I think the starting point in any definition of photography has to be in the reality outside the computer or camera. Yes, the film industry does a lot of purely digital work now, but there's still a great deal of assembling of pieces of reality -- what was done on film in Citizen Kane is now done in a computer. And there is little difference between the original King Kong and the looming Peter Jackson version when it comes to designing the final image. Somehow, whether the model is digital of physical, it has to match with the live footage. As long as that live footage is there, we're talking photography.

Hasn't P4 been relaunched as "Poser Artist"? I use P5 partly because I seem to have just missed the tail-end of availability in the UK, but P4 would probably do everything I want.

What I found, and it was a bit of a puzzle at first, is that the ground plane in Poser 5 defaults to invisible, which makes it awkward to select to make visible. You need to explote the two menues under the working display. Being able to turn visibility off and on can minimise a lot of problems, especially if a body part pokes through clothing.

The question of credits is rather like the way the clothes might be credited in a real-world model shoot. Or the hair-stylist. In the context of an article about creating characters, the sources of the components deserve to be credited. But how many times do you see photographs of fashion where both the dress and the hairstyle get equal credit?

Have a look at the Dr. Geep tutoral referenced on the main page. The "seperate pockets" you saw don't blend in, or "round", the join with the rest of the item. There's also a lot which can be done with materials settings, which can be a bit easier with some of these tricks. Let me think of an example... Have you seen "The Prisoner"? Number Six's blazer has white piping down the edges. It's possible to do that in the texturemap, or you can do it by making that edge a different material, and then the colour doesn't even need a texturemap. And those umbrellas, with the different coloured panels -- do each panel as a distinct material. But if you follow the materials route, be careful what you name them as. And, when you test, try some contrasting colours. I've been fiddling with an all-black uniform, and the colouring hides several little flaws because two distinct parts are the same colour. And a bump-map can be useful too. Like patterned textures, it can be tricky, but it can be a way of getting a seam-line without messing with the mesh. And that can make an item work better with transparency maps. Little_Dragon, doing seams and hem-stitching with a bumpmap opens things up for using transparency maps to modify an item. There's a halter-neck dress (Poser 4, I think) with the hems in the 3D-mesh, which spoils it for transmapping. A plainer mesh speeds that side up, but the texture/bump mapping needs more work. But the same mesh could be turned into lace or lycra. There are trade-offs in all this. I think I might do something for my own use in some quick and dirty way -- anything that works. After all, fashion photography doesn't show the duct-tape holding the dress at the back.

As a start, the following details will help: Poser version (including full version number) Operating System. System RAM. I've found that sometimes quite trivial-seeming changes to a scene can hit RAM limits on my system. A consistent change of behaviour could be a sign of a virus or trojan, lurking and using a bit of RM. I know that there were utilities which could clean out the Windows Registry, which can gradually grow. A utility which displays memory use can be informative, and frightening. OK, I'm guessing, but hitting the physical RAM limit can really mess with how Poser runs. My experience, it's the first thing to look to.

The fonts within Poser are often so poorly chosen, colored, and sized, that I've taken to making a backup copy of a texture map, and editing the copy with the original name, rather than messing around changine filenames in Poser. If you're doing some sketch-type work, trying out ideas, you can also use a smaller texture map. The bigger the texture map, the more RAM it needs, and some of the DAZ 3D stuff, such as Vicky and her clothes, are using 3000-pixel square maps. When you're in the Poser 5 Materials room you have a winder onto the scene, and the lighting control, so you can see what effects your changes have. You can also click on a part of a figure (conforming clothes are a figure) to get access to the materials settings. That's good, as some clothing can have rather unhelpful labelling, such as "cloth 1", "cloth 2", and so on. It's rather like the multiple ways of picking the item in the parameters/properties menu in the posing section. You can choose "head" in a menu, of click on it.

Your pics of the aircraft in flight show up two of the common problems. 1: A high shutter speed, maybe needed with a long lens, freezes the prop. 2: Exposure coming out correct for the sky, with the plane effectively back-lit. It's frustrating. You maybe need a couple of stops over-exposure, and that will burn out the sky, even with a polarising filter. And then you can't rely on standard photoprinting, which will try to compensate. This sort of picture is really quite extreme, and automatic systems will struggle..

Neither the manual nor the PDF version are all that good. As manuals go it isn't outright bad, but the program help function accesses the PDF, and it's near useless as a helpfile. A good third-party guide would be a better bet.

Thanks, I hadn't realised Mike 1 and Mike 2 were compatible. Is there any listing anywhere of these compatibilities; Mike, Vicky, and all the others? I know Posette head morphs work with the Poser 3 female...

lesbentley has it right, but stops just short of why changing the focal length seems to change the perspective. That hole in the paper, of different apparent size, gets squeezed or stretched to fit an image of fixed apparent size. Incidentally, all a longer lens does is magnify the final image, whether with glass or with a "digital zoom". Now, do you ever use a background image? What lens was that shot with? If it was shot with a wide-angle you can always crop the edges to match the angle of view of the Poser camera, but getting the right size could be tricky. But that may be why something doesn't look quite right. The thing to watch for is parallel lines converging in the background. That's the big give-away.

The way those elbows look in the first picture, combined with the skin colouring, make her look more like a blow-up doll... I think I have an idea now why some textures look wrong, they're too unvarying...

There's a known bug in Poser 5 running under some versions of Windows, which can be worked around by switching focus from Poser to some other program, and then back. It would be a big help though if you told us which version of Poser, and which operating system, as Poser 5 made a lot of UI changes, and many of the options are in different places.