livebooks news

National Geographic’s All Roads Film Project : “All Roads is a National Geographic program created to provide an international platform for indigenous and underrepresented minority-culture artists to share their cultures, stories, and perspectives through the power of film and photography. All Roads is an exciting, groundbreaking film festival, photography program, and film grant program rolled into one. Whether you’re an indigenous artist wanting to tell your story, a filmmaker wanting to make a difference, an industry representative looking for the next age of storytelling, or an audience eager to learn more about our world, you’ll find what you’re looking for when you travel All Roads” : The project is supported and advised by a number of influential figures and companies from the world of photography and beyond, including Andy Patrick (Director of Fifty Crows, CEO liveBooks), Robert Pledge (President, Contact Press Images), Audrey Jonckheer (Director International Special Projects, Kodak), Tina Ahrens (Photo Editor, Geo Magazine), etc.

ShutterBug talks about the advantaged of using liveBooks for your photography website. Find out what they had to say below.

Google “photographer” and you get, as of this writing, about 140 million (!) possible URLs; do the same for “photographer web pages” and you get over 25 million! The motivation for creating a web page with your photographs is legion: it can be used to display your work to a worldwide audience; showcase work to potential clients; license images for sale in publications and other sites; sell fine art prints; promote events and clubs; and display work shot at events for additional sales beyond paper proofs (although the paper proof route is almost extinct these days). For those who simply want to share work there are also community sites that take loads of uploads at once and offer e-mail notifications for sharing or creating public galleries for all to see. Plus there are traveler sites, weather sites, and even sites for just plain old goofing around.

To read more click here.

Photographer John Russo mentions liveBooks in an interview by imaginginfo.com. Check out what he had to say!

We asked John Russo how long it took him to capture this shot of tennis pro Serena Williams. His answer: “About five minutes.” For Russo, setting the proper lighting, and designating tasks to his crew helps to make his shooting process seamless. “I have an extremely efficient crew. We don’t usually experience logistical issues,” he explains. A Profoto Acute 2 2400 in a Mola beauty dish was used for the main light; a Profoto Acute 2 2400 was placed behind Williams for separation, with two more near the edges of the background as hair/separation lights. [Ed. note: go to imaginginfo.com to see the lighting diagram.] After an hour of setting up, Russo went to work, shooting with a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II. “The images are imported into Capture One Pro, the exposures are adjusted, and then the images are edited. We create a low res selection clients access through our Livebooks website. With the client’s selections made, images are retouched, and sent via ftp,” Russo explains. And how did Serena’s reps respond to the image? According to Russo, “the client loved the shot.” For more of Russo’s images, go to www.johnrussophoto.com.

To read more click here.

PhotoShelter is welcoming DRR customers with a special 3-month free offer and FTP migration tools to help photographers recover their images. The PhotoShelter offer – promoted on their Web home page – is good until November 4.

Today there is also an offer from liveBooks to DRR’s former clients, a savings of up to $800 on a liveBooks Professional Web site. Their unlimited site which is regularly priced at $3,200 is available now for $2,400 for DRR clients who make the switch, and the basic site package that is regularly $800 is available for DRR clients at $600. There is also a $90 a year hosting fee.

To read more click here.

imaginginfo.com‘s sister publication, Studio Photography, paid tribute to Breast Cancer Awareness Month by publishing intimate, personal stories from photographers who are using their talents not only to fight breast cancer, but also a plethora of other noble causes. liveBooks was among a small sampling of what some manufacturers and retailers are doing on their end to help people in need.

liveBooks has moved its many charitable endeavors and philanthropic activities under the umbrella of “Conscious Communities.” The company’s employees have individually and collectively demonstrated a strong desire to integrate a sense of social responsibility into the very fabric of the company.

liveBooks founder and CEO Andy Patrick founded the FiftyCrows Foundation in October 2001 as an effort to empower social change and support the work of indigenous photographers through its annual grant competition and awards. FiftyCrows also promotes the work of these photographers through email, direct mail, online marketing, and TV programming. In addition to powering the FiftyCrows gallery website, liveBooks also provides a free website to all grant winners, enabling these photographers to expose their work to a worldwide audience that would have otherwise been out of reach.

To read more click here.

Katie Van Buren happily hired liveBooks to convert her website into a dynamic marketing tool. “Your site is the number one place to invest money,” she says. Read more of what the Professional Photographer article said about liveBooks and out stellar SEO below.

