livebooks blog

Art Becker is a multi-faceted photographer based in St. Petersburg, Florida. He believes that photography is about sharing a moment and he uses his Nikon camera with Nikkor lenses to capture his subjects. To see more of his work, visit his liveBooks website now: www.artbeckerphoto.com.

Being a photographer is my job, but it’s also a part of my life. I’m passionate about what I do and I want those who see my work to be moved by it. It’s my hope they will experience what I’ve experienced and “get” what it is I’m trying to say. If I accomplish that, my career will have been worthwhile.

The bonus is, I get to create cool moments as I go along. In some mysterious way maybe it changes a life, an outlook, a mood or even just a few minutes in the day. That is enough for me.

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

AB: Simply, Creative, Graphic. I wouldn’t change anything about it.

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

AB: Choosing the photos that I display on my homepage is simple. The choices I make are based on the visual impact of each image. It has to have a strong composition and light to attract the viewers. The first image – the little girl peeking over the edge, the story behind it is to take a look inside. The second  – there’s beauty in the clouds, just look up. Third – out of a plane window with natural light creating the composition. And last, the magic of twilight – my favorite time of day to photograph.

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

AB: How often do I change the images? At very least once a week. It’s my belief in order to keep your existing audience coming back. To attract new ones, I create new imagery for them to view.

Q: What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks8?

AB: One of the best features of my new website is that it’s easy to navigate. You simply click on portfolios and view the images of your choice. My older clients love it and new clients are sending me requests. I couldn’t ask for better results than that.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

AB: The one piece of advice if you are creating a new site is to keep it simple, make it visually driven and easy for a client to, as I say, “Find Art”.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Joshua Holko is a full-time Professional Nature Photographer who specializes in polar photography. Joshua is a fully accredited AIPP Master of Photography and member of the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP). He has won countless awards for his photography including being names the 2015 Global Arctic Photographer or the Year.
Joshua is officially represented by Philip Kulpa and the Source Photographica Gallery in Australia and Aspen, Colorado. To see more of Joshua Holko’s work visit his website: www.jholko.com.

I am extremely excited and proud to be releasing my new short film – Ghosts of the Arctic. The product of more than two years of planning Ghosts of the Arctic was filmed exclusively in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in the depths of Winter. It is my hope that the film will impart some of the haunting beauty of this incredibly precious and endangered polar wilderness; as well as give you some insight into my life as a Polar photographer. I hope you will take six minutes out of your day, set your display to full screen, turn off the lights, crank up the volume, and allow Ghosts of the Arctic to transport you away to one of the world’s most spectacular polar regions; in it’s rarely seen winter veil. Please enjoy.

My most sincere thanks to both Abraham Joffe and Dom West from Untitled Film Works who worked tirelessly for a week straight putting in eighteen hour days in freezing temperatures to shoot and produce this film. My thanks and gratitude also to my friend Frede Lamo who likewise worked tirelessly with good humour and whose assistance with expedition logistics simply made the impossible, possible. Without the dedication of this team, this film would simply not have been possible.

It would be remiss of me not to also provide a little insight into what it was like to make this short film. During the Winter shoot we experienced temperatures that were never warmer than -20ºC and frequently plummeted down as low as -30ºC + wind chill factor. We were exposed to the cold and elements for up to sixteen straight hours a day. Many days we drove over two hundred kilometers on our snow mobiles in very difficult terrain and conditions as we searched for wildlife. The bumpy terrain left us battered, bruised and sore. We experienced three cases of first and  second degree frostbite during the filming as well as a lot of failed equipment and equipment difficulties as a result of the extreme cold. We had batteries that would loose their charge in mere minutes, drones that wouldn’t power up and fly, cameras the wouldn’t turn on, steady-cams that would not remain steady, HDMI cables that became brittle and snapped in the cold, frozen audio equipment, broken LCD mounts, broken down snow mobiles and more. We existed on a diet of freeze dried cod and pasta washed down with tepid coffee and the occasional frozen mars bar.

It is hard to put the experience into words, but just the simple act of removing ones gloves to change a memory card in these sort of temperatures when you are exposed and exhausted comes with serious risk of frostbite. In my own case, I removed my face covering for one three minute take and suffered frostbite (from which I have not fully recovered) across the right hand side of my face. And whilst not all of this will come across in the film, I think I can safely say it was without any shadow of doubt the toughest film shoot any of us have done.

For the technically inclined: Ghosts of the Arctic was shot in the 2.35:1 cinema ratio in true 4K High Definition with Canon, RED, Sony and DJI 4K High Definition camera systems.

Absolutely no wildlife was interfered with in any shape or form during the filming and everything you see is totally natural behavior.

Michael R. Soluri is a New York City based fine art documentary photographer, speaker and author of Infinite Worlds: the People and Places of Space Exploration (Simon & Schuster). His work is widely published, exhibited and in permanent collections. He also has made presentation at a number of national museums and NASA related venues. Michael’s photography has appeared in numerous American, European, and Brazilian print and online publications like WIRED, Smithsonian Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times, Time, Discover, Air & Space, NPR, Family Circle, Mother Earth News, Wired UK, Grazia, Amica, Vogue Brasil and Claudia. To see more of Michael’s work, visit his liveBooks8 website: www.michaelsoluri.com

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

MS: Visual, elegant, graphic.

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

MS: I seek consistency in my visual branding. As a result, there is not any set time. I typically update when I feel a need to revise gallery images, copy text, or make new additions to my Media.

Q: How do you choose the photos you display on your homepage?

MS: Because my website is custom-designed, I use only one photograph. As a result, it is a challenging communication process based on an essential question that I explore from the user point-of-view: What is the visual essence of what I do?

Q: What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks8?

MS: Personal control over the design specifications, aesthetics, and gallery elements of my site.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer someone designing their website?

MS: Patience. It’s a learning curve. Be prepared for a creative journey in designing and implementing every aspect of your site.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

My earliest long-term photography project was a 3 year documentary photoessay on Cambodian refugees and street gangs in the U.S., something I worked on while doing my masters in Photography at Columbia College in Chicago. As an undergraduate student, I’d studied Southeast Asian studies and Thai language to it was only natural to start my professional career based in Bangkok, Thailand covering Southeast Asia. Clients included The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and several European and Asian-based publications. I worked on assignment as well as my own documentary projects throughout the region. I continued this kind of work later based in Tokyo and then Paris, France.

Nowadays I do less editorial work and more corporate and commercial work and have been living and working out of Seattle for the better part of a decade although I continue to travel and work in Asia. To see more of Stuart’s work, visit his liveBooks8 website: www.isett.com.

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

SI: Big and bold. As a lot of my older work was shot on slide film or b/w negative, I worked hard making sure the colors and quality of those images matches more recent digital work. Too many photojournalists don’t do that with older slide work and I think it’s important that images on my website, whether editorial or commercial, look their best.

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

SI: Every few weeks I’ll add photos, then pull older ones. My portfolio is always a work in progress, always evolving. Like most photographers, I’m on my own worst editor. I’ll tweak the design a few times a year.

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

SI: My roots are as a photojournalist so even though most of my work these days is corporate and commercial, I try to balance what I do today with my roots as a documentarian and show that on the homepage.

Q: What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks8?

SI: Well I sues the old system for close to a decade so plenty to like about liveBooks8, but the ability to edit, modify, and add images is key for me.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

SI: Make sure your images are technically consistent across the website. This is more true for photojournalists who need to learn the design skills for some of their commercial brethren and not simply throw images up. Design is important, even if you are a documentary photographer.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.