Framing your images for maximum effect is a key part of a successful composition. Whether you're shooting portraits or landscapes in far away lands, there's always a constant battle to set the perfect composition. One of the challenges is choosing between a vertical or horizontal composition. Some subjects are inherently better looking when shoot vertically. Others look better in a horizontal format. Sure that matters from the esthetic point of view. But what does that really matter to a photo editor.

I've exchanged several e-mails recently with people asking about the frustration of shooting horizontally only to find that a publisher was looking for a vertical shot. But wait, you're thinking. All you have to do is just crop the image in a vertically. Unfortunately for most digital cameras, this constitutes a very significant crop. As an example on the D2h you would go from a 2464x1632, 4.1mp image to a 1632x1088, 1.8mp image. That's a huge crop. Unfortunately, the same results will happened for a 12mp D2x image. The crop is tremendous. Not only that, lots of print publishers out there require more than 8mp's for their digital submissions. In Nikon's line-up, only the relatively full sized DX format D2x and the recently announced D200 will fit the need--and that's without a crop. You can crop little if any and certainly won't be able to turn a horizontal image into a vertical. What I'm saying here is you can not depend on a crop to get you that sale. You have take things into your own hands and deal with the situation. You have to shoot vertically and horizontally.

First and foremost, I always remember that "yes, you can shoot vertically". The trick to this is most cameras are simply designed so it's easier to shoot horizontally than vertically. Whether there's simply no buttons that support vertical shooting, or something as simple as you nose gets in the way thus making it a bit uncomfortable, shooting vertically is generally harder than horizontally because of the camera design. For me, my biggest pet peeve when shooting vertically is the bill of my hat doesn't clear the camera body thus pushing the hat off my head or I start looking like a dork with it hanging on the back of my head--I can be a fashion conscience kind of guy sometimes...

Even though it's more difficult to shoot vertically, don't let that little detail stop you. Learn to deal with the inconvenience. Learn to orient the camera so you can access the most important switches. Or, if that can't work buy a camera that will support vertical shooting. All newer pro level digital cameras will support vertical shooting by being configured with a set of buttons or that have a special add-on hand hold that have the buttons that make vertically shooting easier.

All of Nikon's latest pro-level digital cameras have Command, Sub-command, shutter release, and AF-activation buttons available for the vertical shooter. They even conveniently set a couple of other buttons that can be reached either in the vertical or horizontal orientations--very smart, I think.