Megapixels. 'Millions of pixels'. MP. 4MP, 8MP, 12, 16..22...36.3 and beyond. We all love to play the numbers game, and,
sometimes, more is better. Image resolution. DPI. PPI. One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn since I first picked up a DSLR 13 months ago is that the number of megapixels really only matters depending on what you intend to
do with the image. The more megapixels, the bigger the possible print, to screen or to media, at least in terms of baseline quality achieved. What most people don't realize is that IF you want to print your images,
and then at only maybe 5"x7" to give as holiday cards, 3-5MP is plenty for
incredible quality. 6-10MP if you want some good-sized family portraits for the stairs and hallways. Anything more than that and you're starting to delve into the realm that is the purpose of this post...something approaching insanity. But what fun is anything less?!
Please keep in mind I usually write just to exhibit my own personal experience, which, hopefully, might help shed some light on a subject for someone else. ;o) I also won't attempt to explain too much in the way of technical details as it has already been done many times by people far more learned than me. I'll dig up some of my favorite resource links and put them at the bottom for your perusal.
In my case, I was in the worst possible situation, at least with respect to learning something about this new-found passion (addiction) and coupling it with the ideas stewing in my mind. We all know what it means for an image to be
sharp. Crisp, detailed, plenty of contrast and color to salivate over.
Pin sharp, as if drawn by hand with the head of a pin; there's a reason that term gets thrown around in the photography world. We all appreciate it when we see it, and to strive for it is something else entirely. It is a reasonable pursuit and an attainable goal. But getting there can be a bitch, principally if you think big. Really big. Like me. I like that Richard Branson said recently "
To give you some background, I grew up on a west-facing bay in the Puget Sound. Dramatic views of Dyes Inlet and the Olympic Mountains.
Spec-tacular sunsets. Snow-laced mountains reflecting sherbet-saturated rays of sunrise contrasted by the black of rock. I wish I could print some of the images I have captured with only my retinas to share with you! (Yeah, I know...someday soon we'll have USB17.2 ports in our skulls...) I always wondered if my genes had something to do with it; mom and dad both loved mountains and panoramic views, and we all had broad shoulders...? If I may be so deluded, broad intellects, or at least imaginations? Who knows. Something I imprinted on at any rate. Lots and lots of visual breathing room. I remember always spreading my arms out as a kid and consciously trying to find out how much of an angle I could create and still be able to focus, or at least be aware, of my fingertips and what was beyond them (still do). Western Washington and the rest of the Pacific Northwest was and is an amazing playground for this kind of imagery, everywhere you look. Which makes living in San Francisco somewhat anticlimactic...at least there's the Gate! You'll see a lot of my work around, playing with the Bay Area, trying to make it work...that is a challenge in itself, for me anyway.
Puget Sound
(Olympics and sailboats removed temporarily)
Bay Area
(Karl and GG removed temporarily)
Given what historically appeals to my eye, I was drawn to the likes of Ansel Adams and Art Wolf very early on, then to Robert Lough and Peter Lik among many others. That's reaching pretty high, and when you're 44 and just getting started you don't quite feel as invincibly capable as you used to. Fortunately that feeling fades with devotion, discipline, study, practice and experience! Passion turns back the clock - seriously. It
really does. And, of course, friends' votes of confidence help immensely. Unless you suck, like I mostly did, and still do...then you need to fall back on your great sense of humor.
Dammit! Then there's the seeming fact that if you're doing it to please yourself, you'll get better at it just because
you want to, and your passion for it will infect others.
"For every 1 screen pixel show 1 image pixel". This is the best explanation of 1:1 I've seen. I don't know who said it first.
