For the most part, with pixels it’s quality, not quantity. Once you have enough for your needs adding more *usually *degrades the quality. I’d put the useful limit a bit higher than most folks here (8-12 MP) but with the current state of technology going beyond that is getting you little for most non-professional users.
I think it’s fair to say that the most important photographic tool is the one holding the camera.
Machine Elf nailed it- I have a 12 mp Canon PowerShot s100, which has a relatively tiny little sensor- a 1/1.7 which is 7.6x5.7mm and 43.30 square mm area.
While it takes decent enough pictures, my 18 mp Canon T2i with any of my lenses blows it away, even in bright light and easy to meter situations. It has a APS-C sensor, which is 22.20x14.80mm and 329 square mm area.
Basically the T2i has 1.5x the pixels, and 7.6x the surface area, so the pixels are quite a bit larger.
Like the 1927 folding Brownie Autographic I used for a while because it was unbelievably funky, though it had light leaks and was a terrible waste of 620 film? Or how, when I get this newest one running or replaced, I’ll give my daughter the Fuji A500 and keep the lesser-all-around A360 as my pocket camera because I like its color? Do you mean like that?
This “girl” I knew a little in high school turns out to be a pretty good photographer. I will ask how she gets those lush colors. It probably helps that she doesn’t shoot dirty snow piles. Any tips from you folks will be welcome, too.
Get a copy of Understanding Exposure, then shoot. A lot.
Lush colors are easy, just apply post processing. But that doesn’t make for good photos.
Shooting a lot will be easier when I get my new XD cards and have space for more than couple shots. The time change will give me another hour of sun, too. Right now I’m teaching my eyes and trying to not shake.
What I’ve learned so far:
- Until recently, Fuji cameras used XD cards, not SD cards, which are worth more than many of the cameras. Even the 16mb ones, which are useless.
- eBay sellers will pull things like XD cards and sell them separately, driving up the actual cost of the camera to above that of a full package.
- Unlike when an eBay seller says something works, when he says it doesn’t work, take him at his word. On the other hand, this one is a fun challenge. I can hear it trying to push out its lens, so there is still hope. Stuck in is tougher to fix than stuck out, and will require much more disassembly than I was willing to give it lest night.
- I hate having to rely on that screen on the back instead of a proper viewfinder or SLR. My eyes don’t work that way. If nothing else, I want a screen that flips out so I can use it like a two-lens reflex. That would put it in the range of my bifocals.
Big, quality glass, RAW capable, then big sensor, them Pixels.
I find that if I reduce a pic to the size of a computer screen, I get a much better picture than a Super Cannon can produce if the part of the image used must be enlarged to fit the screen format.
Quality paper prints are still a chemical process so you gain a bit back when enlarging.
As long as you have to stay with under $10 cameras, technique is your most important friend.
There are great deals on used cameras on eBay for old 8 megapixel cameras. They are good for most uses, very large blow ups excluded. I use an 18 megapixel camera (Canon T3i) and the only reason I would want more megapixels is to have better resolution of birds taken at a distance with super telephotos. I’d love 100 megapixels for that, or even more than you could ever possibly imagine. That said, the modern consumer DSLRs have 6400 ISO as about the minimum fastest “film” setting and you can take amazing indoor party pictures without flash that way. Just hold the camera still. There seems to be an ISO competition going on now between the Japanese manufacturers and those extra stops are quite nice for low light.
Do you find that when cropping on bird pictures like that, it is actually the pixels that are stopping you zooming in any more? I would have thought that even with a very good camera and lens, with an 18mp image you’d have reached the resolution limit before the pixels started showing up.
Not even close. A DSLR with it’s larger sensor (even a crop sensor like the T3i) has a high quality 18 Meg image that would allow for a lot of cropping.
dropzone, you’re probably better off dropping the old Fuji and buy a reasonable semi-recent camera that uses SD cards and stat from there. You’ll have lots more options, much better sensors since they’ve improved dramatically since 2006 when that camera was built, and better reliability. You’re really making your life difficult with that old camera.
Also, Canon hasn’t really changed their sensor in a long time so if you get a T3i (what I use, and like a lot), it’ll be pretty much as good as a T4i or T5i minus some other bells and whistles.
Here’s a quick album of some shots of mine, all taken with my T3i and mostly taken with the 18-55mm kit lens that came with it. The two bird photos were taken with my 70-300mm telephoto. The shot of the temple with the light trails going past was bought and published by a big glossy magazine where they gave it a two-page spread.
Oh no. I’m using the 400mm lens (the cheap one, not the sports one) with a 1.4 multiplier and taking pix in flight. I take them home and look on my 1080p monitor and zoom all the way. Definitely pixelation when you zoom in all the way, only a very small amount of fringing. And that fringing is the multiplier, not the lens. Any more lens and I couldn’t move it quickly enough to capture birds in flight due to weight and of course bigger lenses start at $8,000 and go to $14,000.
