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.

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Today Viewbook reached the magical number of 10.000 users! We’d like to thank everyone who made this possible. Special thanks goes out to our beta testers, thanks for all the invaluable feedback. For our 10.000th user we have a special gift, “The Art Of Looking Sideways”, a brilliant -and beautifully designed- book by Alan Fletcher one of the worlds greatest designers. The book is an inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, images, curious facts, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories, all concerned with the interplay between word and image. A lot of big thinkers come across, from Goethe to Philip Starck from George Orwell to Charles Eames. So happy reading to lucky Ailine Liefeld, the book will be with you in a couple of days.

So now that everyone had some time to get used to the new look of the web site, we think now is a good time to unveil the new image manager, image galleries and portfolio pages! We silently rolled out a completely new version of Viewbook.

Of course, there are a number of new features we want you to discover and try out. Overall, we wanted to keep the simplicity and practicality but still add more useful features to fulfill everyone’s needs. The post below contains more information on that topic, but the best way to find out what the new Viewbook has to offer, is to try it out yourself.

And, please let us know what you think, we’re always eager to hear.

Hi everyone,

To inform our current and new users we wanted to let you know about the changes and new items and features on Viewbook. See the list below for the most important new Viewbook features.

• All current users keep their existing account for free

• All current and future users will have unlimited presentations and web pages

• IMPORTANT: You can now choose where you want to store your images to maximize downloading speed. Go to the account tab and select a region

• The Library in the Image Manager is not there anymore. All your images must be inside a presentation from now on. Your Library is now a presentation with the name [Old Library images].

• The Trash is not holding your deleted images anymore. Once you drag your images to the Trash they will be deleted immediately. Your old Trash images are now inside a presentation with the name [Old Trash images].

• A ‘getting started’ tutorial is available in our support section

• The web browser requirements for Viewbook changed. In the new version we do not support Internet Explorer 6 and Safari 2.0 anymore. You need Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3 or Firefox 2 to use Viewbook. With those browsers it is possible to use Viewbook on almost all platforms.

• All paid upgrades are expected to be available at the end of March 2008.

If you experience any difficulties find any Bugs or if you have any suggestions, please leave a post on our forum here.