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I like the way this three second time exposure makes the car lights look abstracted but still recognizable. I took this photo early in the evening from the location across the mouth of the Waldo Tunnel described in Alignment. I used a long lens, my 70-200 VR zoom combined with a 2X telextender at the maximum focal length. The 400mm effective focal length translates to 600mm in 35mm terms, considering the Nikon 1.5:1 sensor equivalence. In Photoshop, I cropped further in on the portion of the photo that interested me, namely the bridge roadway, walkways, and car lights. It probably goes without saying, but let me say it: cropping in on an image in post-processing is the logical equivalent of using a so-called "digital" zoom in-camera. Of course, you have more control over cropping in post-processing. But you don't gain any magnification using a digital zoom, you just discard pixels, exactly the way you do when you crop. [600mm in 35mm terms, 3 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.] View this image larger. |
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Photography
Comments (2)
Read More Entries by Harold Davis.
Ben, you make a good point. I was simply trying to say that you don't gain anything using a "digital zoom," and that in fact you would be better off (rather than using the digital portion of a zoom) magnifying to the full extent of an optical zoom and then cropping in the digital darkroom.
Thanks - Harold
You wrote: "...cropping in on an image in post-processing is the logical equivalent of using a so-called “digital” zoom in-camera." Depending on what you mean by "logical equivalent" I'm not sure I can agree.
In "digital zoom", the camera is actually degrading the image before presenting it to the user (creating large areas of pixels that correspond to single pixels on the sensor). When cropping in post, you're simply removing part of the image. While you can certainly choose to magnify the cropped area, that's not a necessity of the cropping itself; it's a wholly separate process. Indeed one can apply the same [mis]judgment to any image whether cropped or not.