Tag Archives: Digital

Portrait, Seniors

Denver, CO | Family + Senior Combination Session | Three Sisters

Below are a bunch a pictures from my recent Family Portrait / Senior Portrait combination session. I really like the variety of images we were able to get in just a short time. McWilliams Park in Denver provided a bunch of different settings and backgrounds, and I kept switching between Camera/Lens/Film(digital) combinations to keep the look changing.

As you look over the pictures below, the soft, pastel looking color images were shot on color film, the warmer more contrasty color images were shot on digital, and the black and white images were shot on black and white film. Film processing and scanning was done by the amazing Richard Photo Lab in Hollywood.

I am really happy with how all of these images turned out, but as usual, my favorites are the images shot on black and white film. The combination of Fuji Neopan 400 and the Nikon 85mm f1.8 lens constantly blows me away.

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

Portrait of a young woman
Portrait of a young woman

Portrait of a young woman
Three sisters smiling and walking

Portrait of a young woman
Portrait of a young woman

Portrait of a young woman
Portrait of a young woman

Portrait of a young woman
Portrait of a young woman

Portrait of twin sisters

Portrait of a young woman
Portrait of a young woman

Portrait of a young woman
Group portrait of three young women

Young woman laughing while going down a slide
Young woman smiling while climbing on playground equipment

Portrait of a young woman

Tech Info:

B&W Film
Nikon F100
Nikon 85mm f1.8
Legacy Pro 400 (AKA Fuji Neopan 400)
Richard Photo Lab

Color Film
Nikon N90s
Nikon 50mm f1.4
Fuji Pro 400H
Richard Photo Lab

Digital
Nikon D70s
Nikon 35mm f2
Adobe Camera Raw

Portrait

Arvada, CO | Children’s Portraits | End of Year Collage

I have posted previously about a collage that I created for one of my seniors. For the holidays, I decided to take that idea and apply it to a bunch of pictures that I had made of my girls thoughout the year. I put together the collage you see below and we gave prints to Grandmas and Grandpas. I think this ended up being a cool way to display a variety of pictures, and it tells a much more complete story than any single image ever could.

These collages would also work really well to display a selection of pictures from one of my documentary family or children’s portrait sessions. Over the course of a single shoot we might not get enough images to put together a complete album, but we will almost always get enough great images to put together an interesting collage. If a collage seems like something you might be interested in, just let me know.

You can click on the image to see it larger. Enjoy…

Custom collage of kids portraits

Tech Info:
Collage created in Adobe Photoshop CS5
Mixture of film and digital captures

Portrait, Seniors

Denver, CO | Family Portraits | Sneak Peek – Sisters

Today, I have a sneak peek from a recent portrait shoot. These three young ladies are sisters, the two in the vertical shots are twins. The images are from a sort-of combination family/senior (in college) portrait session. The twins just graduated from college, and their younger sister is a student at CSU. Their mom wanted to take some time to document how they look at this transitional moment in their lives, finishing up school, but before careers and families. I think this is a great idea, and it was especially fun for me because I have know these girls since they were little.

We dedcided to try for an outside shoot – always my preference, but sometimes tricky in January. We lucked out and got a relatively warm day with just slight overcast and enough snow on the ground to give some of the pictures a sense of seasonality. Pretty much ideal conditions for an outdoor shoot in Colorado during the winter.

I really liked how these digital captures turned out, so I wanted to get them up on the blog while eagerly awaiting my film scans from the extraordinary Richard Photo Lab. I will put up a more comprehensive post once I have all the film scans and digital files prepped and ready.

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

Portrait of a young woman
Portrait of a young woman

Portrait of a young woman

Tech Info:
Natural Light
Nikon D70s
Nikon 35mm f2
Adobe Camera Raw
B&W conversion using Adobe Photoshop/Channel Mixer

Portrait

Arvada, CO | Outdoor Children’s Portraits | Emma+Molly+Tree

There has been a lot of black and white stuff up on the blog recently, so I wanted to break things up with a bit of color. Below are a few portraits of the girls that I shot back before Christmas. I needed to get prints of these pictures in short order, for presents, so I shot digitally. I think the digital files held up pretty well. It would be nice to have a little more highlight detail (like I can get with film), but the prints still look really nice.