Absolutely. I have a shot from vacation of the entire front of St. Peter’s in Rome taken from about the Rome/Vatican border in front, and when I zoom in, I can tell that there are individual people on the observation deck on top of the dome. I think that my lens sharpness may have been more of a limiting factor than the sensor resolution, honestly.
I’ve learned a couple of things in this thread and don’t have anything to add, but I just wanted to say that those are really nice shots, BD. Nice rich tones and colours. I’d be glad to have taken them. How much editing do you think you did? The reason I ask is because I bought a T3i last fall, and subsequently an ultra wide angle lens, but haven’t used it much yet. My old film brain is still trying to plumb the depths of digital camera menus.
First, thank you. I’ve only had my camera since last June and I’ve had a lot of fun learning the craft. I’ve had some threads here when I wast starting out where I got a ton of great advice, including the big one - SHOOT IN RAW!
I now shoot in RAW 100% of the time and always do a decent amount of post-processing to get the image how I want it (and no shame in it, PP is a big part of the Photography process) but most of what I do could have been done in a darkroom with film.
I use Lightroom for 95% of all my post. Photoshop for a little bit here and there as needed.
For just about all photos, in post, I:
- Adjust white balance (shooting in RAW allows this)
- Adjust exposure in case it’s not where I want it
- Increase contrast/vibrancy/clarity/saturation - but all with a light hand, I try not to go overboard
- Bring the blacks down a bit
- I almost always decrease highlights to where I like them, and Shadows usually get brought up but sometimes down if I’m looking for a darker look.
Things I do sometimes:
- Dodge/Burn using the adjustment brush in Lightroom
- Adjust specific colors to bring them out more or decrease them.
- Use the Lightroom ND Filter function to adjust the exposure in the sky (the black and white photo of the rocks by the lake, I used this function to make the sky look more dramatic).
The skyline photo didn’t have a ton of processing done to it. The colors aren’t exactly true to life, but I got it where I wanted using a long exposure (6 seconds) which gave the clouds a painting-like look and the lake a glassy smooth effect. The color was mostly achieved using exposure and white balance.
Aside from cloning out an airplane light trail in the Baha’i Temple shot, that one was remarkably close to how it came out of the camera.
Yeah, I hate-hate-HATE JPEG.
Technique is what I’m working on because I’m a stuffy old fart like that, but also looking for a $10 camera with what you suggest that a little TLC can bring back to life. But probably one of them “bridge cameras” because DSLRs are just too damn heavy, and they’ll kill you with the glass.
I’m not making my life difficult. I’m learning, and an education without pain is no education, Grasshopper. 
Anyway, I’ll still need something that fits in my pocket to shoot UFOs and Bigfoot.
I keep forgetting how far north Lake Point Tower is. Did you shoot as B&W in the camera, or did you make them that way in post?
A fellow at work wondered what Ansel Adams would think of digital photography. Another thought he’d hate it, but Adams nearly lived in the darkroom and I think he’d love it.
Thanks for all the info. I guess it’s high time I started shooting in RAW. I think I’ve gotten fairly good at getting the most out of JPEGs, but the difference between the look of your photos and mine is obvious, and JPEGs just don’t cut it. To the drawing board!
You can take great photos in JPEG – most sports shooters still shoot JPEG out there and I think most editorial shooters are still JPEG – but raw gives you far more flexibility, and I’ve been shooting that way for about 7 years or so now.
You can do a lot with JPEG, and JPEG does teach you to nail exposure (it’s very similar to shooting slide film in that respect), but with memory being as cheap as it is today and processing being as advanced and easy today with programs like Lightroom and Aperture, there’s few good reasons not to shoot raw.
If he’s shooting raw, which it sounds like he is, the B&W is in post. (Although it’s possible there’s some metadata saved that automatically flags a B&W conversion in the post-processing program, but you can always go back to the color.) Raw preserves all the sensor information, including color. There’s really no good reason to do B&W in camera, unless you for some reason need to output a B&W image without having access to a computer. Doing it in post, whether you’re shooting JPEG or raw, gives you a lot more flexibility. It’s not just that you can always go back to color if you don’t like it (which you can’t do with JPEG), you can also decide on the spectral sensitivity of the conversion. That is to say, you can decide the greens should be lighter, and the reds should be darker, for instance. Or, one thing I commonly do, is play around with the orange slider in a black and white to get my skin tones brighter or darker.
Sorry for three in a row, but I have to correct this:
Ack, that should say “which you can’t do with an in-camera black-and-white JPEG.”
Anyhow, with most images it would be impossible for me to tell with any certainty whether the initial capture was made in raw or a fine JPEG, just from looking at the final output. Maybe in cases of extreme dynamic range, that’d be a giveaway. Working on the file, though, is much more pleasant in raw, once you get the hang of it (and there is a good bit of a learning curve.)