#i'm pretty sure the last time I played LE1 i put 15 hours into the game before i ever left the citadel

[swaps55]

Agreeing with your MELE screens are amazing! Do you have any tips for the photomode in action? I fail to get it working in any way that's nearly cool. :D

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!

Some of it is dumb luck. I got this shot, which is one of my absolute favorites, because in the middle of a conversation with an omni-tool out on the geth dreadnought, I accidentally hit the melee button while Shepard was talking. So I got the omni-tool and biotic punch at the same time, went, "HANG ON THAT WAS COOL," and did it again, pausing the game at different points of the melee animation to see what looked cool.

My tips for action shots I suppose are this:

Pause the game in combat all the time - you sometimes don't know something cool is happening until you stop to look. Biotics, for instance, can look very different depending on when you hit pause, especially in LE2/LE3:

Be willing to die for it, lol. I'll knock the difficulty level down sometimes to give myself more free rein to do stupid shit that might look awesome. Poor Shepard constantly gets set on fire and takes missiles to the face for the sake of Space!Gram. I got grabbed by a husk and went, "oh wait, what does this look like in photo mode?" So I paused the game with a husk on Shepard's face, and it was awesome terrifying to look at up close.:

When you pause the game and go into photo mode, move the camera around. Look down from above, look up from below, swing from left to right, zoom out, zoom in - find something that catches your eye. Spend time composing the shot. I often take a dozen shots of the same scene, just looking at it from different angles. What looks meh from one angle can look amazing from a different one, especially when you're trying to hide Shepard's derpy as fuck combat face. I got some really ethereal shots on Alchera in ME2, because I noticed when I pulled the camera way back (I use a mod on PC that disables collision and doesn't restrict the camera movement), there was this neat sliver of light leading up to the Mako wreckage. So I walked Shepard into that spot to compose it, then went ham.

Take your time. This can be kind of hard to do in the middle of combat, but keep an eye out for neat ambiance and interesting lighting, because that's half the battle in photo mode. One of my favorite spots for photos in ME2 is on the derelict reaper, right before you encounter Legion. There is a nice long catwalk with cool sightlines, an amazing light source, and a ton of enemies. Biotics look bitching in that spot:

Fuck around with settings. The first thing I do whenever I enter photo mode is turn off film grain, but I also mess with brightness, contrast, and saturation settings, play with F stops and occasionally switch to different "lenses."

Get creative with idle animations. This isn't a tip for action shots, because idle animations, but I've been able to create some really neat shots by waiting for characters to get bored:

Have fun on UNC worlds in LE1. Ontarom is my favorite, because you can go helmets off, and there is some REALLY cool lighting. Who cares if the enemies are invisible?

It's a lot of trial and error, really. When I say I take my time in photo mode, I'm not kidding. I have over 11,000 screenshots, rapidly approaching 12k. I spent the better part of an hour on just one scene where I managed to magically run Shepard and Kaidan into each other at the perfect moment:

Photo mode is the absolute greatest thing about Legendary Edition. I fucking love it. :D