So far no one has really dealt with this issue. Reading text up and down is not great, our eyes were made to scan side to side. Plus Cinema HD is horizontal. So basically you have display technologies that are trending in the opposite way to the semantics of the web. The web has no css for pagination that I am aware of, it needs a way to take data and format it for horizontal viewing and not scrolling.

Animated page turning is really really dumb. Another issue is frame rates, currently when you scroll something like T magazine online horizontally you get a lot of image shudder. This is another issue to be fixed. But the time will come although I think web/tech will need to be pushed somehow to think in this way. The verticality of “code” has their brains thinking this way I think.

I don’t ever think magazines will go away. But might there be a photographer who doesn’t shoot for magazines or newspapers but instead shoots for this new lcd medium?

I know I’m seeing work online that would not reproduce appropriately and these are photographers who are loved online.

we can all agree on a moratorium on the word “pop.” I might pop my eyes out otherwise…

At my magazine (a national lifestyle/automotive title), it takes quite a bit of convincing to get the A.D. on board for a B/W shoot. The people here think B/W won’t “pop” (I’m hating that phrase these days), but how could it not in a sea of over-saturated CGI’d work?

@sean: when magazines go away and we are left with the LCD, does this mean there will be some latitude? A large computer monitor is much better for the reproduction of photographs. Poorer however for reading.

@eric: nice to hear from you! everyone click on his name and check out his new book: Breach of Peace…

Whether you’re doing 4-color separations or just black and white it makes no difference. Printing photography on both of these paper products is ALWAYS a nightmare and the resulting style preferences of photography editors are for frontally lit, bright images that have clear separation.

This is probably more a preference that came down from the pre-press people and landed squarely on the desk of assignment editors who HAD to deliver a eye-catching product to the news stands.

This style preference is dominant today whether it’s news, fashion or something else and it’s also a continuation of a tradition especially in editorial and news photography where a black and white photograph shot by available light would be printed with the hand of god just to create that same kind of separation.

This preference for clear separation OR very frontally lit two dimensional photographs is nothing new, but its also very seldom talked about.

I know if I’m shooting for newsprint that this will dictate to me shooting a style that is reproduce-able.

Not always true. When I worked as a story editor at Rolling Stone (’90-’94), first Laurie Kratochvil and then Fred Woodward were always commissioning B&W photos to go with my articles. Which were much more often than not great images.

Still, as an editor, one wants to have a little input from time to time. I took one of my last features — about the Spur Posse — to Fred, and suggested/asked just this one time could we have color portraits. He looked at me as if I had just run over his dog.

The B&W portraits that accompanied the article were fabulous.