Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Z
Rattlesnakes are found all throughout Florida. This is their natural range. Actually my wife usually finds most of the rattlers. She is OK with them. Doesn't want to step on one, but she understands this is their home. We've had to relocate a few of them that sometimes would prefer being someplace that would place them or someone else coming here in danger, but beyond that we just take pictures and leave them be. BTW, some of these really were not "close" to the house. We live on 50 acres, so there is room for the wildlife. Except squirrels, of course. They took to messing with my bamboo, so they crossed the line. 
We've also seen several coral snakes here, as well as the occasional pygmy rattler and sometimes a cottonmouth along the stream bank on our property. I would much rather have them around than fire ants any day of the week.
Camera resolution reaches a point of diminishing returns when being used for online viewing. Most screens will only display just so large of an image, so you really aren't getting any more benefit out of more resolution past a practical point. For instance the screen I am using right now is 1920x1200 pixels. It can NEVER display any greater resolution than that. If you try to, well, all you get is an image that is larger than the physical screen, so you have to scroll horizontally or vertically to see it all. In effect, getting a 1920x1200 WINDOW of the image you are trying to view. I normally cut down all the images to no more than 800 pixels wide when prepping them for online view. So I take the 4256x2848 pixel images the camera creates and scale them down to 800x535 pixels. Honestly, would I have lost any resolution on the viewing screen if I had used a camera that could only take 800x535 pixel images natively?
The ONLY real benefit I have found for larger resolution cameras is that it gives you the benefit of being able to crop your images in such a way that you can somewhat emulate the abilities of a macro or micro lens without loss of detail. In effect, in my example above, I could crop out a 800x535 window from that original 4256x2848 image with no loss of detail when viewed on the screen.
So take the resolution specs of digital cameras with a grain of salt, understanding what it really means to you in practical terms. |
Yes, and no...
Yes, because all that you say is true, and I usually recommend to folks that approx. 6.2MP with a decent lens, will provide a nicely detailed 8"x10" print. If they don't need to print anything larger, then 6.2 MP is sufficient.
No, because for someone like me who takes a lot of photos of small objects, like insects, flowers, a bird in flight over head, etc., that may be 20', 30', or 100' feet away, I need all the pixels I can muster. My camera is 16.2MP, and sometimes even that isn't enough. I do a lot of cropping, sometimes retaining only 25% of the original photo. That's where high resolution really pays off.
My first digital camera was 1.3mp, I couldn't crop out anything. My next was 10.1mp, and there was a huge improvement. Now with 16.2mp, I can crop out almost anything, and still have very nice resolution. I expect my next camera will be around 23mp, and my guess is that I won't need anymore after that.
Oh, P.S. -- I'm glad I live in a populated area. Been here for 17 years, and have not seen a single snake so far...PERFECT!!!