Those of you who know me or are familiar with my work know that I don’t have a great deal of patience for pixel peeping. I can tolerate pixel peerpers but not so much their pixel peeping activity.
My primary concern with pixel peeping is that it never takes into account things like mood, art, feeling and most important – taste. Pixel peeping also removes the single most valuable tool a photographer has from the equation – the photographic eye – and replaces it with a set of numbers.
Michael Reichmann of Luminous Landscape has written a very eloquent piece about this on his site. While I rarely simply link to another post here on the TWIPPHOTO blog (I think out of 600 posts I’ve done it less than five times…) this is one case where I simply couldn’t have written this as well as Michael did – and yet it’s such an important point that I want to make sure everyone gets it.
Sometimes you should believe your eye and not the numbers.
Scott,
I’m wondering why you kept the horizon in above shot at the dead-center? Is it because it’s a panoramic image or to enhance the mirror effect of the two parts (sky/water) or something else?
I like it, btw. :-)
I see pixel-peeping as just another tool in evaluating an image. It’s not the most important at all, with the photographic eye, mood and so on, as you say, much more important. But I don’t disregard pixel level detail entirely, particularly when cropping images that will expose such detail.
meckimac: the rule of thirds is a misnomer. It’s not a strict ‘rule’, just a general guideline for aesthetics. Just as important as knowing the ‘rule’, is knowing when to NOT use it. The image is lovely.
Sorry, in addition, the image kind of does follow the ‘thirds’ – you have the sky, the sunset (and its reflection), and then the water, all about 1/3. The horizon is separate. If you want to get technical.
Yes when shooting panos it’s common practice and acceptable to put the horizon in the center. I’ll also do this when shooting square sometimes. As MRKGOO says below it’s a guideline. Let’s try to stay on the subject of the post tho thanks.
I agree Scott, Michael Reichmann has an eloquent way of stating a point, and in this case his point is well made
I had the pleasure of acquiring a Canon 50D a while back and I trusted my own eyes and thought it a good camera for its place in the market.
Regrettably, I stumbled across the 50D forum at dpreview where I was astonded by the level of vitriol, aggression and plain bad manners of people basing their opinion on a camera that so many of them did not own, or had not used, purely on numbers.
Two things came out of that experience … I trusted my own eyes and still happily use my 50D as it was intended – to make images, the second was to delete dpreview from my bookmarks list – both have been very happy experiences :-)
Thanks for sharing
Perfection! Love this site. Great to learn, and nice to know…”Rules were meant to be broken”
I tend to go with my “eye”, and not the numbers. Good tip
Chris other than being a bit expensive compared to similar cameras in its class, the 50D is not only a good camera – it’s a great camera – and the LAST place I’d look for advice on something like which camera to buy is an unmoderated photo forum. They tend to be populated by trolls and people who knew a guy, who had a sister, who’s ex-boyfriend was a mailman who delivered mail to a bookstore that had a magazine on the rack that somewhere said that the camera you bought might not be perfect.
There was a post about this awhile ago on Smugmug, and it’s still relevant
Excellent article. Don’t you just love numbers. If you like it, you can afford it, or it will pay for itself and do the job, then that’s what you should go for. Yes professionals will make different purchasing decisions than perhaps a rank amateur like me and so they should, their needs and lively hood depend on it. Me I just want to enjoy photography so I bought what I liked that would help me learn. Keep them coming Scott way to go.
i really agree with this article, it’s all megapixle-schmegapixle to me, and high end lenses are ovverated, except for the large apreture. But overall no matter how bad the camera proformas, it’s always the image and the story that make the difference, not the clarity and sharpness of the photo. And with the recent event of the airplane in the river deal, the winning photo was still taken by a camera phone, and at the end it was the photo and the story within that counted not the quality.
I too am new to this site as well as a new podcast listener to TWIP. I want to offer a profound thank you to each of you.. I am beginning to come up the learning curve and having fun taking photos while on snow shoe outings in the Adirondack Mountains
I’d be cautious about using high end audio as a positive comparison: the trend away from measurable results has resulted in a some incredibly insane scams. $1000/ft speaker cable, for example. Objective, scientific testing definitely has its place in keeping manufacturers honest.
Modern day high end audio marketing likes to make us believe that there are mysterious, magical properties about their products that mere scientists can never understand – I’d hate to see that same happen with photography gear (although some of the marketing speak is already pretty bad, currently it seems to mostly be ignored by consumers)
That said, I agree with the conclusion of the article – that there’s a place for subjective and objective measurements. And it’s also true that concentrating on the purely technical can get in the way of enjoying what you have.
In that way it *is* quite similar to high end audio – at some stage you have to put down the magazines and actually listen to music. If you’re lucky, in no time at all the specs of the gear you’re listening to fall out of your head as you get lost in the reproduction.