You Can Shoot a Magazine Cover

Outdoor Photographer Magazine Cover, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

A few months ago I mentioned that I had gone out for a few days in pursuit of images which might serve as a good magazine cover. In photography circles the term “landscape” is often synonymous with a horizontally-oriented image, capturing broad swaths of the outdoors with a wide angle or ultra-wide lens. Most landscape photographers know that it can also be very powerful to emphasized objects in teh foreground by using a vertical orientation with a wide angle lens. To be able to offer prints in a format such as 16×20 which is more square than a typical sensor’s 4×6 aspect ratio, you have to compose the shot with a shorter height in mind.

A few years ago I met a full time stock photographer in Mt. Rainer National Park, and he pointed out that magazines are close to the relatively short 8×10 vertical format, but they require even more open and non-critical space in the image to accommodate the magazine’s title and text describing the articles inside.

I never forgot this advice, so when I was looking for images to submit to Outdoor Photographer, I was able to offer a range of possibilities which were not only nice photos, but also met the layout requirements for a magazine cover. It works, as shown by my photo on the cover of Outdoor Photographer’s October issue.

The next time you’re out shooting landscape photographs, visualize an 8×10 composition which is shorter than what you see in the viewfinder, but also intentionally leave room in the composition, maybe shoot a little wider, to improve your odds of producing a magazine-compatible result.

Shooting a little wider when composing a shot also enables you to perform leveling adjustments in post-processing, it improves your cropping flexibility, and it can make gallery wrap canvas prints easier to produce as only non-critical portions of your image will get wrapped around the frame. So give vertical compositions due attention next time you go out, and in particular try to back off a bit from tight, tall compositions, and see what you can can up with!