Prerequisities

You must have an active account in Second Life to take a snapshot.  If you do not yet have a Second Life account, please refer to How to Get Started in Second Life.

Step by step

1. Log in to Second Life, and assemble the props or people for your snapshot.  Encourage them to face the same direction.  Stand with them if you want to be in the shot.

2. To set your camera angle, hold down ALT and click on the object you want to be in the center of the frame.  You can pan around the object by continuing to hold down ALT and pressing the left or right arrow key.  You can zoom in by holding ALT and pressing the up arrow.  Zoom out using ALT and the down arrow.  Similarly, you can tilt around the scene by holding CTRL-ALT and using the arrow keys.

3. To set the lighting, you can "force the sun" to be at sunrise, noon, sunset, or night.  Noon is the brightest.  To do this, select "Force Sun" under the "World" tab at the top left.

4. Take the snapshot using the snapshot button at the bottom of the viewer.  You can save the snapshot "to disk," which means directly to your computer (default choice in popup), choose to upload it into the Second Life world, or send it to an email address.

5. Second Life snapshots often come out dark, and if you take snapshots to disk, they will be very large bitmap files.

6. Share your best shots with friends and project members.  You can publish images to your project gallery, share on the web... whatever you want!

Further information

There is a useful video tutorial about taking photos in Second Life here.