Even though these are my own kids, this was a pretty typical “kid’s session” for me. For this shoot, I was more focused on nailing the traditional portraits than I normally would be. We were working on a pretty limited time table, and I knew I was going for a couple of nice prints rather than a photo story or session album. We had to shoot pretty fast because the light was falling and it was pretty cold (but not that cold considering it was December in Colorado).

I find, when photographing kids, it makes things easier if I have something for them to interact with. It takes their mind off of the camera and allows me to get more natural expressions. In this case, we used an almond tree in my parent’s back yard as our “prop”.

We waited for late afternoon to get warm, directional light. I placed the sun at the girls’ backs to give nice rim lighting on their hair and to help show the texture of the tree.

One other element in this shoot was camera angle. You will notice that I was moving around a lot. Some of the shots I was standing on a chair to get a higher angle, and some of the shots I was sitting or laying on the ground to get a lower angle. I like to move around to keep the images from a shoot constantly changing. It allows me to get a variety of different looks from a single location.

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

Portrait of a six year old girl
Three year old girl leaning against a tree

Portrait of a three year old girl
Six year old girl sitting in a tree

Tech Info:
Nikon D70s
Nikon 35mm f2
ISO 200
Adobe Camera Raw

Personal Work

Wray, CO | A Portrait And A House | Goodbye Papa Paul

2 Comments

Infant girl being held by her great grandfather
On Christmas day, we lost my Grandfather (My Dad’s Dad). He was over 90 years old, and his health had been rapidly declining, so it was not a surprise, but it was a shock. We waited until the following day to tell the kids, and then we had to get everything ready for the funeral. I printed up an 11X14 of this portrait of Grandpa Paul with Molly, to stand along side the casket at the funeral. The final print turned out really nice, and added a happy element to an otherwise sad occasion.

Along with this picture, Julie and my sister-in-law, Jess, put together a large presentation board showing a wide variety of pictures from Grandpa’s life. There were photos going all the way back to 1942. Seeing all of these images together really drove home the importance of protecting your memories. I know there are a lot of people out there who have pretty much stopped carrying a camera and are just using their cell phone cameras instead. If this sounds like you, please make a conscious effort to get those pictures off of your phone and on to your computer, and then make a conscious effort to make some prints.

To go along with the portrait above, I wanted to show some interesting pictures that I shot this summer. The three images below were shot in Grandpa Paul’s home town of Wray, CO. The house shown in the photos was actually my Grandpa Paul and Grandma Nondice’s first home. They moved in shortly after Grandpa returned home from World War II. As you can tell from the pictures, they very well could have been the last people to live in this house. It is almost completely overgrown with trees and bushes. This is probably an appropriate metaphor to end this post – my Grandfather’s house, being reclaimed by the Earth.

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

Small house completely overgrown by trees
Small house completely overgrown by trees
Small house completely overgrown by trees

Tech Info:

Portrait
Sigma SD9
Sigma 50mm f2.8 Macro
f4 | 1/90 | ISO 200

House
Fuji GS645S
60mm f4 Fixed Fujinon Lens
Fuji Acros 100
Ilford Ilfotec DD-X Developer
Epson 4870 Scanner + VueScan + Adobe Camera Raw

About Jason

Arvada, CO | Social Media | Jason Noffsinger’s New Tumblr Feed

The view from my office window. Photographed on my iPod Touch 4G.
Hey out there on the internets. I just wanted to call your attention to my new Tumblr feed. If you look over there >>> in the right hand widget bar, you should be seeing some pictures or quotes that I have added.

