A couple of months ago, whilst I was in Iceland on my summer photography workshop I was contacted by liveBooks and asked if I would be interested in joining their new Ambassador program. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with liveBooks, this USA based company specialises custom designed and pre-designed website templates for photographers. They are widely regarded by many as the industry standard for portfolio websites for professional photographers around the world and it is with great pleasure I join their Ambassador program. My own liveBooks website can be seen at www.jholko.com. Professional photographers need to stand out from the crowd and liveBooks have had a major hand in helping me grow my own business. I have been a liveBooks customer for more than eight years now (I was actually the first Australian photographer to sign up) and during this time have been continually developing and updating my website and blog. I have seen the company change hands and continue to grow with both new template and custom options (My own site at www.jholko.com now has quite a lot of custom flash programming for the workshop section of my website) as well as additional offerings such as Blogs and Video pages. During this time I have also seen many other prominent photographers choose liveBooks as their website of choice – both for the clean slick look and for the user friendly back end for managing images. One of the key factors that originally drew me to liveBooks was the time-saving back end support they offer. My time is very limited when it comes to allocating time for website maintenance and anything that saves me time and effort is a major plus. There are some very well known names amongst liveBooks list of clientele and if you are considering a move to a new web design or in setting up your first photography website it is well worth checking out their list of clients, example websites as well as their extensive range of template websites and custom designs.
Being an Ambassador for a company that has lead and continues to lead the industry in photography websites for photographers is an honour and I am very much looking forward to working with the team at liveBooks on some new projects over the coming year. I have several personal projects I am currently working on at present including a book on Polar and Sub Polar Photography, as well as an exciting project I will undertake in Iceland late next March (more to come on this soon). liveBooks will be assisting me with making these projects a reality and I am looking forward very much to the release of these projects.
Edit – The observant amongst you may have noticed that I have been a little slack of late in updating my photo of the month here on my blog. I did have the best intentions to update the photo of the month whilst I was in the Arctic but the little down time I did have between workshops and expeditions was spent catching up on email correspondence. This photograph of a large female Polar Bear is my photograph of the month for August (Yes – September is coming soon!) and was taken at approximately 80º North of Svalbard at the edge of the pack ice around midnight. We were fortunate to come across this bear on a fresh seal kill and we spent a couple of hours making photographs of this incredible animal. This particular image was shot with the Canon EOS 1DX and the new Canon 200-400mm F4L IS lens with inbuilt 1.4 Teleconverter and was actually shot through the open porthole of my cabin window on M.S Origo. M.S Origo is a wonderful ship for polar photography – with operable portholes that are only 60cm above the pack ice it provides the perfect vantage point for photographing these incredible animals. You can see a higher resolution version of this photograph on my Live-Books website at www.jholko.com
By way of full disclosure: I have always paid for all my liveBooks services out my own hard earned money – that includes my original website design, blog design and yearly hosting costs, plus all the custom work I have engaged them to complete. As an Ambassador I am entitled to a number of benefits with liveBooks that I negotiate on an as needs basis.
www.WILDNATUREPHOTOTRAVEL.com 