The death of vertical photos

In our earlier threads, New Business Models: Time to rethink what publication means and Possible "out of the box" solutions we discussed what happens when you rethink the old business model of printing photos on paper to be distributed to a quantifiable number of people and shift to an Internet based publication model.

But many of the current biases coming from the old print mentality are still being used on web pages. As younger designers, who relate to the monitor more than paper, begin to redesign publishing, photography will certainly be affected.

Dirck Halstead in The Coming Earthquake in Photography continues this discussion. He notes that as newspapers send their photographers out with video cameras, the entire concept of a "page" will change.

The standard 8x10 aspect ratio now commonly used will be dropped. Why waste all of that horizontal information in the pictures? Eventually, you can expect to see wide-screen pictures not only on your TV screen, but in print as well. We predict that magazines (those that still exist) in 10 years will be bound on the top or bottom, not on the sides as they now are. That will allow the magazine to be opened to display a horizontal rather than vertical layout. This will accommodate all those "wide-screen" photographs. However, it is more likely that paper printing will be long since gone, and instead newspapers, magazines and books will be delivered on "electronic" paper, in which case the visual presentation would most likely be video in the first place.

. . . Don Winslow, the editor of News Photographer magazine, has noted that vertical photographs have almost ceased to exist in the photography lexicon.

If it's time to rethink what publication means, maybe it's also time to rethink pro-photo education.

photography trade associations;Photography Business;Photography Business Models;Photo Education;Newspaper Publishing