Memorial Day usually finds the beach my family and I frequent packed with bodies. So it was with a feeling of trepidation (I hate crowds) that we approached the boardwalk to Ocean Grove. But wait, where is the boardwalk? It wasn’t there, just some remnants of the pylons. There are worse tragedies in the world I know, but I sure did miss walking on the boardwalk. We made the best of it though and walked along the shore of the beach from Ocean Grove up to Asbury Park and back.

I of course had my camera with me and took pictures while my wife and the kids gathered sea shells and explored the wonders of that transitory environments. After a while I found myself shooting in the same manner as I did when I was working for a nature magazine. Shooting horizontals but also turning my camera 90 degrees to get a vertical shot. Why do verticals? After all most images work better as a horizontal. It is how we see the world. But if you are a budding magazine photographer a vertical shot may land you on the cover of a publication, especially if there is a lot of quiet space to text.

I was always being reminded to take plenty of verticals by photo editors. As a horizontal you might get an image good enough to have as a spread but usually it would wind up being a fraction of a page.

But now imagine that you want to use the image as a cover of a magazine that is natively taller than it is wide and you need space for the title of the magazine plus a few blurbs. Then you would need something like this:

Lots of blank space on top for a title plus some extra teaser texts. Sometimes the world is just more dramatic with a vertical perspective. I like to use verticals to empahsize our place in the world.