A Photographer's Guide to Norrath
| Legends of Norrath Living Legacy Photo Contest |
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| ATTENTION NORRATHIAN PHOTOGRAPHERS!!! Sony has a contest running that could take a photo (real world) of you and immortalize yourself on a Legends of Norrath card as well as on a piece of in-game art in EverQuest or EverQuest II!!! See our story here for information and the link to the contest page at SOE. |
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How do I take a Screenshot?
The Print Screen button on your keyboard (usually directly to the right of the F12 and above the Insert keys on a standard 101-key keyboard, and usually labled Prt Scr) takes an image of the entire EverQuest II screen and places it in the Sony\EverQuest II\screenshots directory as a .jpg file. The filename will be EQ2_000000.jpg where the zeros are a sequentially generated number that checks for existing files in that directory with the same name. So, just line up the image on your screen as best you can, and press the Print Screen. You will get a message in your chat window that says, "Saving screenshot."
What should I take pictures of?
Mob list showing icon for mobs with a picture
The BEST way to find what we need you to photograph is by looking in any of the 4 subcategories under Category:EQ2 DB pages with no images. That list knows about the db picture field AND the Image System, both, so the pages listed there really do not have any image at all.
General Rules
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| An acceptable signature with logo/image |  |
- Crop your screenshots! No one wants to see your UI, so when you take a screenshot either use F10 to turn the UI off, or position the "camera" such that you have a clear square on your screen with the subject you are "photographing" clearly visible. No UI means no targeting reticle too! We know that with some subjects, such as end-game raid mobs, it is nearly impossible to get a good picture without being in-combat, but everywhere else try to avoid it!
- Never crop through skin! This is a sacred rule in portrait and action photography, and it should be here as well!
- When taking pictures of mobs and landscape, be sure to have your graphics resolution as high as you can possibly stand it. If you must, find your picture, change to Very High Quality, take the picture and then change back to your usual resolution.
- Lighting: In many zones the natural light is sufficient for taking good pictures, but in some places the atmosphere is dark or smoky/misty and photos will be washed out and grainy. For this reason, the serious photographer will always carry a torch! If you use a colored light source, such as one of Tish Tickers' Tinkered Lanterns, it will seriously distort the natural colors of the subject! Unfortunatly, having a personal light source will not help at all for landscapes, but for portrait work it is an absolute necessity!
- Posing: Remember that, when photographing mobs, if you hail them they will turn to you! This even works with monsters, so it is possible to get them to turn to a position where you can photograph them with the best natural light and/or the most interesting background.
- Resize your cropped image to a width of 500 pixels or less, if it is larger. Unfortunately, not everyone has that ginormous widescreen flat panel your mother/wife/girlfriend got you for Christmas, so be considerate of others and always assume that other people are viewing the entire browser at a max width of about 850 pixels, making the wiki panel on most db pages about 500 pixels. Anything wider squeezes the related records pane on the right and seriously messes up the page layout.
- It is ok to paste a signature on your pictures, but please remember that the purpose of the picture is to show your subject to the best effect, not tell all your friends how cool you are. Keep it small, keep it clean. Simple text is best, such as your toon's name and server, or name and guild. If you have a logo, keep it small! Be sure to place your signature as inconspicuously as possible, preferably in the bottom right or bottom left corner. At right you can see an example I whipped up, although I do not generally sign my pics.
Landscapes
When photographing landscapes, composition is everything! Remove your UI (F10) and frame the shot the best you can. Also, because personal light sources are useless beyond a few meters, it is important to take landscape photos during daylight. They say that Ansel Adams would make a camp and sit for days or even weeks waiting for the perfect light and sky to take his landscape photos. Luckily for you dusk to dawn in Norrath is only 36 minutes.
Afterwards, crop the image to emphasize the features of the central subject, removing any non-important parts of the background but preserving the sense of where you are.
Quests
First and foremost, we need a pic of the New Quest! window. Sure, it does not always give us all the information we need, but it is simply what we do here. It is ok to crop the image to remove the "New Quest!" at the top, and the Accept and Decline buttons, but it is not required.
Beyond the New Quest pic, it is good to have pics of objects you must interact with on this quest, or unusual happenings such as the Void Storms of GU39.
Important: On Quest pages, the namespace template will automatically display (in order of preference) a picture defined in the datatbase record or, if that is blank, the top-most (promoted) image in the image system attached to that quest page. If you are uploading a New Quest window shot you do not have to add the image wiki tag to the page. It will be done automatically. Additional images may be added but those will need to be inserted into the wiki code manually. See Using Images on a Wiki Page, below, if you don't know how.
Mobs
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| Broddock Stout | |
The picture at right was taken in Very High Quality with the UI on, and cropped to keep just enough background detail to preserve the sense of place and remove all UI except the mob's name.
