In our continuing efforts to give you some insight on how the world of photography looks through a working professionals eyes, via our Whats’ In The Bag? series of videos, subscribers to the free NEWSLETTER, know that we are trying to put some tools in your hands to help you get into that world yourself.

While we love and appreciate the power of the still photograph, and appreciate all of the experience of that final image, photoinduced.com wants to also help those of you that want to transition into the commerce side of photography.

Sure many of you are already there, but perhaps a new tool to help you promote your work is what may jump start a whole new deal.
When we first saw Viewbook, the concept itself was intriguing.

Every photographer (and every business) needs a website, we know. Social media has so permeated our lives that you must have a platform to communicate with your audience, as well as promote, do business, and well, open a virtual storefront.
This is what we feel Viewbooks does.

Viewbook – Portfolio Perfect from Viewbook on Vimeo.

“Viewbook is not a pre-fab template website service, but a format based website creation tool integrated with an online Image Manager that you can also use to create and share individual albums and pages for daily projects. With the Lightroom plugin you can update your sites and client presentations straight from your Lightroom library.

We believe it’s important that photographers look beyond just a static portfolio website. To engage with people it’s important that they take control and communicate their work actively, update that site regularly, integrate and run the blog, create password protected client areas, create special project pages to show of and embed slideshows in Facebook and such… Doing this will give them a good advantage to those who don’t because connecting and engaging with clients and audiences is directly related to a photographers reputation and success in the competitive photography industry. Although it obviously starts with good images;)

We also think photographers should have enough creative freedom to create things their own way, that’s why we dislike template websites, which are based on too many conventions and make everybody look the same.”

This week we’ll be giving away a FREE, one year pro subscription, worth $190. to one of our NEWSLETTER subscribers at photoinduced.com.

So make sure you are signed up by Tuesday night, May 25th, to be eligible for the giveaway.

We will also be using Viewbooks for our work and report back in. So far, we’re happy.

And if you just want to take a look, you can get a free 30 day trial.
We know that choosing a home for your photographs and business is a major one so look carefully, and choose wisely.
As we say “measure twice, cut once”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 at 11:17 am and is filed under Photo News, Weekly Giveaway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.