Tip of week: Megapixels

I hear a lot of talk about megapixel this and megapixel that. There was even something called the Megapixel Wars held by the camera manufacturers when each one was trying to up the megapixel count in their cameras. But does the amount of megapixels in your camera equal a better quality more sharp and colorful image? The simple answer is NO. Each megapixel of resolution equals around 1 million pixels. Think of each pixel as a block. Then think of more than 10 million of those next to each other in all different colors making up your 10mpxl image. The illustration below shows that different megapixel sizes only relate to the amount of resolution in an image.

So, now you’re thinking, why have a camera with a huge amount of megapixels if it doesn’t make my image look better? Well, what if your image needs cropped in a little, or the horizon line isn’t quite straight and you need to tilt and crop it? You are immediately losing resolution from your image. Most cameras today are at least 10mpxl. This will get you a great size image, probably up to a 16×20 inch print before you start to see pixelization in your image, which is simply seeing the blocks that make up your image. Which is why I always suggest setting your camera to the largest resolution on the best quality possible. You never know when you’re going to get that “keeper” that you’ll want to make into a large print or that you’ll need to crop out a lot of the image to make into a large print. With flash storage becoming very inexpensive, it’s easy to store all of these images.

Needless to say, don’t let any sales person talk you into a camera based on quality when they are talking about megapixels. Look for other factors including low noise in higher ISO’s, clarity of the image and how user friendly the User Interface is. There is also the speed of the camera and battery life to consider. You can also check out my favorite site Imaging Resource, to check out a camera you are looking to purchase. They have reviews as well as test images that allow you to download the full resolution image in different settings to see how clean the image will be. I hope this helps in your future camera purchases and to give you a little more insight on how megapixels relate to image size.

Post About Posts

How would you like some tips about photography, Photoshop or great website I’ve found? How about some great posts about my photo sessions? What about hearing from some of my friends from time to time? If this sounds good to you, you’ll be happy to hear that Miville Photography have a new blog schedule that will start today. Tonight I’ll have the first post in the new schedule and the schedule will work like this.

Mondays will be “Session Day” and will include a recent session that I thought was fun and had some great images. It will allow me to showcase some of my work and give a few details about the session and how much fun it was.

Wednesday will be a tip of the week. I will use this day to give a tip, trick or let you know about a really interesting website, piece of photo gear or podcast that I’ve found. It will be a fun way for you to keep up to date with the ever changing photo world. I’ll also let you know of any new products I’ve seen or are now offering and how you can get your hands on them.

Friday will be a “Guest Blogger” day and I will introduce you to friends of mine who will be talking about a range of subjects. They may talk about their life, their passions or anything that comes out that they want to discuss.

Mother’s Day Session with Veronica

Off to York I traveled for a Mother’s Day mini photo portrait session with Veronica and her kids, Madison and Luke. Keeping it in their home made the kids as relaxed as they were going to be. While Madison was a camera ham, Luke seemed a bit shy for most of the session. That was until we pretty much finished up and he had his little melt down. After that it was all about running around and not wanting to sit still at all. It was fun and made for a challenging session. Enjoy.

Luke, Veronica and Madison

I love this one! May be my favorite of the three of them.