With 100,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. For one of their current exhibitions LACMA uses Viewbook to show a selection of art works from Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters. You can visit the the LACMA page here.

Today we pushed some Image Manager optimizations online, together with a new Share feature. You can now share your Viewbook galleries almost everywhere. With just a few clicks you can embed your gallery in Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress and 20 other platforms I did not even know the existence of. It’s quite amazing how fast you have your gallery posted in your Blogger web site.

The new Share feature can also automatically bookmark your Viewbook gallery to Del.icio.us, StumbleOpon, Twitter and 30 others.

Just click the ‘Share’ button on top of your presentation to get started. Happy sharing!

The public Viewbook presentations were not available in the weekend of 14/15 March, because of network problems. You can read more at our System Status forum here.

With Viewbook it’s possible to create multiple web pages. Web pages are portfolio or project pages that bundle your presentations, to make them available to the public.

The new web page style settings allow you to adjust the page to your specific needs. You can choose the image size (small, wide and large), background color, hide or add a custom logo, and more. We’ve added a brand new tutorial to our support section; Create and Customize Portfolio Pages to get you going and which shows you all the available options.

If you want to try all of this you can upgrade to the Standard or Pro account and try it one month for free. Login to your account and go to the ‘account’ tab and choose ‘upgrades’.

To show you what you can do with those style settings see the examples below.

wide images, white background, default font | open example

wide images, black background, no-logo | open example

large images, dark blue background, Serif font | open example

In this first post of our portfolio series, we’ll show you three portfolios. Using low-fi techniques and without uncovering the scratches the following artists create ‘unpolished’ and very atmospheric images.

Jeffrey Engel engelfoto.viewbook.com
Jeffrey uses an interesting combination of cameras and techniques to create his high-contrast apocalyptic like images. He uses a hard-to-find 4×5 (large format) infrared film on a Graflex Speed Graphic modified to use an old giant WWII-era airplane reconnaissance camera lens. A digital camera that was modified internally so that the sensor only captures infrared light and an old Soviet-era medium format camera with a broken lens that gives weird focus / de-focus effects much like a large-format camera.

Adriano Sodré cassiopeia.viewbook.com
The Holga is a cheap, medium format 120 film toy camera, made in China, appreciated for its low-fidelity aesthetic. Adriano creates simple personal, silently framed, sometimes utter sweet pictures (see the ‘natureza viva’ series).

Gabriele Rosso gabrielerosso.viewbook.com
Gabriele Rosso shows you graphic design, photography, illustration and clothing, leaving the rough edges in place.

Interested in getting your portfolio here? Drop us an e-mail with the link to your Viewbook portfolio.