livebooks blog

Guest blogger Manuela Marin Salcedo is a research and development team leader at Momenta Workshops. Her expertise is in visual communications and social media. In addition to her work for Momenta, Manuela is working on long-term, independent multimedia projects.

Unless you are a social media manager with experience engaging virtual audiences, social media as a promotional tool for your photography business can be intimidating and exhausting to manage. While it can also be a social and fun experience, keeping up with all your feeds takes maintenance. Therefore, the team at Momenta Workshops has put together a short list of tips and tricks to help you re-evaluate and invigorate your social media feeds to further your photo business strategy.

Develop Social Media Goals

Whether you are new to social media pages or a seasoned pro in need of a social media boost in creativity, it is important to plan and evaluate your social media outreach. If social media success by way of increased follower engagement is your destination, you’re going to need a road map to success. Consider the following as you create your goals:

• How is social media important to your company?
• How does social media relate to your goals?
• How are you using social media as a voice of your brand?
• Are more followers the goal or better dialogue with current followers?
• Do you use all your feeds equally? If you’re neglecting one, do you need it?

The answers to these important questions will give you direction, and that will be essential in creating a new strategy or refreshing an old one.

Add to the Story

Taking the above tips into consideration, with every post you put your valuable time into, ask yourself:

• What am I saying?
• Did I just say the same thing with a previous post?
• Am I adding to my brand’s story?
• Is this post encouraging people to follow me or just adding content?
• Would *I* want to follow posts like the ones I’m sending?

If you are bombarding your audience with the same perspective or information multiple times in a short span of time, you could become irritating.

Live-Post From Events

Are you attending a film festival this weekend? Did you recently attend a gallery opening? What about a lecture? Were they interesting, exciting, mind-blowing? Talk about it! Share content from it, such as favorite quotes or photos. Chances are, others who attended these events have social media accounts and will be talking about it too and your posts can add to the dialogue and give you lots of exposure to new people. If the event has a specific hashtag, make sure to use it. This will make your posts visible on a grander scale and allow you to interact with brands and individuals.

Interact With Your Followers

Think of your social media as an invitation for followers to interact and engage with you and your portfolio. Your posts initiate a dialogue. When followers respond, don’t leave them hanging. Turn those replies into a conversation; your followers will be more likely to chime in with their two cents in the future.

Get Visual!

As visual creators, you’re in luck. Research and analytics show adding images to your social media posts can increase click-through rates anywhere from 18%-27%. What does this mean exactly? People love pretty pictures! So let it rip and share your greatest asset: your beautiful images!

What are some other tips that you’ve employed to invigorate your social media channels? Let us know in the comments!

Photographer and stylist Steven Menendez has one of the most vibrant, colorful, and beautifully styled websites we’ve ever seen. He says that his work has been greatly inspired by his travels – seeing exotic people and landscapes has influenced his creative perspective – and we can definitely see that same unique perspective in his website design.

We are so thrilled to have him as our featured website this week and we know you’ll love his site – www.stevenmenendez.com.

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

SM: I would describe the aesthetic of my website as uplifting, chic, and clean.

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

SM: The way I choose my images is finding the ones that speak to my aesthetic of classic, chic, and timeless.

Q: How often do you update your website?

SM: I update my website whenever I have new work.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

SM: My favorite feature on liveBooks is the ease in uploading images and updating portfolios to keep the website fresh.

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

SM: The advice I would give others when designing a website is to keep in mind that the images should speak first and the website should be a beautiful canvas to display your work and not distract the viewer. For the most part I usually feel less is more when it comes to displaying your art. Research other websites and find out what looks good and what features you are drawn to. My motto is to keep it simple and let the work speak for itself.

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

Bob Packert, a creator of fine art, motion, and still photos has a website that is so intriguing and captivating that we absolutely had to feature it this week. His usage of video and colorful images plus his sleek design has us eager to click to each new page.

Check out the full site here (trust us, you don’t want to miss out!) – www.bobpackert.com – and read on for some great info on the creation of the site.

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

BP: I view my website aesthetic as a clean simple gird, with a kinetic feel to the video movement. (I guess that’s more than three words…oh well.)

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

BP: I choose the images for my homepage very carefully. I wanted to represent what I shoot, but also consider what images would work well within the grid format.

Q: How often do you update your website?

BP: Approximately every three months. I switch out images and placement.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

BP: I love being able to control things myself.

