Tag Archives: business

About Jason

Arvada, CO | Interesting News | Back to the Grindstone

Portrait of a little girl sitting in a restaurant and playing with her toy blackberry. Photographed in Arvada, CO in December of 2010.
As many of you know, I was laid off back in April of 2010. Since that time, I have been splitting my time between running my photography business and looking for a new full time job. Well a couple of weeks ago, a job came up that is really a perfect fit for my skills and background. I just started as the Photographer and Web Marketing Specialist at Prestige Imports in Lakewood, CO. Prestige is a luxury car dealership  specializing in both Audi and Porsche. In my new roll, I photograph the new and pre-owned vehicles, maintain and update the website, design web ads, and keep up their social media activities.

So what does this mean for Jason Noffsinger Photography? Well, if the last couple of years have taught me anything, it’s that it is always best to keep your options open. To that end, I will be keeping the business up and running, but in a scaled back fashion. Most likely, I won’t have much time to spend writing new posts for this blog, but I will be leaving the old posts online. I think there is a lot of really useful content here that people may want to refer to.

Having income from this new job will allow me to just focus on shoots that I’m really passionate about. Most likely, these will be smaller scale portrait shoots with people that really value what I bring to the table – my unique vision. Intimate weddings in interesting locations also hold a lot of interest for me. What I will really be looking for are opportunities to document people, families and weddings for those that really value authentic timeless photography.

So, to sum up, the business is alive and well,  but with a renewed focus on the things that I do best. Additionally, I am really happy to be out of “limbo” (for the first time in well over two years) and working on exciting projects at my “day job” as well as in my personal business. Please let me know if you have a project that would be a good fit with this new direction.

Tech Info:
Natural Light
Sigma DP2s
Sigma 24.2mm f2.8 fixed lens (41mm full frame equivalent)
Adobe Camera Raw

Business

Behind The Scenes | Photo Website | WordPress + Photocrati

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Screen capture of the jasonnoffsingerphotography.net home page from February of 2011.
I know that some of you out there are interested in all things digital media and web technology, so I thought I would give you a little peak behind the scenes of this website and blog. For those of you that are strictly here for the photography, sorry about the geek-fest, please check back next week when we return to our regularly scheduled program.

To start with, this whole website is actually built on a self-hosted WordPress content management system. That means I had my web host (webhero.com) install PHP and MySQL on my webserver and then I installed WordPress. I know that sounds super geeky and impressive, but it isn’t. You don’t really even need to know what PHP and MySQL are, you  just need to know that WordPress needs them in order to operate. It takes less than an hour to get the bare bones website up a running, and there are easy to follow instructions over on www.wordpress.org

Of course, at this point, all you really have is a very generic looking blog with one “Hello World” post. The cool look and feel of the website comes from your theme.  There are about a million WordPress themes out there, some free, some you pay for. For my website, I chose Photocrati. This is a premium theme designed specifically for Photographers. It will set you back about $80.00 – a really good price considering everything you get.

What I really liked about the Photocrati theme is the amount of flexibility you have in setting up your look and feel. There are 15 basic templates within the SuperTheme (as they call it) and you can further tweak the final look of any of them until you are really happy.

I have my website set up so the home page looks like a “normal” photography website with a continuously running slideshow and navigation bar across the top. From the home page, you can navigate to any of my galleries, sub-pages, or go directly to the blog. All of these pages can be customized, and since the whole site is built on WordPress, every time I make a blog post, or someone else comments on a post, Google comes looking for new content to index. In other words, Google sees the site as an ever changing and evolving blog rather than a stagnate portfolio site.

So far, I have been really happy with this set-up. The WordPress dashboard makes updating and maintaining the website easy, and the Photocrati theme allows me to create the look and feel that I want. Also, the Photocrati support and update frequency has been great. They have been busy adding tons of new features and making the theme even better, so if you are in the market for a photo-centric WordPress theme, I would definitely check them out.

I hope those of you that are interested in web technologies found this information useful. If you would like more of these types of posts, just let me know.

***Disclaimer Alert – Other than using their products, I’m not affiliated with Webhero, WordPress, or Photocrati***

Wedding

Boulder, CO | Chautauqua Wedding | Top Knots Photo Contest

I just entered some of my images from Kate and Brandon’s June wedding to the Photo District News Top Knots photography contest. This is one of the biggest contests of the year for wedding photographers. There is some really great work on display, but most of it is more traditional “posed” wedding photography, so I’m not sure how my documentary approach will go over.

The main website can be found here . If you would like to vote for one of my pictures in the “People’s Choice” category, you can click here.

Below are the pictures I submitted for consideration. The four pictures of the Bridal Party walking around in the rain were submitted as a series. I chose these because I felt they really held together well as a series, and they also do a good job of illustrating the documentary style that I use when shooting a wedding. In the portrait category, I chose this particular portrait because I think it is really pretty with nice soft window light, rich dark tones and bright highlights that retain the details in the dress. I also chose this picture because it is somewhat unusual, being a straight profile of Kate’s face.

Hopefully, the judges will find these images interesting, if a little different than the usual wedding photography fare. Let me know what you think of them.

You can click on any of the images to view them larger. Enjoy…

Bride and her bridesmaids walking in the rain
A bride and her bridesmaids walking up the street
Bride and her bridesmaids standing in the rain
Groomsmen and ring bearer walking in the rain
Candid portrait of the bride

Tech Info:
Nikon F100
Nikon 50mm f1.4
Legacy Pro 400 (AKA – Fuji Neopan 400)
Processing and scanning by Richard Photo Lab

About Jason

Colorado Wedding & Portrait Photography | New Business Cards

Up until recently, I have been using business cards designed in Photoshop, printed on photographic paper and cut down to 2″ X 3″. While I liked the way these cards reproduced pictures, they were not great for text, were thin, only allowed printing on one side and were slightly smaller than standard business cards.

Using lessons learned from creating my first business cards, I went ahead and designed a more traditional card and had it printed on heavy-weight recycled paper. The new design utilizes both sides of the card. The front shows my standard logotype as well as contact information and the short message “fine art documentary photography of kids, seniors, weddings & families”.

The back of the card contains three vertical images, one of a young girl (to represent child and family photography) another of a high school senior, and the last showing a bride. All three images are in black and white and were shot in my signature style – on location, available light, natural expressions, etc. Coincidentally, all three images were shot with the same camera and film combination – Nikon F100, Legacy Pro 400 (Fuji Neopan 400) film.

So take a look at these samples and let me know what you think…

Front of Jason Noffsinger Photography Business Card
Back of Jason Noffsinger Photography Business Card

Tech Info:
Business card examples
Cards printed on 100lb recycled stock

Images all photographed using
Nikon F100
Legacy Pro 400 film (Fuji Neopan 400)