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New Viewbook brother portrait

By Alrik | April 13th, 2011 | 2 Comments

photo: ©Ilse Leenders

Striving to be an open and personal company, we thought it would be nice to give you an idea of us, the people behind Viewbook. Last year we worked together with photographer Mamabart who came up with an idea for a group portrait and we really enjoyed the process of working with him. We thought it would be nice to create a new portrait every year, to use for our about us page and to share the creation process. But who to do it with? What would be the new idea? Tapping into the creativity of our Viewbook users for an idea sounded like a nice way to get in touch with more Viewbook users. The one with the best idea wins the portrait shoot. We received many ideas from Rome to Berlin, and there were some quite extreme ones in there. The one that really caught our attention and got us excited was the idea that Ilse Leenders e-maild us. Her idea in her own words:

“What I was thinking about is to create a portrait in which the connectedness between you as brothers becomes visual. To make it seem like you are attached like a ball of wool or connected with some sort of web. Actually you are together making a sort of sculpture with the ropes or elastics. Also I would like the city of Rotterdam to be as background as this is the city where all the creation takes place.”

Ilse took us to the riverside and together with two assistants she wired us up.
See a short video of the shoot:

We are very happy with the result and hope you like it too! It’s on our new about us page. Many thanks to Ilse Leenders as well as all the other photographers who send in their ideas. Cheers!

Aperture export plugin for Viewbook

By Rien | April 4th, 2011 | 13 Comments

As of now a plugin to export images from Apple’s Aperture to Viewbook is available here. So from now on you can create new presentations and update your Viewbook website straight from your Aperture library.

On January the 29th I received this e-mail from Jean-Christophe Gallagher: “I am new to Viewbook, and I like it so far! I’d like to obtain an api key, as I am building my own export plug-in for Aperture.” I immediately asked Jean-Christophe if he wanted to make the plugin publicly available. Two months later it is ready and available for everyone to use! A big thank you to Jean-Christophe.

The plugin comes with an installer, exports IPTC data (captions) to Viewbook, allows you to select and create a new Viewbook album within the plugin and allows you to choose how to compress and size your images when exporting to Viewbook.

We’ve added the plugin to Viewbook’s add-ons page or you can get it via the link below.

> Download and instructions.

Viewbook meetup Rotterdam, thanks for stopping by!

By Alrik | March 25th, 2011 | No Comments

Snapshot of last Tuesday’s meetup in our office.

Thanks all for a wonderful evening. Great that many of you came from far to meet us and each other. Special thanks to Anders eten for the surprising concept catering and Ilse Leenders for presenting our new portrait. London is next, stay tuned!

Share your work in Social Media!?

By Alrik | March 18th, 2011 | 3 Comments

With our new feature, ‘Publish images to Flickr & Facebook’, sharing your images in these social contexts has become very easy. You can do it in just three clicks. But which of your images do you share on Facebook or Flickr and which do you not? And when do you or don’t you?

“I think, therefore I am”, is a famous quote from Descartes, which nowadays can probably be translated to “I share, therefore I am.“ While on- and offline participation in social communities can take many different forms, the fact of the matter is that we all invest in social interaction. Sharing thoughts, ideas and work with people simply opens up new opportunities.

However on the one side, there’s the desire to be independent and autonomous as an artist, on the other side the necessity to share. It’s a challenge to find a balance within this paradox.

Brandon Schulman, in our first podcast, says the following:

“I don’t love mixing work and personal stuff, which is definitely an issue on Facebook. A blog is great for me. I see it as another way for people to get to know me without knowing me. I see all these things as a way for people to take a little bite, if somebody wants you they are going to get you, it’s important not to force things upon people.”

I’d like this post to be a start of a discussion about whether or not to share works on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media. And if yes; in what manner? Got ideas or insights that you like to share? Please post it in the comments!

New mobile Galleries for iPad, iPhone and Android

By Rien | March 17th, 2011 | 19 Comments

Developing fluidly functioning mobile galleries for the iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices is not an easy task; dealing with memory issues, different versions of operating systems and many different screen sizes makes it a very specialized job. We’ve put a lot of effort in this and we’re very happy with the result. Here’s a breakdown of the major new features and improvements.

The touch ‘swipe’ navigation is improved drastically. We’ve also added image titles and descriptions and a new interface design. There’s a slide show option and loading and unloading of images is optimized for the memory limit of mobile devices. But that’s not all, we’ve generated special lighter mobile versions of your images to make them load faster for a smooth viewing experience, also for the slower mobile connections. The gallery works on any browser and any screen size on any device. The option to put the gallery as an icon on your iPad’s home screen is great for if you want to view it later or show it to someone else. From your home screen the gallery opens without a browser bar for an even cleaner view.

