My Dad, took this series of pictures the other day from the top of a hill in a lightning storm, dedication eh. Anyway, I thought this was too cool not to share. My Mom, laid down some Garage Band goodness and they came up with this video. Quite nice stuff if you ask me.

It has been a long time since I have updated my blog and I have been getting a little flak for it. So I decided to add not one, but TWO new posts today!! I know, the amazement and wonder might be a little too much for some people. Just try to remain calm.

I just figured out how to add my Flickr photos to a slideshow here on the blog and I though I would try it out. Have a look and tell me what you think. This batch of photos are from a trip to a local retirement home that I was asked to come visit along with a fellow photographer whose father lives there. We took pictures of any and all residents who wanted them and we will be giving them copies of the pictures so they can share them with family and friends. It was just kind of a nice thing we wanted to do to brighten the day for some of these wonderful people who don’t get as many visitors as they deserve. It really was a great experience to sit and talk with these folks. They are so incredibly nice and have so much to share. I was sad to leave. If you click on a photo within the slideshow it will bring up a brief description. I tried to explain a little bit of the story that goes along with each photo.

Photographer Mark Wallace let me into his studio yesterday to observe and help out with the filming of a series of short videos for PocketWizard’s website. The new video clips will be part of a series of step-by-step instructions for the new PocketWizard MiniTT1 and FlexTT5. Stay tuned for more information on when these videos will be available. If you recently acquired a set or are thinking of making the purchase, these videos and instructions will be very useful. Mark is a great guy and knows his stuff, you can check out some of his previous educational videos on his YouTube channel.

I have to admit, after seeing the videos and getting a little taste for what these new PW goodies will do I almost wish I shot Canon so that I could go get a set right now. Unfortunately, like the rest of us Nikon shooters, I will have to wait until PW comes out with the Nikon version, according to their website this will be in Fall 2009.

I wish I could say I have had the chance to play around with these new toys but I can’t. So if you are really interested in seeing what the pros have to say about the new Pocket Wizards, check out the links below (they have plenty of pics too) :

Mark Wallace’s review
David Hobby (strobist.com)
Rob Galbraith

After much procrastination and indecisiveness about what I wanted to do for a website, I came to the conclusion that I wanted something I couldn’t break so I decided to have someone else do the work for me.  (My past endeavors in website design haven’t exactly ended happily) I still have a lot of photos and features to add to the site and there is some tweaking that needs to be done, but the basic framework is up and running now.  Please take a look and let me know how you like it. Thanks!

www.ChadWestover.com

This has little to do with photography but a lot to with persistence, patience, determination and probably a lot of scrapes and bruises. I came across this on Alexx Henry’s blog (I was checking out what he is up to with the new Red Camera) and I just had to share.

Ok, you will have to click on the image and view it larger to actually see the difference. You might not even notice most of the changes between these two images because most of them are rather small. A friend asked once about retouching faces to clean up skin tones, fix blemishes and basically give anyone the skin of a model. So thought I would finally answer his question, sorry it took so long Justin. Well, in my limited experience, when you look really close even model’s are human too. They don’t always have perfect skin. Sorry to disappoint!

When you look at the cover of a magazine or makeup ad you are usually seeing an altered perception of what that person’s skin actually looks like. The good news (if you feel like you need to fit into the stereotypical mold of what some people think is beautiful) is that you can have skin like that too. Maybe not in real life, but at least in your digital images, you too can be a supermodel! It can also be nice to know some of these tricks if all you want to do is make a little more flattering image of your mother-in-law, significant other, person giving you money to make them look good in pictures, etc…

The purpose of this post is not to give you step-by-step instructions, I don’t have the time to write all the steps, post screenshots and all that good stuff. What I am going to do is give you a nice tidy little list of links to tutorials and websites with tons of helpful tips. Aside from my previously mentioned laziness excuse, I think this will be better for a different reason. I find that when I am working on a photo, I don’t just use one method, I bounce back and forth from one tool or technique to another. Read on for all the tutorial goodness…

Many of these examples cover some of the same material, there is a lot of overlap. It’s just about like anything you do in Photoshop, there’s always seven different ways of doing the same thing. So hopefully this will help you find the way that you are most comfortable with and works best for you.

In no particular order…

• Grafpedia – Simple Facial Photo Retouching
• ToxicLab – Artificial Smooth Skin
• Yanik’s Photo School – Soften Skin with Surface Blur
• Lunacore – Smooth Skin *excellent tutorial
• You Suck at Photoshop – Patch Tools & Levels *Parental Guidance Recommended
• Photoshop Mama – Setting Skin Tones
• nampersands – Airbrushing Skin
• NewDarkroom.com – Advanced Skin Smoothing
• Photoshop Tutorials – Airbrushing: Natural Smooth
• Eyes on Tutorials – Glamour Model

If you don’t have the patience to go through the effort of learning and applying everything from the tutorials above you can also find programs out there that do all the grunt work for you. For example, Portraiture by Imagenomic takes a lot of the sweat out of the process. (If you ask me though, I think some of their examples are almost scary!)

One last little tidbit, just because I think it is entertaining.

]]> http://blog.chadwestover.com/2009/04/skin-retouching-tutorials-and-resources/feed/ 0 http://blog.chadwestover.com/2009/04/what-makes-a-photograph/ http://blog.chadwestover.com/2009/04/what-makes-a-photograph/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:35:00 +0000 Chad http://blog.chadwestover.com/?p=126

What is it about heavily-processed, unrealistic and over-saturated images that I like so much? I don’t know but I think that the explosion in HDR images on photo sharing sites like Flickr and others is a good indication that I am not the only one. What is HDR? It stands for High Dynamic Range and it is a term that describes a method of combining multiple photos (typically an image that has well exposed shadow detail another image that has well exposed highlights and somewhere between none and as many as you want in between). The purpose of combining those different exposures is to get the entire image properly exposed. Have you ever seen a photo like this:

The clouds look cool but the ground and everything else is underexposed. You could fiddle around in Photoshop…dodge, burn, levels, curves, all that jazz. Or you could bracket your shot and merge the exposures to get something like this:

I think it makes for a pretty nice effect. However, there are certainly those who like their ranges nice and low with no dynamic-ness. Yes, I made that up. What I meant to say is there are so-called purists who think that somehow making HDR images is like cheating on an exam or something. For example, a fine upstanding photographer by the name of Trey Ratcliff blogged about his finalist entry in the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest. This was his contest submission:

Read all about it on Trey’s blog, Stuck in Customs. By the way, if you ever want to learn anything about creating your own High Dynamic Range images, Trey can hook you up, he pretty much wrote the book.