digital camera's full frame and non-full frame proportion

This is a must to know if you are a photographer who plans to shoot for magazines using a digital camera (an editorial photographer), or if you are a magazine art or photo director, or a magazine editor - what the full frame and non-full frame digital camera proportions are in connection with your magazine size. This is especially important if you are one of those photographers who prefer to be in control of how much your photos should be cropped. For editors, art and photo directors you need to know in advance whether or not a photographer's camera is full frame or not, to calculate the space for your masthead for cover photos so that you will know how much of the photo you can tightly crop without sacrificing the photo composition.

Here are the proportions:

photo by Edmund Chan
Canon 5D mk2 - full frame

photo by Warlen Hipulan Rodriguez

Canon 1100D

The size of a full frame digital camera is 3 inches longer in length in proportion to the usual magazine size of 8 1/2 X 11 inches. So if you are using a full-frame camera and you are shooting for the cover of an 8 1/2 X 11" sized magazine, aside from the provisional space you will allot for the masthead, you should allow space for the cropping of additional 3 more inches on its length.

But if you are shooting for National Geographic, no need to make provision for a 3-inch space for cropping. National Geographic takes the actual proportion of full frame cameras, all you need to allot space for is the masthead.

Non-full frame cameras, on the other hand, are the exact proportion of an 8 1/2 X 11 inches magazine. Here you can control the cropping of your photos and preserve the dignity of your composition.

These same proportions are in effect when you have your photos printed in a vertical orientation, too. In the pre-digital days when people use mostly film cameras, notice that when you enlarge a photo to fill the usual 8 1/2 X 11-inch photo paper, some of the areas are automatically cropped either on top or at the bottom in a vertical orientation just like a full frame digital camera. This is because full frame cameras adopted the proportion of a film camera. So if we want to preserve the cropping of our photos when we have it printed the best thing to do is print it with either a white or black border. Notice that after the photos were printed with border, the left and right-side borders of the prints are thicker than the borders on its top and bottom side in a vertical orientation, clearly demonstrating  the difference in proportion.