If you subscribe to Airstream Life magazine, you may have noticed that we strive to make every magazine cover “different” and beautiful. It’s one of the hardest jobs in the magazine.

Each quarter, our Art Director, Jim Burns, reviews numerous images to select one worthy of the cover. It’s harder than it looks. A cover photo has to be technically perfect, high-resolution, colorful, and indicative of the Airstream lifestyle or interest area. For the upcoming Fall issue, we have an article on “gypsy caravans, the first RVs” and so Jim wanted to use an image of one of these colorful wagons.

Here’s cover test #1

This reduced JPG is blurry, but you can see it’s a nice colorful image. We almost went with it, but when Jim got the proof back from the printer he felt it didn’t have the quality we needed. The image was scanned from a print we got out of England, and often scans don’t hold up when reprinted.

Here’s cover test #2

This is also a nice image, but the composition is flawed. On the right side, which you can’t see because it is clipped off on this image, there’s half a man. He’s a distraction from an otherwise great photo. So this one was dropped from consideration as well. But both of these images are good enough to be used inside the magazine, and you may see them there.

So what image did make the cut? Our friend David Michael Kennedy contributed a really great photo of himself taken by his girlfriend Heather Howard. They live in a 1960 Airstream full-time and roam the country taking pictures professionally. I can’t reveal it here, but you’ll see it soon enough when the Fall/Winter issue comes out in mid-October!