Niall Benvie is a wildlife photographer who writes regularly for Outdoor Photography Magazine. His article Designer Insights sits well with the section of this course dealing with designing a book cover. Although the article deals more with images that may be used in magazine articles or to illustrate books, the principle is the same. He discusses his earlier photography where his one aim was to get as close to a subject as possible and fill the image with it leaving little 'negative space' around it. He now feels that whether an image is published or not depends more on fitting the criteria of editor and designer. As a designer and editor, himself, now, for a variety of projects, he often questions why a photographer has framed an image so tightly and not left any room for cropping or including text. He suggests that horizontal images should be shot rather than vertical as a vertical image will never be used for a double page spread and is only good for a cover, whereas a horizontal image will fill a double page and can be cropped to vertical for a cover or single page. I agree with this to a certain extent as I regularly submit images to our local paper to feature in their 'Camera Club' slot. I now only submit horizontal images as only this format features as 'Picture of the Day' which runs across two pages. Vertical images are only used as smaller additional club images. I regularly give talks to groups on my wildlife, landscape and travel photography to groups ranging from church groups, through WI to Wild Life Trust, RSPB groups and camera clubs. For these I need horizontal images to project onto a screen At these talks I sell greeting cards and for these I need vertical format images so always shoot both formats, especially if I am using my fixed focus 500mm lens and the image would be too close to crop to vertical. Niall Benvie goes on to say that not only is it better to shoot horizontal but space needs to be left around the image for text and cropping.
I remember Pete Cairns (Northshots) telling us that you should always work a subject until you have everything you want and not to be satisfied with one shot. Maybe there is a message here: if possible take images in horizontal and vertical formats, tightly cropped images and images with plenty of negative space around so that images for all uses are in the portfolio.
http://niallbenvie.photoshelter.com/
I have selected two images from my protfolio that have plenty of negative space around them for text, for use as double page spreads or for projection. I have also cropped both to vertical format so they could be used as single page images or cover shots or would be suitable for card production. Both images were taken on a Canon 7D; the crested tit with a Canon 500mm and the red squirrel with Canon 100-400 at 400mm.
To view large, click on an image.
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