Well the times they are a chagin’. I was watching an episode of “The Grid” a week or so ago when Matt Kloskowski had brought up something that has been in the back of my mind for some time. He and Scott were talking about print and whether it dying or already dead. Matt brought up a point about how we need to start thinking about the orientation we shoot and that shooting vertical is starting to penalize us.
It got me thinking, I love shooting in portrait format, but it is indeed starting to penalize me. Monitors are all widescreen horizontal now. When you post a landscape ratio photo it expands all nice and big, but when you post a portrait ratio photo the long edge goes up and down, which is the short edge of the monitor so it’s all compressed and small.
But where do we go from here? It isn’t ending with computer monitors. Print is indeed dying. When we as photographers shot in portrait ratio it was always to shoot for magazines, they are vertical, they required vertical formats to land a cover photo. Horizontal photos that were inside a magazine, unless double trucked are always smaller then their vertically shot counterparts. The world has flipped.
For those magazines who are trying to change with the times to stay afloat there are loads of things they are having to figure out on the fly. Do they simply create a digital version of their current print magazines like they do on the digital magazine app Zinio or do they start from scratch creating fully enriched and immerse digital mags like Scott Kelby’s “Light It” magazine.
If you are creating content for a new “digital” magazine how will the person be holding the device? For arguments sake, lets take the iPad since it is the most popular. I have one, I subscribe to both Zinio versions of traditional magazines and I subscribe to Light It. Right now both start out in a traditional format with the iPad being held like a magazine with the long edge in your hands. After the title page though where does the experience take you?
With both Light it and Zinio when you flip through the magazine they go page by page. However when you turn the iPad so that you are holding it landscape, then you see the two page spreads. The problem with this is that the pages and the content on them are now small. Just like posting vertical photos on a horizontal monitor. Maybe it is time we throw it all out the window. Instead of two individual pages making up a horizontal spread why not start laying out a magazine where the photos are horizontal taking advantage of holding the device landscape and placing content and copy within the photo.
Right now we are at the beginning of a long road of technical decisions that need to be made in the industry. We as photographers also could be in the unique position to help shape the new direction of this old industry. Why should we still have to flip our devices back and fourth based on the content on the page or spread? Does a page really need to be a page like we know today or can it be transformed into something totally new. These are just a few of the thoughts that were bouncing around in my head the other night, thanks to Matt and Scott for getting my brain thinking.
p.s. clicking on the photo gives you a nice large version to look at on your horizontal monitor!
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