Arizona summers bring a lot of cool things: gorgeous sunsets, monsoons, barbecues, 4th of July, summer break from school for the young ones and even the occasional vacation. All those cool things aside, summertime typically isn’t very cool here. Take yesterday for example, it was only about 105 degrees outside when we started this senior portrait session. Doesn’t sound too bad does it? Well, I’m not a meteorologist or anything but I saw that the heat index was more like 116 degrees out there. That’s just downright nasty, gross and definitely not cool. Anyway, now that everyone knows I’m not a fan of the heat let me show you something that is cool, a few frames from the portrait session.

… just thought you’d like to know that. You know, in case you were wondering you could just look at these pictures and see how cool sleeping babies really are.             

Have you booked your high-school senior’s portraits yet? Come on now, they are going to graduate and move away, like, tomorrow. What are you waiting for?
Call or  hit me up on facebook, twitter, or email. =)

facebook.com/chad.westover
twitter: @chadwestover
chad [at] chadwestover [dot] com
602-456-CHAD (2423)

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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

Here’s a few new photos I took for a friend this past weekend. Too bad we were only there to take pictures, it was such perfect day to be out on a golf course!

I usually just post one or two photos from something like this but since this little girl was so happy and smiley the whole time I thought it would be fun to just show them all. Can you guess who didn’t want his picture taken?

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.

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