y amount of days. I think Visionaire was the catalyst to being able to do more and I absolutely would not be where I am today without their teaching.