Do you know an outstanding high school student that is graduating this year? If so, how would you like to give them (or their parents) the gift of senior portraits?

For the month of January you can nominate the high school senior of your choice for a free senior portrait package from Chad Westover Photography. Read below for all the details.

You can submit your nomination by doing one of two things. Go to the Chad Westover Photography Facebook Page ( <- click right here or on the link over on the right of the page) and post the name of your favorite senior or you can simply post their name in the comments at the end of this post.

Nominations can be submitted for the entire month of January and during the first week of February a winner will be announced. We will be choosing the winner based on two criteria.

1. Random selection – we will put all the names in a proverbial hat and choose on at random.
2. Best Reason for getting the free pics – if you can tell us why your favorite soon-to-be high school graduate deserves it more than anyone else it might give them a little better chance of getting picked.

Free Senior Portrait Package includes:

• 2-hour photo session
• 2 changes of clothes*
• You can choose the location**
• Free prints***
  - 25 wallets
  - 8 – 5×7
  - 4 – 8×10
• CD with internet-ready digital images for sharing in email, on facebook, personal blogs, etc. ****
• Password-protected online gallery to share with friends/family where they can view and order their own prints *****

Ye Olde Fine Print:

* Bring your own clothes, I don’t think mine will fit a high school senior and really will not look good on a girl.

** The location must be within one of the following AZ counties: Maricopa, Pinal, Gila, Yavapai, or Coconino. Travel charges of no less than one meeellion dollars will apply for other areas. Just kidding, if you live further away we might be able to figure something out.

*** Additional images are available for a reasonable charge. C’mon, I can’t give everything away for free!

**** These images will be tastefully branded with a small Chad Westover Photography logo just like the images above

***** This one is pretty self-explanatory. I just wanted to put another line with 5 asterisks

The time has come. The ballots are in, and the winner is Downtown Phoenix.

We will be meeting up Saturday October 10th at 9 am and going until people decide to leave. If you haven’t already let me know in some shape or form that you are interested in coming, no worry, there’s still time. Just send an email to chad [at] chadwestover dot com or send me a tweet @chadwestover or find me on Facebook or leave a comment on my Facebook Page or say it in the comments at the end of this post.

I also want people to be able to get some ideas before we go. Think about what buildings, objects, things you would like to photograph while we are there. The links below should hopefully spark your imaginations and at least give you an idea of what you can expect to see over there. I personally, am not very familiar with the area so these maps were really helpful:

I really wish I could embed this map here on the blog, but Google won’t play, so you will just have to click on this link to see a really cool map of the downtown area. It is a map of photos that people have taken and tagged to specific locations. If you click on any of the thumbnail images on the map it will open the picture up and let you see exactly what is there.

Also, if you haven’t heard of it before, you can use Google Street View to check out the city streets from the point of view of a driver on the street. Just click and drag for much digitally simulated navigational fun.

View Larger Map

And last but not least, here just one Flickr image that I came across. There’s a lot more great images where this came from in the Phoenix Architecture and Transit group, check it out.

Image via Flickr user 'timaz'

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

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.