...Some time later...

Two more things related to this thread:
1. Sometimes when cropping a distant subject, it is often sufficient to just
crop it to (or near to) the maximum size allowed on AP - 1200 pixels. This
will yield a 100% crop - ie, NO re-sizing required. That's what I did for this.
It happens to be a 784px × 1,176px crop of the full sized image.

2. When re-sizing (ie, re-sampling), an even number reduction would be
more accurate in rendering detail than something arbitrary. Ie, re-sample
to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 of the original image size, rather than, say, 1/2.5 or so.

For the example in point 1 above, if I had to re-sample the whole image to
1/4 it would end up the same pixel size as that image, since my camera
outputs 4704 x 3136 pixels. 4704/4 = 1176.