Mega pixels

[Tannin]

G'day Poider.

Actually, you can take a perfectly good picture with an 8MP camera, one that no-one here is likely to even notice wasn't taken on a mega-expensive 32MP wallet-crusher. In fact you could probably get away with 6MP at a pinch.

For many types of photography, the extra resolution gains you little. However there are some things where extra resolution really does help. Bird photography is a good example: because you can seldom get as close as you would like, you tend to want to crop very hard, and that soon reduces your 20MP into something like 8MP. Cropping cuts your effective pixel count far more than you'd expect - an image half the size of the original has a quarter as many pixels. Another example is the type of landscape photography where you are trying to reproduce every single leaf. Here you don't crop much, but you still want lots of detail and that means plenty of pixels.

Nevertheless, for most purposes, the pixel count really doesn't matter a lot. It contributes perhaps a couple of percent of the final quality of your picture. Composition, subject selection, tonal balance, and above all else lighting is 98% of the task.

Does that mean you shouldn't bother with a "better" camera? Well, that's up to you. In general, it is a bad idea to do it just for more pixels. It is also a bad idea to upgrade a camera when you haven't got all the lenses you want - cameras wear out and are outdated by the march of time quite rapidly - who would buy a 10-year-old camera? - but good lenses can last a lifetime.

Possibly the most important feature a camera can have is its handling qualities. People rabbit on about "feels good in your hand" but that's not really the point. The important thing is that it has simple, logical controls so that you can use it without thinking about the details. You want to be thinking about framing and lighting and composition - thinking about the subject - and letting your fingers do the mechanical stuff without distracting you from the main job. Most people find that using a beautiful new camera leads to worse pictures for the first few weeks, simply because they are not used to it and waste time fiddling with it. For this reason, camera manufacturers (if they are any good) go to a lot of trouble making new models behave in the hand as much like the old ones as possible. But it still takes time to adjust. Even now, after having had my wonderful new 30MP 5D IV for six months or so, if you told me I had to take a perfect picture to save my life, I'd reach for my old faithful 16MP 1D IV without a second thought.

EDIT: better auto-focus tends to get a bit better with new models, and a LOT better with more money. The top models (we are talking $5000-odd here) from Nikon and Canon are simply amazing. But so are the prices. That said, the semi-pro ($1000-2000) Canons these days are extraordinarily good, and I'd be very surprised to find that the equivalent Nikons were not similar. Cheapies (of either brand) used to be ordinary at best, though than might have changed now too. (I haven't tried one in quite a while.)