I’ve probably mentioned my dislike for the “megapixel race” enough that it’s tiring to listen to me. So I’ll say something else.

Sometimes having lots of megapixels is important. Specifically, when your lens isn’t nearly long enough, so you know you’re going to have to crop heavily. Lots of megapixels aren’t really a substitute for a better lens. Some cheap digital cameras have “digital zoom,” which just crops off the edges of the photo to “zoom” in for you. The problem is that a lot of lenses really aren’t that good. If you take a 15 megapixel shot of your family and print at 4×6″ image, it’ll look great. But if you zoom into a 100% crop, it’s really not so hot. Nothing looks great at 100%, but some things look much worse than others.

But when you’ve got a $100 lens on your camera, and it’s the longest thing you’ve got, and getting the shot you really want would take a lens that costs 60 times more than your current lens, a minor loss of fidelity* is acceptable.

* Minor Loss of Fidelity became my band name in Rock Band, and comes from the first Microsoft Office error message that could be consider poetic, regarding some error when saving to a different file format.

This blog post was really just a pretense to post a photo, because I haven’t posted any photos in a long time and because I’ve been into photography more than usual lately. Here’s a blue heron from my vacation a few weeks ago, cropped very heavily since I really need to be using a 600mm or 800mm lens, but chose not to sell my car to do so. It also marks the first photo in a while that I’ve done any post-processing to, though not too much. (Well, “not a lot” is what I mean. “Too much” is subjective and I’m not sure about it yet.)