livebooks blog

The liveBooks team would like to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving! We are deeply thankful for having you as our loyal client. All of our work goes towards helping you create the perfect website and we appreciate every moment that you have dedicated to our brand!

In observance of this holiday, please be advised that our customer support communications will be affected.

• Phone Support: Will be limited and only available between 9:00AM – 5:00PM EST.
• Email Support: Our email team will be online and available to help. All emails received will be answered within 24 hours as per usual.

As always our Self Help portal is available 24-hours for your convenience with an extensive library of articles to help with any question you may have!

• liveBooks8 Self Help Portal
• Legacy (FLASH) Self Help Portal

Emily Dryden is primarily a food, product and portrait photographer based out of Brooklyn, New York. She has worked for world-renown clients and was awarded second place in the International Photography Award 2015 for the Food/Advertising category. To see more of her work, visit her liveBooks8 website: www.emilydryden.com

I am primarily a food, product, and still life photographer, though I also have a penchant for editorial portraits and storytelling. Most recently my photography has been exhibited in Luchon, France, and in New York City. My clients include Uncommongoods, Wine Enthusiast, Citibank, Staples, Mercer, Kroger, Horizon BCBS-New Jersey, BNY Mellon, Edible Brooklyn, Edible Manhattan, and Atlanta Magazine. Originally from Georgia, I began taking photos seriously while I was a student at the University of Georgia. I graduated with a degree in Journalism (specifically in video journalism), but quickly went back to school at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta, Georgia where I focused on photography. After I graduated, I began working with editorial clients in Atlanta but after a year, I decided to move to New York City where I have been based ever since.

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

ED: Clean, Minimalistic, and Professional

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

ED: I like to update it with new work every few months. I think it’s important to always show new work as it comes out and I’m constantly refining my portfolio. Fortunately, the liveBooks interface makes it very easy to do this.

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

ED: For the homepage, I wanted to pick a mix of images that show a range but that also work well together as a group.

Q: What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks?

ED: I love the new galleries. It’s great that you can view an entire collection as a contact sheet but you have the option to click and view each image one at a time if you choose to.

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

ED: I would encourage them to spend time experimenting with the different gallery options to see which one shows their work the best. I can imagine that a landscape photographer might need something different than a food photographer – just like a portrait photographer would need something completely different. There are definitely plenty of options to pick from.

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

Dorit Thies specializes in beauty, hair, fashion and celebrity photography and is known for creating powerful imagery ranging from international magazine covers to compelling photos captured in exotic destinations around the world. To see more of her work, visit her liveBooks8 website: www.doritthies.com

When I moved to the US from Europe, I had established myself as a professional hair and make-up artist, working in the commercial world. I was always intrigued with the art form of photography and I started shooting my personal fine art work for a few years when establishing my life in the US.

I am completely self-taught.

My work at the time was driven by my personal connections such as dancers, actors, musicians, and my inspiration came from photographers and painters like Georgia O’Keefe, Tina Modotti, Leonora Carrington, Irvin Penn, and Helmut Newton. I was all about developing my personal style.

Over a period of four years, I created a large body of fine art work, shooting only black and white film. I had success quickly and my work was shown in several galleries in Los Angeles, in Santa Fe, New Mexico and The Katonah Museum of Art, Upstate New York.

When I began to shoot commercially, I decided to specialize in health and fitness photography. My very first commercial client was Men’s Health Magazine in Germany. I was lucky and shot their covers for several years. In the last six years I started to specialize in Beauty/Fashion & Celebrity Photography. I am now balancing the art of shooting conceptual beauty and fashion layouts for magazines such as Marie Claire, Modeliste, L’Officiel with some of my favorite artists while focusing on commercial campaigns.

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

DT: Bold, Intriguing, Layered

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

DT: Every 2 weeks or whenever I have new work, which is usually a few times a month.

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

DT: I love colorful images, technically flawless, artistically strong, surprising, unexpected and I try to mix it up, showing my clients my versatility.

Q: What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks8?

DT: I can post unlimited images to the home page and link them to a particular portfolio, move them into a particular order within seconds. I love the fact that you can choose 3 different template layouts for each portfolio and view it in one click. It is super easy to understand.

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

DT: Keep it simple.

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

Christopher Paul Brown is an abstract photographer that has dedicated his time to capturing fascinating artwork. His work has appeared in numerous shows as well as having a one-man show in 1985. To see more of his work, visit his website: www.christopherpaulbrown.com.

In January of 1978 I used student loan proceeds to purchase a Contax RTS camera with a Zeiss lens. I was attending film school, but my intentions there were to work commercially and pay my bills. I needed a strictly artistic outlet and photography suited me best.

The reception to my marketing was strong. I was in numerous juried shows and publications. The Standard Oil Company bought one of my photographs for their collection and I had my first solo show by 1985. Shortly thereafter, for a host of reasons, I let go of the marketing side of photography. I continued to shoot and eventually replaced my 35mm Contax with a Mamiya medium format camera, began shooting in color, and by 2013 moved into digital photography. It was my excitement with the digital arena that helped me decide to market my photography once again in 2013. Shortly afterwards, I discovered liveBooks, which perfectly suited my web presence.

I consider myself an alchemist. The early alchemists focused primarily on matter. They were the precursors of today’s chemists and their belief was that hidden qualities lay within mundane matter. Unlike today’s chemists, they saw their own personal power as affecting the outcome of their alchemical investigations. In the 20th century, the surrealists and psychotherapists such as Carl Jung and Otto Rank took alchemy to a new level and applied to art and people what the older alchemists had applied to mundane matter. In my own view, consciousness is something shared not only among plants and animals, but also among ordinary items such as grains of sand, cars, and tables. Consciousness is all there is, but our world is wrapped up in a great masquerade.

With my photography, I experience myself as less of a creator of images than a conductor of energies beyond myself. Just as a lens conducts light and a wire conducts electricity, I invite and allow energies beyond my conscious understanding to flow through and co-create these images. My job is to stand astride a polarity: on the one hand I am open, accepting the serendipity of the unexpected, of whatever appears that is beyond the surface of things, but at the same time I am focused on creating a strong image that reveals a depth that is beyond words. With these two intentions, polar opposites though they are, powerful energies are often released. When I am lucky, they manifest images that offer depth and richness.

My work is the opposite of a mental construct. I don’t begin with a series in mind of a title for a photograph. Rather, the series or title reveals itself afterwards. Each image, and series of images, has a consciousness of its own, related to my consciousness, yet also independent of me. In many ways, I am like a paleontologist who unearths pre-existing bones from the earth. In my case, the earth is a metaphor for the unconscious and the unexplained.

I believe these images tell non-linear stories. They seem to be both subterranean and unconscious. I think of them as the wordless shards of dreams that have survived awakening.