Japanese Red Maple Leaf And Detail

A portion of a small Japanese Red Maple leaf found on the sidewalk. (click to enlarge)
See that tiny black dot in the lower right portion of the leaf just above the vein?  Read on.

One early November afternoon way back in 2004 I was out in my neighborhood walking.  For exercise.  I'm told its good for me.  But I've already digressed...

Autumn leaf color comes late here in southeastern Virginia.  Usually the second week of November is, on average, the peak week for leaf color.  As I walked down the sidewalk lost in my thoughts and the beauty that Mother Nature brings us each fall, I picked up this Japanese Red Maple leaf, which measured about 3 inches (7.6cm) from top to bottom.  It had fallen from the small tree next to the sidewalk.  As I continued my walk while examining the little red leaf I thought I might be able to make some sort of photograph of it.

After I returned home, on my kitchen table I used an old wooden clothes pin to attach the stem of this leaf to something or other (I don't remember right now) so it was securely oriented in an upright position.  I then brought in an old Tensor high intensity desk lamp with a quartz halogen bulb to backlight the leaf.  Using my 6mp Nikon D70 and Nikon 60mm f/2.8 G micro lens attached to a tabletop tripod, I made a few exposures at 1/6th sec. @ f/11with an ISO of 200.

I am pleased at how well this image held up over the past 8 years.  In fact, I have a 16 X 24 inch (40 X 60 cm) matted and framed copy of this photograph on a wall in our home.  Not bad for a 6mp camera.  But wait, there's more!

With today's digital tools, I decided to see how well 6mp would REALLY hold up.  You see, in the far lower right hand portion of the leaf , just above the vein, you'll see a little black dot sort of thing.  That is a bug of some sort and, if you look closely, you can barely make out a leg or two.  I wondered just how good a look at this bug I could get?  Here is what I did for the image below.

The original image is cropped to 5.5mp.  In Topaz Gigapixel AI, I upsized and sharpened that cropped image to over 66.5mp, then back in Lightroom, cropped it back down to 4.9mp.  You can do the math to figure out how much of the original frame this second image represents.  In any case, I think with today's modern editing tools, the possibilities for going back and re-editing old images, whether reducing noise, sharpening slightly unsharp subjects or upsizing a small file, is pretty much endless.  

I made it a practice to never delete files as I predicted, sometime in the future, editing tools would be available to fix many of the defects found in those old image files.  That time has arrived.

The original file was 6mp from a Nikon D70 and a Nikon 60mm f/2.8 G micro lens.  The original
file was cropped to 5.5mp, then upsized to 66.5mp, then cropped again to 4.9mp.  I am amazed
that this much detail was recorded in the first place.  Much more than I would have thought 
possible from a 6mp camera. (click to enlarge)

So....my question to you is, “Do you really need 100mp, 61mp, 50mp, 46mp or even 36mp?”  If this original 6mp image file from 2004 can resolve the legs on this tiny bug, I think that fact challenges the assumptions we make the about numbers of pixels we think we need.  Do we need them or just want them?  I think a case can be made both ways.

Join me over at my website, https://www.dennismook.com.  

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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