Think about your destination output, not megapixels

I was at the San Diego Zoo recently for the Nik Summit and I was faced with a dilemma a lot of people face at the zoo (especially when on vacation) – my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens didn’t have the reach I needed to get the shot. Even an extender would have helped here because this guy was just being bashful and was very far away. My solution was to recognize the fact that all I ever planned to do with this shot was to put it on my web site, so the answer was simple – I just took what I could with my focus on the eye of the tiger and cropped. In-camera, I used the zoom feature to make sure I had a shot that would work. Mouse over the shot above to see the original in-camera framing.

I had confidence in the sensor and image quality of my Canon 1D Mark IV that it could capture the pixels I needed for a tight crop on the tiger, so I just set my camera to f/2.8 and handheld the shot at 1/200 sec and ISO 250 and zoomed out to 200mm. I put the tiger in the sweet spot of the lens and took care of the rest in post-processing. Sure, my 16.1 megapixel image dropped down to 593x890 pixels which comes out to about a half a megapixel, but who cares? My target output is the display where I’m using even less than my cropped image, and the world can see this magnificent animal.

If I wanted to print a 4x6, I could easily do that with the data in this image, so even printing isn’t out of the question. I couldn’t do a huge poster, but guess what, even if I had the megapixels – I probably wouldn’t.

Think about this the next time you are getting obsessed about megapixels or purchasing that new camera, because it really is about the quality of the pixels in the image your camera creates rather than how many megapixels the has extracted from the data from the sensor. I’m confident that my 5D Mark II would have created equally excellent results, and that my old Canon 40D would have been up to the task as well. However, my point and shoot may have had the number of pixels, but the quality of those pixels never would have resulted in an image like this.