When photographing taller races, it is tempting to crop too tight, but this creates tall, thin images that really do not look good on a page. Widen your crop a bit to add background details and make the picture more interesting to look at! It should still be taller than it is wide, though.
Important: On Mob pages, the namespace template will automatically display (in order of preference) a picture defined in the datatbase record or, if that is blank, the top-most (promoted) image in the image system attached to that mob page. If you are uploading an item picture you do not have to add the image wiki tag to the page as it will be done automatically. Additional images may be added but those will need to be inserted into the wiki code manually. See Using Images on a Wiki Page, below, if you don't know how.
Items
Goodbye, old "Examine Window" pictures!
Important: On Item pages, the namespace template will automatically display (in order of preference) a picture defined in the datatbase record or, if that is blank, the top-most (promoted) image in the image system attached to that item page. If you are uploading an item picture you do not have to add the image wiki tag to the page. It will be done automatically. Additional images may be added but those will need to be inserted into the wiki code manually. See Using Images on a Wiki Page, below, if you don't know how.
Objects, Resource Nodes and Points of Interest
All three of these live in the Object database, and therefore in the EQ2_Object: namespace. For Objects and Resource Nodes, threat them like MOBs as far as the rules for framing and cropping. Points of Interest should be treated like zones, in that what we need is a picture representative of the POI as a whole. If there is a distinguishing landmark within the POI try to photograph it in such a way that it is easily recognizable and shows enough background and terrain to give a strong sense of place.
Uploading Your Masterpiece
There are three ways that an image can get attached to a database record. The third one also applies to stand-alone wiki pages.
- The picture or image field of the database record. This is not really useful to you, the wikibase contributor, since only admins can edit the database but it is accessible and I will discuss it briefly in the next section. If it exists the site template will display it at the bottom, below the wiki panel.
- The Add Image link at the bottom of the page - Not all database pages have this button, but those that do will display the top-most image full size and all additional images below that as thumbnails. For this reason we do not recommend using this for images that you intend to place in the wiki article. Note: This method attaches the images to the database record id, so if the record is renamed the images follow it.
- The Media button on the wiki menu bar - This is the best option for you, as it keeps all the thumbnails hidden "behind" the page, giving you greater control over where and how to display the image. Remember that on Quest and Item pages the top-most image is still gonna get auto-displayed at the bottom of the wiki panel. If the page you are looking at displays the drop-down version of the wiki Edit menu, edit the page and that will get you the full wiki menu bar, then just click on Media. This method attaches the image to the name of the wiki page. For db-wiki (Wikibase) pages, this is the db namespace, such as EQ2_Mob:, plus the db record title as it stands at that time. If the page gets moved the images do not move with it. Images inserted into a page by Image System ID Number will still work, but any image that was auto-displayed will be lost in space because it is still attached to the old page name!
Add Image Input Form
Using Images on a Wiki Page
For the Zone, Quest, Item and Mob databases, we have code in place that automatically detects images in the image field of the database or in the image system attached to the current page, so you don't have to do anything else if you just uploaded the only image for the page. The templates will take care of it. If there is more than one image for a page, the template will grab the top-most or "promoted" image. If you have uploaded extra images, or if the page is not in Zones, Quests, Items or Mobs, then you have to place an image tag in the wiki page where you want the image to appear.
The basic format of the [[image:]] tag is as follows:
- [[image:isin_or_url|sizepx|position|frame|thumb|caption]]
- isin is the Image System ID Number
- url must be for an image located on any of the Allakhazam servers. Inclusion of external images from servers outside the allakhazam.com domain is not permitted.
- size is a number followed by px, such as 80px.
- position is one of: left, center, or right. If position is used, text will flow around the image.
- frame places a 1px box around the image.
- thumb will thumbnail the image to 100px, link it to the fill-size image, and place a frame around it.
- caption will display under the image inside the frame. caption is ignored if you do not include either the frame or thumb keywords.
You can also use the BigThumb template. See that page for complete directions on how to use it. BigThumb is just an upgraded thumbnail image, but includes an opaque background and an enlarge icon, plus controllable thumbnail size.
The Mediabox
Allakhazam has featured player screen shots for a long time. See our main page for the current one! We happily accept screen shots for the Mediabox via e-mail.
- Screenshots for the Mediabox must have no UI showing. Use escape to deselect any target and press F10 twice to remove your UI from the screen shot.
- Mail your submission to eq2db@allakhazam.com with the subject "Mediabox"
- Include a name and server if you'd like credit, and any pithy caption you've come up with
- We try to chance the Mediabox at least once a week, but it depends on how many submissions are in the queque.
- Please keep the pictures tasteful. We don't feature pictures of, say, your house pets entwined in a comical but obscene pose.
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EverQuest II Wikibase™ |
 | Bludwyng, ZAM Network Sr. Wikibase Admin |  |
| "Fear my evil cuteness!" | ||