In marketing, having a great Web site is a must.  Even more important is making your site easy for customers to find through any popular search engine.  Google dominates the search engine, so catering to The “google-bot” –its automatic page indexing spider– is the first step.

Wedding photographer Katie Van Buren (www.vanburenphotography.com) chose liveBooks (www.livebooks.com) to redesign here web site, because of the clean design, efficient navigation, ease of maintenance, and degree of search engine optimization (SEO) the company offered.

To read the entire article click here.

Central Valley Business Times interviewed liveBooks CEO Andy Patrick. Read below to see what Andy had to say about photography, the industry, and liveBooks.

Small businesses are failing to maximize the impact of their websites because they don’t understand how search engines like Google and Yahoo work, says Andy Patrick, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based liveBooks Inc., which sells customized portfolio websites and marketing software for professional photographers.

The technique is called “search engine optimization” or SEO. Most companies looking to do search engine optimization find an SEO consultant and spend thousands of dollars — again and again, Mr. Patrick says.

“At liveBooks, we’ve taken something that is a rather complex set of tools and made them extremely easy to use,” he says.

To read more click here.

NGS + liveBooks = All Roads Film Festival

All Roads is a National Geographic initiative supporting films by and about indigenous groups and under-represented minority culture filmmakers. The festival is a multimedia event comprised of cutting-edge film, videos, live music, photography, and art from cultures around the world.

One of the facets of the initiative is the Photography competition which honors four photographers from Argentina, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Azerbaijan who used their work to advance awareness of the plights of their native countries and drive social change. The photographers will participate in the All Roads Film Festivals in both Washington D.C. (Sept. 25 to 28) and Los Angeles, California, (Oct. 2 to 5), where their images will be exhibited. The winners will be discussing their work during the Global Storytellers program and exhibiting at this year’s All Roads Film Festivals.

To read more click here.

I was so happy to get the announcement that Doug Miranda’s new site went live today. liveBooks did a great job of building the site based on our design and layout. It’s very fast, and looks great. We wanted the feel to be stylish and classic with a little sport and nature thrown in there. I love the combination of the green and blue and wood grain. Reminds me of a cool new Ford Woody Beach Cruiser. Doug was so fantastic to work with, I just know he’s going to be a photographer to watch in the next few years.

The Travel Photographer highlight’s the interview of Colin Finlay featured in Photographers in Focus on liveBooks.

The monthly Photographers in Focus video interviews by liveBooks feature photographers who share their personal vision, inspiration and beliefs. According to LiveBooks, these “enrich the photo community by providing a means for one photographer to share knowledge with others.”

This month’s interview is with documentary photographer and photojournalist Colin Finlay.

A self-taught photographer, Colin Finlay is a four-time “Picture of the Year” award winner who has photographed wars, conflicts, genocide, famine, environmental issues, disappearing traditions, and has filmed several television documentaries. He’s circled the globe 27 times seeking compelling images that make a difference. When doing photojournalism, he often shoots with two camera bodies, using a 28mm lens on one and a 35mm lens on the other. He uses a Canon 1DS Mark II lately, along with Canon EF lenses, 35mm f/1.4L, 50mm f/1.2L, 24mm f/1.4L, and occasionally a tilt-shift lens.

To read more click here.

With the digital age in full swing, professional photographers are always looking for the next big thing, something that will give them a competitive edge in promoting their business. Creating an enticing website is one such edge. While many photographers create and manage their own sites, many more are turning to web professionals to handle the job. Studio Photography interviewed representatives from some of the top photographic web-service companies, including liveBooks, to find out what’s hot, what’s not, and what’s next. Read on for more…

Going Live

liveBooks was founded by MICHAEL COSTUROS, a photographer who recognized the need to have a website, but who also recognized the problem with actually working with a web designer to create that website. The biggest problem was that once the site was designed, four or five months later when the photographer wanted to update the site with his latest work, the designer was nowhere to be found. So Costuros created liveBooks.

Every liveBooks package comes with two parts: a personalized website and online software. “We have an in-house design staff that will build a website for you, and you’ll actually work directly with our designers so that your site reflects your business aesthetic and really is in line with your work,” says TRICIA GELLMAN, VP of marketing, liveBooks. “This helps the photographer build or reinforce his brand. The concept that we like to get across to them is that they actually spend a lot of time selecting the images, figuring out how they’re going to sequence their images, how they’re really going to take their body of work and use that to present who they are. We do that for every single photographer.”