If all goes as planned, these will be the most recent additions to the feed. I will try to put up at least one fresh post every day. They will be short and sweet – One picture, or one quote, or one random thought. Most of the time, the posts will be photography related. I am calling the feed Jason Noffsinger Photography/Life, and that pretty well sums up my intent. I just want to give you a little more insight into my life and my work without the limitations of Twitter or Facebook but also without all the analysis, editing and SEO considerations that go into a full blog post.

“So what exactly is a Tumblr feed?” you may be asking. Well, Tumblr is a blogging platform that has been stripped down to the bare essentials. It fits somewhere between Twitter and a traditional blog (like this one). It doesn’t limit me to 140 characters, but it is super easy to put up pictures or quotes or random thoughts – especially from my new favorite toy – the Ipod Touch 4G. I love this little thing! I can check email, maintain my calendar, surf the web, make Tumblr posts, and look at Flickr from anywhere that has wi-fi, all with no $90 per month data plan.

And my favorite feature… the horrible little 0.7 megapixel digital camera. I can use it to make quick snapshots (like the one at the beginning of this post) and then run the pictures through one of the many post-processing apps on the Apple App store, before uploading to Flickr, or Facebook, or Tumblr. At last count, I already have eight of these imaging apps loaded. Of course, with the terrible camera, the image quality is not good at all, but the pictures are sure fun to play with. So I am using the iPod Touch as my FunkyCam – for fun little pictures that I can snap while I’m out and about.

So take a minute, click on over to www.jasonnoffsinger.tumblr.com and have a look. I really like the simple design that I put together for this project. Hopefully, I can create some worthwhile content to go along with it.

Let me know what you think.

Tech Info:
Ipod Touch 4G
Instagram App for tonality and sloppy border
MonoPhix Lite App for B&W conversion
Filterstorm App for adding metadata and uploading

Portrait, Seniors

Northglenn, CO | WHS Senior Portrait Session | Collage

Here is a collage that Breanna asked me to create using her favorite images from our Senior Portrait session this summer. This image is pretty different from the work I usually put up on the blog – I tend to lean more towards black and white images on simple backgrounds. But this was a fun project, and it shows the variety of opportunities that are opened up with technology.

Having been out of high school for more than a few years, I didn’t know that collages were “a thing”.  Now that I have had my eyes opened to the possibilities, I am definitely interested in where they may lead. Collages seem to be a great way to showcase a wider variety of imagery and include some of the “edgier” pictures that might never see the light of day in the traditional world of 8X10’s hanging on the wall.

Anything that lets people see portraiture in a new context, and exposes them to interesting imagery, is okay in my book. What are your thoughts?

You can click on the image to see it lager. Enjoy…

Eleven image senior portrait collage

Tech Info:
Collage created in Adobe Photoshop CS5
Images are a mixture of film (Fuji Pro 400H) and digital (Nikon D70s) captures

Personal Work

Westminster, CO | Documentary Photos | WHS 2009 Las Posadas

With the Holidays upon us, I wanted to put up some documentary pictures that I shot last year at Westminster High School’s Las Posadas celebration/parade/march. The event was a lot of fun, it included Mary, Joseph and even a real donkey. There were candles, guitars and lots of singing. The large crowd moved from church to church through the old town area of Westminster and ended up back at the high school for refreshments after the march.

It was pretty cold, and very dark, so photography was a challenge. I wanted to document the event, but using flash would have been very intrusive and would have looked awful – red eyes and blown out faces with pure blackness in the background. Instead, I chose to shoot in the available light (err – darkness). I utilized the  highest ISO the camera would allow and then under exposed by about a stop, and I also used my fastest lens. It was too dark for the camera to auto-focus (without an annoying AF assist lamp) , so manual focus was the order of the day.

Even though these pictures are very grainy, I think they do a good job capturing the spirit of the event. They are authentic. They illustrate the setting of the event – the cold and dark of a December night, punctuated by the warmth and light of community and candlelight.