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

BP: Keep it simple and clean, and able to load fast for the viewer.

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

Photographer Wayne Kaulbach took his family and went on the trip of a lifetime around the world for nine months – capturing some pretty incredible moments along the way. We love his story and images so much that we had to share.

Q: What inspired your trip?

WK: The inspiration for our trip came about when my wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor in May of 2012 (she has thankfully fully recovered). We just sat down as a family and decided life is much too precious and short and that we should embark on a Round The World trip that we dubbed “9 Months of Sundays.” We took our daughter Chloe (who was 14 when we left on December 2nd, 2013) and our son Noah (who turned 12 on December 5th of our trip). Our eldest daughter, Litia, was busy with University studies. Another inspiration for the trip was to try to follow the “mindful living” philosophy and live in the moment.

Q: Which countries did you visit?

WK: We flew from Vancouver, British Columbia on the morning of December 2nd to Seattle, and then on to Tokyo, Japan. We spent five days in Tokyo and then flew to Bangkok, Thailand. In Thailand we volunteered at an Elephant Nature Park north of Chiang Mai for one week and then made our way by train down south to spend Christmas and New Years on Koh Lanta. January 6th, 2014 we flew to Kolkata, India where we spent six weeks mostly in Rajasthan broken up by a flight up to Kathmandu, Nepal. Mid-February we flew to Nairobi, Kenya and started a 30-day trek that took us through Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. On April 1st we flew to Rome and embarked on the European portion of our travel. We visited Barcelona (took in a Barcelona football game and saw Messi), Rome, Sora, Florence, and Venice. The month of May we spent in Ljubljana, Solvenia – amazing city! June found us in Budapest, Prague, Salzburg, Munich, Wroclaw, Poland, Berlin and a flight to London on June 21st to celebrate our daughter’s 15th birthday. End of June, July and all of August we spent in Paris and flew back to Canada the beginning of September 2014.

Q: What was your main focus/inspiration for the pictures you took?

WK: I love to photograph street/editorial images and I just love to photograph people. My wife and I have owned a natural light portrait business – Skylight Images – for the past 20 years so it was nice to have a break from our business but we simply could not put our cameras down as we are both very passionate to create photographs. We shot lots of candid work and also approached people and asked to photograph them. We also left our bulky Canon gear at home and I traveled with Fujifilm’s X-Pro 1 mirror-less system with a 35mm F1.4 R and my wife took the Fujifilm X-E2 with 23mm F1.4 lens. Each of our camera bags were approximately 6 x 8 x 4 inches. It was a liberating experience and I do not feel that we compromised on quality. The only time we really missed the gear we left behind was in the Serengeti – a longer lens would have been useful.

Q: Do you have a favorite image from the series? If so, which one and why?

WK: It’s challenging to pick a favorite image but I’m partial to the image that opens my website (shown below): Dysturb (candid street image taken on the streets of Paris).

Q: It appears you made a conscious choice to have these photos in black and white. Did you know that going into it or was that a decision you made in editing?

WK: The Paris Series that won Best Feature Album at our National Convention in Canada in May of 2015 did (originally) have some color images that looked good on their own but as a series I decided to go with a black and white theme. Perhaps channeling the great French street photographers I admire so much: Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I generally default to black and white with my street work but some images just look better in color.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about the two awards you won for this series?

WK: I won the Beast Feature Album – 1st in Class, Professional Photographers of Canada in May of 2015.  Everyday I would wander different sections of Paris on foot/bike or transit and photograph.

WK: I also won 2nd place for Life International Magazine, Interconnections for “Dysturb” photographed in Paris, April 2015. I was admiring the backdrop of Dysturb and brought in a foreground element with the sign. I waited about five minutes for my subject to walk through the scene.

Q: Do you have any other projects that you’re working on for the rest of the year?

WK: Upcoming projects include three photography tours I will be conducting. The first is 18 days in India: Rajasthan and Taj Mahal, January, 2016. The second is eight days in Venice in April, 2016. And finally, I will be doing eight days in New York City in June of 2016. Please contact me at wkaulbach@shaw.ca for more information. I have over 10 years part-time experience teaching Street and Travel photography at Langara College and and Focal Point here in Vancouver, Canada.

To read more about Wayne and his family’s trip, check out his wife’s blog about the experience, and see more of Wayne’s photography here: www.wkaulbach.com