The winter issue of Overland Journal is at the printer and will be mailed out next week, so I thought I’d share the cover, which I am particularly fond of. The photo was taken by Roger Blair near Gering/Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, where the Oregon-California Trails Association held their annual convention a couple of years ago.
The image shows Oregon-California Trail landmarks Courthouse Rock and Jail Rock, which could be seen from three days of overland travel away and were the first landmarks that emigrants would see as they made the trek. The remnants of eroded plateaus, they are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
This image was shot as a wider view, but because it was done at a high resolution, it left me the flexibility to crop out the sides and make the rock formations much more visible, while keeping the image large enough to take up the whole cover. (I did have to add a little transparent gradient fill to the sky so that I could leave in as much of the sunflower foreground as possible.) Just another example of why the highest resolution is vital to flexible design!