livebooks blog

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

Photographer and world traveler Karl Nielsen develops dynamic images that showcase his high energy and fearless approach to photography – and his website exhibits all those same qualities.

We are really excited to have him as our featured website this week – read on to find out more about his site and see more at: www.karlnielsenphotography.com.

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

KN: Personal, Eclectic, Rough and Tumble.

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

KN: I struggle with this all the time, portfolio consultants always tell me I should focus my portfolio in one genre. But in all honesty I have a broad set of interests and I really feel passionate about most of the projects I take on, which is good because when I started my business in 2007/2008 the economy was horrible and I was desperate to find any kind of work as long as it paid money. So from the beginning I was delving into every subject and genre I could all at once. Luckily, all of my clients have stuck with me and each client has introduced me to more clients and through word-of-mouth my business has grown in all sorts of directions. Because the type of work I do is so diverse so is my portfolio, which makes it difficult to decide what to show in it.

I guess the simple rules I stick with are as follows:

1) Strongest work

2) Most recent work

3) The type of work I want to do more of

4) Consistent galleries within the portfolio.

After I follow the listed guidelines it’s a lot of trial and error, adding photos, removing photos, and moving photos around until the portfolio has a good feel. My website never really feels finished to me, just constantly evolving.

Q: How often do you update your website?

KN: Probably every 2-3 months or whenever I build a new body of work that I want to show off to the world. It’s a good feeling when you are working on a project and you know you shot something better than anything else in your portfolio.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

KN: The scaling features and the mobile-friendly version of the site. It’s nice to be able to pull up my website on my phone while I’m talking to someone.

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

KN: A great website does not happen overnight, keep working on it.

Follow Karl’s adventures and see more of his awesome photos on Instagram – @kidcalifornia.

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

Robin Layton, an award-winning photojournalist, renowned artist, and filmmaker is our featured website this week. We just love the clean, fresh look of her site and how gracefully it pulls the user in, making them want to stay for hours!

Check out the full site here – www.robinlayton.com – and don’t forget to read below to see what she has to say about her site’s creation!

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

RL: Art, Fresh, Clean

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

RL: I choose the ones in each category that I feel are the strongest ones, the ones that will hopefully get someone’s attention and make them want to look at that portfolio.

Q: How often do you update your website?

RL: It depends; I try and add new images when I shoot them. But overall, I try to update my website once or twice a year.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

RL: That you can easily edit or update your images/content yourself and that it’s so simple to use!

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

RL: Design your website to reflect who YOU are. Make it different than everyone else’s. Once of my favorite quotes: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde.

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