Happy Friday everyone. Before we begin, I wanted to congratulate Nancy Duke for winning this week’s Layers TV contest as well as Tom Mee (Which I happen to think is a WAY cool name) for winning this weeks Layers Blog Contest.

FJ Westcott has a Blog / Top Endorsed Pros Announced
I am a very big fan of the FJ Westcott TD5 Lighting system, and am very unapologetic about it. I think for what they offer a photographer, the lights have an outstanding value. I talked about them in a Easter baby shoot with Sabine couple of months ago, and am putting together a demo on how to use them from a product photography standpoint in the coming weeks. Anyway, I was excited to see yesterday that they announced the first set of members into the Top Westcott Endorsed Pros! Even more exciting than that was the fact that a couple of my favorite photographers are listed there: Rick Sammon, David Ziser. Jim Schmelzer, Scott Kelby and last but not least Terry White (Go Terry!!!!).

Now, in order to keep up with all of this stuff, I would recommend that you put FJ Westcott’s newest blog “The Lighting Lowdown” on your must read / RSS read list. The site’s got a bunch of writers but it looks like Kellby Mondora, VP of Westcott is actually leading the charge there, which i think is too cool. You get a look into the company, a look at trends and techniques, and you get the whole picture.. from the photographer to the VP. Doesn’t get any better than that. Check them out at the link below:

The Lighting Lowdown – FJ Westcott

Design with Flair with Illustrator
Corey’s got a great tutorial on making a cool design in Illustrator CS4. Check out some of it here:

We’ve all seen some tutorials with outrageous designs where it shows you just how to do a small part of the technique. In this article, we’ll start from scratch with a basic photo and create a fully realized design—in no time at all.

1 START WITH A PHOTO
As mentioned above, it all starts with a photo. We’ve placed (File>Place) our photo of a dancer into a new Illustrator document. We just want to make this a simple black-and-white graphic, so with the photo selected, click the Live Trace button in the Control panel to invoke the default settings.

2 TWEAK THE THRESHOLD
Depending on your photo, the graphic may need some tweaking. In the Control panel, locate the Threshold field, click the arrow to its right, and adjust the slider to increase or decrease the setting. You’ll see the graphic change as you do this. Find the setting that makes the graphic the most appealing. For our image, we used a setting of 83.

Click here to see the rest of the tutorial

OK guys.. have yourselves a wonderul weekend. we’ll see you guys back here Monday with the new contest for the week!