Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Friday, November 14. 2008

Why the sensor matters more than the megapixels

Excellent, non-technical piece. (Thanks, reader.) It explains, among other things, why you get that "video look" with compact point-and-shoot cameras, which are incapable of the "pro look."
Posted by Bird Dog in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 18:31 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

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Re depth of field
Regarding compact cameras, sensors, and depth of field, I took this one with my Canon XTi:
Weblog: Maggie's Farm
Tracked: Nov 18, 11:06

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I shoot a Nikon D2Hs--a 4.1mp camera--and I have to tell you it rocks like sex and whiskey. It's a pro-body DSLR, but think about that--it's a 4.1mp camera!

If I keep my compositions tight I can print out to 13x19 (interpolated up) and the prints get noticed, I mean, they look good. I just shot a project for a friend, indoors under artificial, mixed light (no flash) at 800 ISO equivalent and there's no noise and the colors are great. And if I want graininess in a black and white photo, I shoot a higher ISO (with a neutral density filter), underexpose the image and bring the exposure up in post while converting to greyscale to make noise into a grain effect! That's a 4.1mp camera!

The files are small so they transfer quickly, batch edits in post are a snap, and they take up less room on my hard drives.

Plus, as Askey mentions in the article, if your sensor out resolves your lens it's just bringing out the flaws in the glass.

Paying for more sensor than you need, or worse, a big megapixel number with poor performance, well, that's crap.
#1 Jephnol (Link) on 2008-11-14 23:08 (Reply)

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