Shoot your images portrait AND landscape

A short post about what I have learned about images that need to fill multiple sizes and slots. I will show you by a personal example:

I'm teaching a web copywriting workshop and for this I have a landing page with social image, a checkout page and a campaign on Facebook/Instagram. Of course I will also want to share my landing page on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Find the words

The workshop is about how - once you have a strategy, plan and schedule - you can overcome your fear of the blank page. So, I take the people with me through keywords gathering, copy writer briefing, and a series of very tangible and concrete tips.

And that message of finding the words needed to include an image. You want to stand out but also have it functionally fit with the subject. I quickly made a pre-selection and ended up with the Scrabble letters. This is a strong idea because we need to find words. Unfortunately, the image was in English, so I decided to do produce on myself.

Create my own pictures

I looked for a scrabble board, came up with a text, set the lighting and took a photo with the iPhone. What I learned soon after, especially since there was text on it, is to take landscape and portrait shots with plenty of room to crop. To be able to crop to a suitable ratio between height and width. Let me show you why.

Formats

The campaign is running on Facebook and Instagram, in the news feed and stories. The images there are generally standing or square:

Then there's the landing page of the workshop and there I can choose, landscape or portrait:

Open Graph image

But the accompanying social media image for the landing page, Open Graph Image, is again landscape oriented with a different aspect ratio than the iPhone standard (4:3). I made that image landscape and then cropped it back to 16:9. Otherwise, the letters are partly out of the picture. Now they look really nice and readable when the page is shared:

Lesson learned

The lesson I learned is that if you are going to make a photo with a wider application, then make at least two of them: One portrait, one landscape.

Make sure you have wide margins that you can crop to the desired aspect ratio.

Not sure if you can find the words, but for sure the proper image formats.