Recently inspired by a thread in a photography forum I participate quite actively, one of the member whom I hold in high esteem, he does wonders with a camera and he is phenomenal with a smartphone camera, posted photos taken by Sony A300, one of the last CCD sensor cameras to come out of Minolta/Sony line. I have a Minolta Point & Shoot (P&S) and Sony A100, a predecessor to A300 that have not been used for more than a decade. These cameras are 8MP and 10.2MP respectively.I charged the batteries for both the cameras and turned them on. Lo and behold, they turned on as if they have been regularly used, and both of them asked to set the date and time, naturally. It was a testimonial to the engineering that went into these cameras.
More is less and less is more: My wife and I went to Pinnacles National Park for a hike and I took my 8MP P&S camera. I knew going in that my regular camera, A 42MP Sony A99M2 will be heavy to carry (about 1200 grams with wide angle lens) on a seemingly strenuous (at least for me) hike that has about 1500 feet elevation gain in about 5 miles. So I decided to take a lighter (650 grams with lens) on the hike.
Here are couple of images from that hike:
As you can see, these are good enough pictures from the hike but not good for details if you care to zoom in, due to smaller sensor size.
More is more:When we went on a family vacation I took a Sony A900 (25MP) camera. Here is a perfect example of having more pixels can make your life easy. The image below is taken inside the Duomo in Firenze. Those of you who have been inside the Duomo in Florence will know that the interior is not well lit and the distance from the ground to the bottom of the dome is 295 feet (90M). I noticed every one was trying to take a picture of the dome bending over backwards and struggling with low light. I used a technique perfected on my a previous trip to Paris. I put my camera on the ground, set the timer to 2sec delay, clicked and moved away. The image below was taken at 8sec exposure and at f/16 aperture. I could not ask for better details.
As I was processing the image, I zoomed in to 12oclock position above the skylight and cropped the image. I actually printed the crop at 8″x12″ size on my home Epson printer. The crop looked like this below image.
This is a perfect example of why more is more woks very well. I had so many pixels to spare, that I was able to get an “effective” zoom out of the image without necessarily carrying my 1.5Kg zoom lens. Here down below is another example of using a large MP camera (42MP) where I had the luxury of cropping the image (below) so severely from the original, seen below the crop image (please scroll down)
Conclusion, more or less: I was intrigued by a comment made at one of the conversations about how we need to simplify our life at this point of time, seek less for more peace (of mind) etc., That seemed to be the recurring theme among our friends these days where (almost) all of them, successful in their chosen path, driven, intelligent and enlightened. I could not bring myself to subscribing to this line of thinking which IMHO, seems like a knee jerk reaction. I am convinced that there is always room for “more is more”, and “more is less”, rather than an indiscriminate “less is more” point of view of our lives, and living style. It is eminently possible to have these seemingly extreme dichotomies to coexist if only we apply discretion on when to lean one side or the other. It is not either this or that, but it is this AND that that should sum up our life or living.
