“Think vertical, vertical, vertical!” My good friend Richard likes to remind aviation photographers to think vertical when flying air to air photo missions. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t think verticals naturally. My vision is always on either the wide or intimate horizontal not the vertical. My mind’s eye just doesn’t naturally go vertically but if you want magazine covers, you gotta think vertically. In my entire editorial career, I was never after covers because I naturally arrange elements horizonatly. The one cover I cherish the most was the last wrap around cover Audubon magazine ever did in 1995, a horizontal image of a California Gnatcatcher. Not really worried about covers, I don’t shoot verticals for covers. Just having my 10th cover for 2014 hitting the news rack this week, it made me think I should say something about this unnatural photographic format that does pay bills.
Being an old fart, I still call them verticals still while most call them the portrait format. Anyways, the vertical used on magazine covers is not the same aspect ration as when we turn our cameras vertically. At that same time, covers have to have room for type and at the very minimum, the name of the magazine at the top of the vertical. So if verticals aren’t a challenge enough, you should leave room for the cropping to the right aspect ration and type. Just knowing those two things, you can see why I’ve never been really trying to get covers. Staying true to your style and storytelling makes covers hard to do. But covers are where the money lies with some going for as much as $2k on the big mags! What you see here is our 10th cover for the year and one I shot hoping it would be a cover. If you look at the top image and remove the type, you can see that it’s not an image you would normally frame in that way. Because without the crop and text, it’s kinda stale. If you look at the bottom and crop it to the right aspect ratio for a cover and place type, you can imagine how tight it would be. That intimate portrait was why I framed it the way I did to begin with in the viewfinder. So while we typically go to the vertical format to tell the story of height, I want to encourage you to think about the other life of the vertical.