You can click on any of the images to see them larger and read a caption. Enjoy…

Principal Pat Sanchez welcomes the crowd
Students wait for the celebration to begin
Students light their candles
The donkey has a quick snack
A student sings
Students laugh as they wait for the celebration to begin

A little girl waits for the celebration to begin
A girl's face is lit up by her candle

Members of the community hold their candles
Choir Director Larry Meerdink walks and sings
Mary, Joseph and their donkey

Students huddle together
Two students play the parts of Mary and Joseph

Students play guitars
Two students play the parts of Mary and Joseph
Two students play the parts of Mary and Joseph
Students play guitars
Students hold candles and sing
A woman holds a candle and sings

Tech Info:
Nikon D200
Nikon 50mm f1.8
ISO 3200 (underexposed, so more like 6400)
It was DARK!

Portrait

Arvada, CO | Arvada Center | Documentary Family Portraits

Below are some pictures from one of my fall documentary family portrait sessions. These pictures were all shot over the course of a couple hours at the park behind the Arvada Center for the Arts in Arvada, CO.

I was fortunate to get to work with such a fun and happy young family, with a three year old son who reminds me so much of Molly (also three) it’s scary. We were blessed with a warm day, nice late afternoon light, and beautiful fall colors.

It was fun to document this family interacting and having a good time. I think we were able to capture some great images that really tell a story about who these people are and how much they enjoy each other.

You can view the whole event and order prints HERE.

Click on any of the images to view them larger and read a caption. Enjoy…

Portrait of a young family laughing

Portrait of a mother
Portrait of a father

Portrait of a three year old boy
Three year old boy climbing over a wall

Portrait of a three year old boy looking down
Three year old boy's hands

Portrait of a couple laughing

Portrait of a three year old boy
Portrait of a three year old boy standing between is parents

Portrait of a young family
Three year old boy talking to his parents

Three year old boy playing on the playground
Three year old boy playing on the playground
Portrait of a three year old boy kissing his mother
Portrait of a father and his son
Three year old boy looking up to the sky

Tech Info:
For this shoot, I used three camera/lens combinations

B&W Film
Nikon F100
Nikon 85mm f1.8
Legacy Pro 400 (AKA – Fuji Neopan 400)
Richard Photo Lab

Color Film
Nikon N90s
Nikon 50mm f1.4
Fuji Pro 400H
Richard Photo Lab

Digital
Nikon D70s
Nikon 35mm f2
Adobe Camera Raw

If you would like to figure out which combination was used for which picture, you can look at each image’s IPTC info (using Jeffrey Friedl’s Exif Viewer) or you can hop over to my Flickr photostream and look at the image tags.

Portrait

Arvada, CO | Kids Portraits | Airplanes, Wagons & A Big Bruise

Kids are resilient. Ten minutes before I shot this series of pictures, Jaxon managed to fall and bang his forehead on the asphalt. I would have been laying in bed for a week. He cried for about thirty seconds, and then wanted to get down and play. We watched as the bruise started to come out on his forehead, and I went back to taking pictures. This was something important to document, as a toddler he is pretty much a walking bruise. That’s just who he is at this point in his life.

Jaxon never seems to get too worried about it. He has more important things to think about. Like airplanes flying overhead and wagons to pull and climb on. I guess he figures bruises are just the price you pay for the freedom to walk around and check things out.

I really like the authenticity of these pictures. The bruise, the clothes, the hair, the setting, it all feels real – because it is real. A picture doesn’t have to be staged and styled and manicured to be beautiful. Life is what it is, and I like to document it. Let me know if you have a life you would like to have documented.

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

A toddler looks up to the sky
A toddler holds up the handle of his wagon

A toddler slams his wagon handle to the ground
A toddler plays in his wagon

Tech Info:
Open shade late in the day
Nikon D70s
Nikon 35mm f2
f2.8 | 1/400 | ISO 200
Adobe Camera Raw
Photoshop Unsharp Mask to boost midtone contrast