megapixel power and the mining bee

Mining bee on dandelion.  Left is the original image; the right is cropped.
While shooting images for my painted rock blog I did the other day, I came across a small bee on a dandelion.  I had my 105 mm macro lens on my camera and photographed it then went on my way thinking nothing more of it until I got home.  It was then that I looked at my shots.  I discovered I had photographed a mining bee.

Mining bees are docile; they build a solitary nest in the ground simply by excavating a hole.  They collect pollen on their excursions and build small pollen balls upon which they lay an egg.  She will usually have a single nesting site and lay many eggs.  Although they carry a stinger, mining bees will not attack you.  They are helpful because of their pollination behaviours and their ground aeration skills.  If you see one, let it bee.

There is something about this photo that warrants discussion.  The left image is the one I captured in-camera.  You can see how small the bee is in relation to the dandelion.  The image on the right is from the left one; it has been rotated and enlarged.  In photography we call this cropping; it is done all the time to enhance appearance and facilitate size constraints.  It is also done to enlarge a part of the image.

The original image was 24 megapixels in size.  That is massive overkill for things like viewing an image on a screen or making 4x6 prints.  Even an 8x10 needs only a portion of that; typically three or four megapixels are enough.  So why would a person need so many pixels when a fraction of that would normally suffice?

If you find that the image sizes are way too big, that every file takes up a huge amount of memory, you can reduce the size of the image your camera creates.  Typically the choices of large, medium, and small are available.  I like the large size for the simple reason that when the need comes, I can crop or enlarge as required.  The image on the right is magnified 4 times larger than the image on the left.  That means it uses 1/16th the number of pixels from the original image if the dimensions were the same.  That 24 megapixel image would be down to only 1.5 megapixels.  The whole point of all this resolution is that it allows these sorts of manipulations. 

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com   Eric Svendsen

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I found a black widow spider in a plant pot today

Image
The spider I found is a western black widow spider, one of three species of black widow that occur in North America.  The fact that this one has another red patch on the back of its abdomen above the spinnerettes tells us that it is an immature individual. The one thing that people know about black widow spiders is that they are extremely poisonous.  Their venom is something like 15x more toxic than that of a rattlesnake.  The saving grace is that there is very little venom injected from a black widow bite than what a rattlesnake can deliver.   The good news is that black widow bites seldom lead to death.  You are more likely to suffer nausea, muscle pain, and swelling around the bite.  Symptoms usually last only 12 hours or so.  Death may be a result in people with compromised immune systems or in the very young or the elderly.   In 2018, it was reported that there were 1015 cases of people bitten by black widows.  Of those, there ...
Read more

The passing of a generation

Image
Kathryn's mom and dad with our children, Josh and Leanne. A generation, for North America, tends to be between 20 and 30 years.  During that time a couple will give birth and raise children to see them repeat the pattern as they themselves have done.  Each generation has its own set of standards, values, and ideals based upon their experiences and culture, and some of that is passed down to their offspring.  What changes are the life experiences of the following generation and the new customs and ideals that are blended together as a couple becomes a family. Kathryn's mom passed away a few days ago, she was predeceased by her husband several years ago.  Both of them were the grandparents of my children, the mother and father of my wife, Kathryn.  It was my pleasure to know them and to love them as my own, for to me they were Mom and Dad.  And they were there to welcome my children into the world just as my children were with them in spirit when they left it...
Read more

Hang in there, things will get better.

Image
The Svendsen Family - Eric, Samuel, Leanne, Joshua (top row), Nora, Kathryn, Chanelle, Emma If I could go back, in my mind, to a day in my life when I was really down, it would be nice to be able to see into the future.  If could see things as they are today, with the many blessings that have been given to me, it would give me hope knowing that things wouldn't always be so discouraging.   The message here is we do not know what the future holds.  When things are bad, it is hard to raise your head out of the mire to see beyond the darkness.  There are no guarantees, of course, that things will be better, but I think it is true that fortunes ebb and flow as tides do.  The trick is to see beyond the low points and not be too haughty during the high ones.  I know that, at this moment, things are very good.  What the future holds is unknown, but low and high points are likely in the forecast.   This is why taking satisfaction from the moment ...
Read more