Just… one, really

profile of great egret Ardea alba
I have a handful of photos from an outing today, but I’m winding down and still have other things to get done tonight, so this is a quick one that’s been sitting in the blog folder. Stay with me, it gets much more exciting.

Okay, no it doesn’t. But stay with me anyway.

When I’m sorting through recent photos to see what to keep and what to discard, right before shifting them into appropriate categories, I usually look at the images at full resolution to see if the sharpness is adequate. Some months back I began using a Canon 7D, and the jump in resolution was noticeable (and don’t ask me what it actually is, because I don’t know – that’s not the kind of thing that I worry about.) With earlier bodies, I could still see most of the subject when I did this, just filling the monitor screen, but now I see just a small portion – and I’m even using a much bigger monitor now. [Note that this is still far from being those desktop rigs that you see where someone has three two-meter wide monitors spread across their desk – I only have one, and it has about a 50cm active display width, but this does mean that I have some room to move the various editing menus aside and see more of the photo that I’m working on.]

There is probably a small degree that this resolution is detrimental, because I might reject an image as ‘not quite sharp enough’ when it has more than enough to print at a decent size – I’m just examining it too closely, and this especially holds true for images that will display full-frame, uncropped and not dependent on detail, like many scenics. However, maintaining sharpness even at high magnification, full resolution, means that I can crop the image, significantly sometimes, and not suffer from pixelation or ‘grain’ issues.

And as I’m doing this close examination, every once in a while one jumps out at me, such as the great egret (Ardea alba) above. That’s the entire frame up there, taken with the Tamron 150-600mm at 450mm while the bird was being cooperative; a lot of the images of the session lacked sharpness, suffering from inexact focus or motion blur, or both. But this one held up pretty well when seen at full resolution, which is shown below.

full resolution inset of same image of great egret Ardea alba
Yeah, that passes muster.

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