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

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