When Is Enough Is Enough?

Do I need more resolution than this image made with a 24mp camera?  More sharpness than made
with an inexpensive lens?  You be the judge. (click to enlarge)

"Enough is as good as a feast." 

James Howell, 1660, Lexicon Tetraglotton

My question to you is when will you (or did you) get to the point of 'sufficiency' with your photography gear?

Whenever I watch a YouTube video or an internet photography blog reviewing a lens, the emphasis seems to always be on lens sharpness—center sharpness, edge sharpness and corner sharpness.  We seem to always talk about how sharp, sharper, sharpest a lens may be.  We celebrate how a lens with superior sharpness is and we clamor to buy them.  

Also, as much as many say we have enough pixels, our buying habits tell the manufacturers we want more and more pixels on our cameras sensors.  There seems to never be enough as we have to capture so much detail that we seemingly aim to see the atomic structure of a leaf or the molecular structure of a person's eyelash!  Sensor size?  Of course, we want bigger and bigger sensors.  APS-C and M4/3, we are often told, are inadequate and even full frame is now taking a back west to medium format sensors.  Is this what photography has been reduced to today?  Has technical excellence replaced content?  It sure seems that way to me.

Are we selling our collective photographic souls for the sake of technical superiority?  Are pictures that are tack sharp better than pictures that are acceptably sharp?  Has a photograph that is not technically excellent become a 'throw away?'  Have we forgotten that what’s in the photograph just might be more important than the technical quality of a photograph?  Have we gone overboard with technical perfection of our images and overly emphasize resolution, detail, sharpness, lack of distortion, vignetting and aberrations?  I think we have.

I want to be clear.  I'm calling myself out on this, too.  I'm as guilty as anyone for wanting more than I need.  Like many of you, I think I'm a victim of our current social media based culture.  But, in the past couple of years, I think I've changed my way of thinking.  For example, I've written that I think a 20mp Micro4/3 kit can produce as good images as a full frame kit, under most circumstances.  But there are always exceptions?  Just to make a point for the other side, if you are photographing warblers at a great distance and can’t move closer, a case can be made for a sensor with a large number of pixels so you can crop in to be able to see the bird at a decent size.  Or, again, if it’s that far away, maybe you should just enjoy looking at it and enjoying its song.  

I don't know about you but I see too many mediocre but technically excellent photographs circulating on the various internet sites.  But the trend seems to be that if the image is tack (or pin) sharp, highly resolved, colorful and grossly oversaturated it has to be good!  Or is it?

Add to that that any digital noise at all is too much and only the dynamic range of capturing detail in the surface of the sun at the same time as stars surrounding it is the only dynamic range that will suffice!

A decade or so years ago we were thrilled with the quality of 12mp cameras.  Remember the Canon and Nikon 12mp cameras?  They were a godsend!  I remember reading they were everything we had hoped digital would be.  They finally exceeded the quality of 35mm film.  Yahoo!  But when cameras arrived a couple of years later with 16 or 24mp, all of a sudden, 12mp wasn’t sufficient.  Then 20mp wasn’t sufficient.  Then 24mp wouldn't do.  Now we see many cameras giving us 45mp, 50mp, 61mp, 102mp and even 150mp!  We, as a photographic community, seem to have adopted a moving target of sufficiency and the philosophy that no number of pixels, resolution or sharpness is quite enough. 

Again, I'll interject that my heart tells me I love all of those pixels and those supersharp lenses but my brain keeps reminding me that anything more than sufficiency is wasted money, wasted computer storage space and wasted time in dealing with the huge files.

What I seem to see quite a lot are attitudes and opinions that a $500 lens mated with a 20mp camera can’t possibly make excellent photographs but the same focal length lens with the same aperture that cost $2500 mated with a camera with 61mp will make excellent photographs because it is the sharper lens and the camera resolves more fine detail.  How wrong.  That kind of thinking is very troublesome to most rational photographers.

The problem, at its base level, in my view is that we pixel peep.  We enlarge an image file on our HD, UHD, 4K, 5K or higher resolution computer monitors, not only to 100% but I now see reviewers looking at the molecular level of image files at 200%, 300% and even 400%!  Are you kidding me?  Shouldn't we be looking at an image in its entirety?  Shouldn't we be examining our images to assess how they look in their entirety which is how we would want those who look at our images to view them?  Do you really want those who see you images to look at them for technical excellence or do you want them to 'see' what excited you and what evoked an emotion in you and what you are trying to say in your images as a whole?

I remember when I was a teenager that an automobile that would top 125mph was extraordinary!  All the hotrodders wanted an engine that would allow them to go that fast.  As time progressed, that moving target became 150mph.  My 2000 Corvette was governed at 186mph!  (No I never drove it that fast and I found little satisfaction that it would go that fast as that speed was irrelevant to the real world—and, I was a Chief of Police, so there's that!).  Now, what is deemed fast is well over 200mph for a street legal vehicle!  I guess it is for bragging rights in the way of not only having an automobile that will go that fast but also being able to spend $500,000-$2,000,000 to buy one!  But you can't drive over 200mph on any street that I know of here in the U.S. anyway.  I guess the Bonneville Salt Flats may be one of only a couple of options.  So what does it then matter the top speed of your exotic automobile?  In the same line of thinking, can you really use 102mp or 150mp?  I'm not sure you can.

Okay, I'll get down off my soapbox.  My question to all of you is when will all this end?  When will we be satisfied?  When is enough enough?  When will stop clamoring for more?  When will we be thankful for the excess we now have and get back to making photographs with good content and not worry about extreme technical excellence?  

On the other hand, should it end?  Is this the only way we can keep the camera manufacturers in business?  I wish I had the answer but I don't.

As it says at the top of this post, truly, enough is as good as a feast!  You gain nothing by having too much to eat.

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

Thanks for looking. Enjoy!  

Dennis A. Mook  

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