The Problem
You want to see your images at their native resolution, right? If you bought into the big-MP idea, you want them in all their glory, otherwise you run the risk of wasting visual real estate (you can, of course, get more detail in smaller images, but with quickly diminishing returns). In most cases, once you've pulled the images off of your camera or chip you can look at them on your computer screen. It depends on your viewer/editor, but for my purposes I use Lightroom (LR) as I shoot only in RAW. Even when I started with my partner
Grace's Nikon D3100, its native 14.2MP at 4608 pixels by 3072 pixels (technically 14,155,776 pixels total but we love rounding, don't we?) was a large frame to fill. As an (ex?) IT Director I've always bought into tools that greatly increased productivity. One of them was a 30" monitor with a native resolution of 2560x1600 pixels. In LR you have the option to view the image 'Fit' to your screen as well as several other options. If you look at these numbers you'll see that not even with this huge monitor can I view a 14.2MP image at its full 1:1 size. If you're on a 12" laptop LCD you'll be mousing a while end-to-end viewing 14MP+ at 1:1. Anything less than 1:1 is going to be more forgiving to your images. I may be wrong, but in my opinion I like to think that the closer you get to good-looking 1:1 the more you're demonstrating your skill with the camera you're using. Or lack of it in my case.
Now, remember what I was talking about in the first paragraph? Yeah. Given my personality, I wanted to print in
feet, not
inches.
I wanted those huge images of places where you feel you could walk right into them and spread
your arms wide. Lose yourself in the image, escape there. You know
what I mean, and we all wish we could afford those framed photographs
hung all over our residences. Like so many, I want to share what I see and love. It can be brutal.
To make things worse, I expected
every single photograph I took to be of the quality you could print to several feet. Obviously now but not-so-obviously then, this is something of an unreasonable expectation, especially when one is a brand-newbie. Of course, I knew that wasn't possible with a phone - the sensor size is tiny. You can still turn out a lot of good work with a phone these days though, and sites like Foap.com prove there's a market for them.
Still worse, being that brain-saturating techie, I outgrew what I could study hands-on with the D3100 in under eight months, and I had forced myself to stick it out even that long. In staying with the family's current assets (lenses and other equipment) I stuck with Nikon and picked up the D800E, a full-frame, full-on professional 36.3MP model with a native resolution of 7360 x 4912 pixels. Even though I could take a few great shots, I knew I had not by any means mastered anything, and using the D800E made me feel like I'd been kicked back to square one. Left naked. And cold. And hungry. And stupid. In the woods. With nothing but a can of Dapper Dan.
It can be brutal. Jumping into attempts to make 36.3MP look good across all pixels is like jumping off of a double-diamond run when you've never skied before. Sometimes lightning does strike and a person demonstrates natural talent, but I would even go so far as to say it is more likely to survive a mountain than to shoot like this on Manual. At least the body has
some familiarity with movement.
I was going to say something else. Forgot. Might edit this later...
One of the ways I like to think of working with a camera like this (or honestly
any camera, for that matter) is that you need to 'please every pixel'. (w0ot - Google has never heard of 'please every pixel' before...maybe that'll be my 15 minutes!) Meaning you need to find the best technique and equipment to squeeze every last bit of awesome out of a frame to get it into your storage media. The way to really see that is to view your images at 1:1 - then you get to critique every last dot. The beauty of this is that you can do the best you can with the camera and then clean things up in post. You can stay true to what the sensor saw for the likes of publication with National Geographic (why is it they always seem to be the epitome of photography? I'd love to hear ideas from others...) or crazy artistic twists combining sensor-captured images with the light pens of image-editing applications.
It is nothing short of amazing how many different disciplines you may draw upon to improve your skills. For myself, obtaining
consistency at 1:1 with everything I shoot is my personal goal. That is how I define a 'master' photographer - someone who can see what needs to be done and perform a 90%+ capture every time with whatever equipment is at hand. I know I won't make it, certainly not for every shot, but let's face it - anyone who shoots knows when they've found a true gem while rooting around in the light.
Disclaimer: I get 'zero' credit or money for mentioning any product or article on my blogs. Not yet, anyway. ;o)
©2015 Michael Pichahchy
