Every family enjoys the flexibility offered by City Photography photographers, but this flexibility often comes at a cost. it is not a cost in money but simply that we have to educate our clients in the way to design and put things together – or things get a little messy.
In this guide to making Montage images that look good for Canvas printing the issue is more complex that meets the eye as it is all about layout aspects.
You may not know there are two types of photograph layout, this means that the images are either Portrait – Camera on the side or they are landscape – camera upright Or for those who want more simpler terms, a tall photo or a wide one respectively.
The current trend for many people is Wide aspect images, like wide-screen TV’s or even wider than that.
Most cameras photograph in a 4:3 aspect
As you can see in this image the 16:9 is a wide-screen aspect.
This means that the top or bottom or even both are cropped from the image to give it this wide aspect.
Don’t worry about this if you’re trying this yourself on a compact camera and you wont get the quality to be able to print images to a good standard when cropped.
Montage prints contain more than one image, just like the left image above: As you can see the image is more of a square than it is wide.
This retains the aspect of the images, as you can see on the image above right, this is the standard aspect ratio layout. Buy selecting mixed aspect images, you can quickly see how the clean lines of the image cannot be achieved. However, some moving around could help.
The portrait images could fit along the side of the main image, or all images could be the same size; this being that the two portraits sit over each other as do the landscapes, again this makes a square image.
It is often easy to “wide-screen” images cropping the landscapes to the same size as the portraits – giving you the option for one portrait and one landscape on one wise aspect print.
OR you can crop the portrait (with out chopping off body parts) to make this fit, or a bit of cropping from both.
BTW cropping means cutting off part of the image.
You then get something like this:
to details this image above… The green area is the print size, the white areas are standard aspect images. The grey (lighter) is the matching of two images to create a wide image and to keep the lines – the top and bottom images on the same levels..
The dark grey area would be the area that is cropped (removed) from the standard aspect ration image to make the final image.
What you should end up with for a large wide aspect image is something like this:
This is a mathematics quandary. The wide image when used as a main feature and cropped to give a wide aspect, much relate to the aspect ratio of the other images to give a length (width) that is equal.
If you take for example the above image. We know that the little images on the bottom are say 6 CM wide each, there are 4 so the top image must be 24CM wide. BUT we have images along the side.. we then have to select these images to make sure they are the correct height, after cropping you have to know the sizes, so if the big image is 24cm then you will know the hight of the images. this will tell you how many images you can fit in. But then you have to consider the sizes of all images in the print. (or you end up with tiny prints along one side)
What we had to do for the above image was lots of cropping. The main image has been cropped both top and bottom.
Starting from the bottom left to the top right..
Standard landscape, cropped portrait, cropped portrait, standard aspect. cropped portrait (top and bottom) squared portrait. cropped portrait.
Without cropping, this selection of images would not fit together. As a client will not know the image sizes or where and if an image should be cropped it does make it hard for them to order images.
The KEY ADVICE – select your images, pick an order of importance and then let your photographer design the print for you!
tell your photographer what you want BEFORE the photo shoot, this allows your photographer to take the correct images for printing.
You can help your photographer, selecting an equal amount of portraits and landscape images, and offering OR images.. these would be the if that doesn’t work try this picture..
And who said photography was easy???