I think we can say we now offer the best performing and cleanest mobile galleries around. Happy to hear your reactions below.

Publish images to Flickr & Facebook

By Alrik | March 17th, 2011 | 5 Comments

Also think uploading the same images again and again is a waste of time? No need to do that anymore. We just released our Viewbook export to Flickr and Facebook that let’s you publish complete albums and image selections in a click. For details on how it works, see the tutorial

Also see the post ‘Share your work in social media!?’

Launched: Viewbook TechBlog

By Rien | March 16th, 2011 | 1 Comment

When starting a web-based software company like Viewbook, many technical challenges will cross your path. During the past years I learned a lot from blogposts from other developers. Some really helped in making the bigger decisions, others helped to solved little problems. Fact is that developer blogs became an indispensable resource for developers.

I think it’s time that we share some of our experiences. Some will be about software architecture, Ruby, CSS, Javascript, others will be about web based software and being a tech company in general. So if you are a developer, or know any friends who might be interested visit our new techblog here.

Viewbook PhotoStory 2010 yearbook available now!

By Alrik | March 16th, 2011 | No Comments

Viewbook PhotoStory 2010 yearbook from Viewbook on Vimeo.

We started this second edition of the Viewbook PhotoStory contest with a question: “To what extent can narrative strength arise out of a series of images and evoke emotions in viewers?” As Garry Winogrand ironically stated, no single photograph has any narrative ability, it just displays a subject captured by a camera; and so we challenged photographers around the world to show what narrative strength they could unleash in a photographic story built up of a series of images. In this yearbook, we are proud to present the six stories that succeeded best, according to our five expert jury members. These six stories made their creators the winners of the Viewbook PhotoStory 2010 Jury Prizes.

Ivan and the Moon by Daria Tuminas
All That You Leave by Luis Lazo
Exodus by Vincent Elkaim
In Ramallah I Can Breathe by Guy Martin
A Portrait of America Left Behind by Brandon Schulman
Fatalistic Tendency by Tushikur Rahman

You can buy the book in our Blurb bookstore. The softcover version goes for €39,95 and the hardcover for €47,95.

The book is edited by Alrik Swagerman, designed by Paul Swagerman with assistance of Frank van Leeuwen. Special thanks to Peter Bas Mensink and Cecily Layzell from GUP Magazine. The books are published using Blurb’s PDF to Book service. The winners of this years awards will receive a box of books for their self-promotion, sponsored by our friends at Blurb.

www.viewbookphotostory.com

Join our first Viewbook meetup!

By Alrik | March 2nd, 2011 | No Comments

Between designing and developing new Viewbook features, this year we’ll be traveling to Europe’s main capitals to meet as many Viewbook users as possible. To kick off this year’s meet ups, we’ll open up our office in Rotterdam and invite all Viewbook users to meet eachother and have a drink with us. A nice opportunity to get and share new insights… and who knows what else will happen.

Collective slideshow
Everybody who joins the meetup can send in one image. We’ll put it in a slideshow and beam it on the wall. It can be a photograph that you made, someone else’s photograph, or a graphic image, illustration or design, good or bad, anything goes! Just be sure to mail your jpeg to alrik@viewbook.com before March 21st. (best 1920 pixels wide 72dpi, but smaller is ok too)

Ilse Leenders
Photographer Ilse Leenders is working on our next founding-brother-portrait at the moment and will unveil it on the evening for the first time. She will also tell us a bit about how it came together.

Demo and support corner
Ask anything about the use of Viewbook and we will demonstrate it right away.

To let us know you will join, RSVP HERE.

Date: March 22nd 2011
Time: 20:00 – 23:00
Location: Viewbook HQ Stadhuisplein 11, 3012 AR Rotterdam

Conversation 01: Brandon Schulman

By Alrik | March 1st, 2011 | 3 Comments

To kick off our podcast ‘Viewbook Conversations’, Alrik Swagerman, co-founder of Viewbook.com talks with Brandon Schulman , 2nd-Prize winner in our Viewbook PhotoStory 2010 contest. After the contest, we got to know a bit more about Brandon and became intrigued and curious. This man seems to live and create his own adventure with no compromise. For the last months Brandon has been traveling pre-picked states with his pickup truck and his large format camera for his series ‘A portrait of America left behind’. Alrik decided to give him a call, to find out a bit more about the man behind the story.

Listen in iTunes. Subscribe to podcast RSS.