To read more click here.

imaginginfo.com interviewed photographer Alex Vertikoff and liveBooks came up!

Alex Vertikoff was initially attracted to photography because it meant he’d be able to flex his creative ideas and challenge himself-he’d have to confront the technical aspects of making a photograph to succeed. A few decades later, success is his with a portfolio of captivating, well-composed architectural images that are so vibrant, their color so accurate, that it’s almost like looking through a window when viewing his work. But beyond the attention to the technical and artistic aspects, Vertikoff insists it’s as much the way he nurtures relationships and forms a bond of trust with his clients that’s allowed his business to flourish.

To read more click here.

The various programs aim to help build a stronger photography community and support the use of photography to drive social change. liveBooks currently participates in industry associations and spends time sharing educational information within the community while also supporting several philanthropic photography-based initiatives.
liveBooks is a company providing fully-editable customized website creation and management solutions for professional photographers to grow their businesses. The Brasov office is a Romanian-American partnership. The technology upon which the company is based has been created by Romanian Tiberiu Craciun, who won a contest organized by the liveBooks founder, Michael Costuros, in 2002 to come up with the best technical solution to meet the demands of photographers. “I published the project on a website used by international freelancers. I was delighted by the response! Within a week I had about nine companies engaged in solving the test problem. Most of them were from India, the others were from Siberia, Ukraine, and one company from Romania. To summarize a lot of details, the Indians made a mess of it. The Ukrainian guy never finished. The team of three in Siberia did a pretty good job, but the company in Romania nailed it,” Costuros remembers.

To read more click here.

MediaStorm recently recognized liveBooks’ series of interviews called Photographers in Focus on our site. The photographers chosen span a wide range of photography- from fashion to cars to journalism.  The most recent is an interview with renowned photojournalist Colin Finlay.

“Finlay is a six-time winner of the Picture-of-the-Year International competition administered by the Missouri School of Journalism, and has received additional awards and honors from the IPA, Los Angeles Emmy Awards and Communication Arts. As his work is already highly recognized and regarded, this installment for Photographers in Focus depicts Finlay in a new light, revealing his deep desire to make a difference in the world.

To read more click here.

About 10 years ago, Andy Patrick had just sold a very profitable company that set up huge e-commerce sites like AppleStore.com — and he was wondering what was next. Walking the streets of New York, he bought himself a digital camera, suddenly remembered how much he’d loved the medium back in high school, and soon had fallen in love all over again. Being the entrepreneur that he is, his mind immediately latched onto photography and began to ponder the best way to include it in his larger plans. Below, he tells that story and shares some of the wisdom he has gained from working with photographers and non-profit organizations for the last decade.

Now the CEO and president of liveBooks , which designs and hosts photography websites, Patrick is also the executive director the NGO Fifty Crows and a founding advisory board member of National Geographic’s All Roads photography program. LiveBooks also recently announced its Conscious Communities initiative, which brings together the many educational and social change projects the company supports.

Andy Patrick: I went home to Ohio where I grew up and I had dinner at home and started talking to my mom and dad about wanting to get into this social change work. I wanted to get into that but I also wanted to get into photography, and I saw the two coming together because I’m always amazed at the wealth of amazing photo essays that never see the light of day. So I went to bed that night and at like four in the morning I woke up to all this noise. I went to the window and the tree outside was covered in crows and they were all looking down at me and cawing. And it woke my mom and dad up too and they walked in and my mom said, what’s going on. And I said, I don’t know, there’s like 50 crows and they’re all yelling at me. And so I ended up calling Lily, my wife, back in San Francisco and I said, Lil this amazing thing happened. So she got out a book about Native American animal myths, and crow is said to be the keeper of the sacred laws, the laws that supersede those created by man, the laws of justice and harmony. And it was said that crow looked out of one eye into the past and one eye into the future, and that with this information crow was going to lead us to a place of peace and harmony and justice. And I was like, that’s it! We’re going to start a nonprofit, it’s gong to be called Fifty Crows and we’re going to take documentary photography and work with photographers to wake people up like the crows did to me, and to shout out to them that, hey there’s all this stuff going on in the world. You’ve got to wake up. To me that really has become such a great symbol, because to me the photographers that are doing such great work are kind of like that myth in that they are looking into the past and the future but they are capturing the present. And it immediately becomes the past but it leads us to think about what’s coming in the future.

To read more click here.