The Everywhere blog

Issue 2 has just come off the press and will be coming to subscribers in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime we have a little sneak peek of what's coming just for you. With features like "How We Learned to Love Los Angeles", "Buenos Aires in Style", "The Murals of Barcelona", "Historic Turkey", "Favorite Hotel Bars" and tons more, this issue has so much packed into it's 120 pages we could barely fit it all in!

So download the PDF (2.3mb) and check it out. Like what you see? You can use this special $10 off coupon to subscribe today

Now that we've produced an issue of Everywhere based entirely on submissions from the community -- nice work gang! -- we've got a much better understanding of what kind of material works best in the magazine. Over the next few days, we plan to post a series of tips on how to improve your chances of getting published in the magazine. Today we'll start off with some thoughts on how to take pictures for Everywhere.

Now, you may be thinking, "I'm an excellent photographer! I don't need no stinking tips!" And that may be true. But shooting travel photos for publication is different than other forms of photography, so keep these suggestions in mind:

TIP 1: People Make Places Real
Of all the tips we have, this is the one we can't stress enough: Good travel photography is as much about people as it is about place, and a good travel pic needs to provide a sense of excitement and energy. The photos that are most likely to be published are ones that show people enjoying a place.

Not necessarily crowd photos, but photos that are like what you actually saw when you were there. So when you take a picture of the beautiful pool at your hotel, don't wait for it to be completely empty. Instead, wait for someone to dive in, or for a group of people to start having fun poolside. If you're taking a picture of a landmark, don't show us the tourist snapshot of your family standing in front of it. Instead, think of the story you want to tell people back home about this place, and take photos that support that story. Show us the tour guide, the monkey, the bus with people hanging off the roof, the super-chic air hostess on your private jet, whatever... show us real people really enjoying themselves.

TIP 2: Places Are More than Just Locations
Specific places are the first consideration in travel photography, and since we've already explained "why people matter," we can now talk about what works in terms of showing us an environment. Travel photos need to show context.

People need to have a rough understanding of what they are looking at -- what the overall setting is like, how the space feels, and what kind of "vibe" it has. If you're showing us a bar, for example, don't take an artistic shot that focuses on the composition of the chairs or the arrangement of glasses on the table. Give a sense of what the whole place is like. If small details are important, show them in the context of the whole bar, so we know what we're looking at and how the elements fit together. The best travel photos aren't just an overview; they capture a moment and provide a feel for a place.

TIP 3: Magazines Are Vertical Creatures
A lot of us are used to shooting travel shots for the Internet and for our own personal uses, but magazines have some unique qualities that are important remember.

The most notable of these is that magazines are predominantly vertical in orientation. Sure, we love to run big, horizontal, two-page spreads, but there only a few of those in each issue. By and large, we mostly need good vertical images that can run on one full page. That doesn't mean you should *always* shoot vertically. But when you're shooting travel pictures, take as many shots as you can, and make 'em both vertical and horizontal. Shooting verticals has another advantage as well: Our cover is vertical, and it's very difficult for us to make horizontal images work on the cover.

TIP 4: Leave Room for Text
Another good compositional tip for magazine photography is to shoot for negative space -- for example, lots of sky, water, street, or surfaces of similar color.

To make photos more integral to a story, our designers look for photos that have strong negative space so that they can be used as openers to articles, sections, or features. Negative space provides a nice, clean area for headlines and other display text, but text is hard to read when it runs over backgrounds that are complex or busy. We don't run text over every photo, of course, so there's no need to do include tons of negative space in all of your images. But if you find yourself saying, "Wow! This looks so good it should be on the cover of a travel magazine!" then you should definitely try to include some space for text. (Magazine covers have to accommodate a good deal of text.)

TIP 5: Look at All the Colors!
The world is a colorful place, and we want Everywhere to inspire people to go explore it. That's why we designed the magazine and optimized the papers, finishes, and printing process to highlight the impact of color. We love black and white photography in general, but we will almost never run it in Everywhere. We don't forbid black and white pictures, but we don't encourage them either. Put simply, black and white photos don't play nicely in the sandbox with others. Either a magazine layout is all black and white, or it has none at all. There's really no in between. If you have great black and white images that you want to share, remember we also publish JPG Magazine, and they love black and white images.

TIP 6: Captions Make a Photo Stronger
While not strictly a photo tip, good captions significantly boost the chance that your photo will be published.

Full-length articles are great, but many of the stories in the first half of the magazine -- in the Points of Interest, Postcards, and Trips sections, for example -- are mostly just photos with great extended captions. That's intentional: We want to make it as easy as possible for you to contribute to the magazine. But we still need some words to work with. Think of this as a variation on Tip 2, "Places Are More than Just Locations," above. Context is important for travel photgraphy, and a good caption makes a photo more interesting and more useful. Members of the Everywhere community tend to vote for submissions that provide more and more useful information, and voting is how we understand what you like and want to see in the magazine. Conversely, good photos with no captions at all often fare poorly because they don't provide the information members of our community need to get excited about a place. (We'll talk about the prose side of things in more detail in an upcoming post about travel writing tips.)

TIP 7: Size Matters
Everywhere is an oversized magazine, so the bigger the better when it comes to filling our oversized pages. To run your photos as large as possible, we need you to submit your images in the largest format you have, without resizing them digitally. While we have a minimum size we can accept, if you only give us that size it restricts the ways we can use your image. Providing the largest version of the image that you have makes your photos more versatile and more likely to get published.

So there you have it. This isn't a definitive resource, but we hope it hits on the most important ways you can get a leg up on getting published in the next issue. You know what to do next: Get out there and start shooting!

When we started Everywhere, we knew it had to be a printed magazine. There's just nothing like it; the joy of holding it in your hands, the way photos look on paper, showing it off on your coffee table. We know that when you see the real thing in your hands, you'll get truly inspired to travel. We also know that this magazine looks best in print, which is why we aren't afraid to put all of the stories and photos online. But you helped make it, and we want to give you a chance to see what this magazine is all about — and how you can contribute to upcoming issues.

Now you can click through every single page of the first issue of Everywhere, right in your Interweb browser. Or you can download the entire issue as a full-size PDF. Either way, we hope you'll like what you see, and we think experiencing the magazine in all of it's oversized, printed glory is just unbeatable. To have it delivered to you, subscribe here!

From now until January 2nd you can buy a gift subscription for someone and get a free subscription for yourself. Everywhere makes a great gift; it's 6 issues of travel inspiration brought to you by the world's smartest travel experts - our readers! Just choose the package you want to give as a gift and when you are done we'll return the favor and give you your very own subscription for free!

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Everywhere Magazine was born from a basic idea: Travel is all around you. To us, this sentence embodies the belief that travel is not something to be enjoyed once a year, but every day, no matter where you are. Whether you are looking for something exotic or close by, travel should be accessible and something that you can do at any time.

We’re different from other travel magazines because each issue of Everywhere is created by the world’s largest and most experienced staff of travel experts: you! As more and more people are traveling, taking great photos and collecting great stories, we feel like there has never been time to make the worlds most relevant travel magazine. It's your insider perspective and expertise that makes Everywhere much more interesting and authentic.

So jump in and discover some places, read some articles, and if you have a cool place or two that you love, let us know about it.