Mt. Rainier really stands out when you back up and let it tower over the local hills.

Technical info: I had planned to take this image with the 150mm lens, which would have zoomed in a lot closer on the mountain. But I forgot to put it in the car, so I used what I had: an 80mm lens. My first few shots, at f/4 and f/5.6, did not keep the foreground in focus, so this one was taken at f/11 and 1/320th second. ISO 50.

If I had had the longer lens, it would have been roughly twice as close a view, like this, a crop of the 80mm image:

How did that happen? Well, The top photograph was so big, that I exported the JPG at 25% of fill size. All I had to do was crop and export at 50% of full size. Because the lens is so sharp, the half-size (really one quarter of the image area) that is roughly equivalent to a 150mm lens is still really sharp.

This would not have been so convenient, of course, if I wanted to output the 150mm image at, say 36” x 24”. But this trick works fine for the web.

OK, OK; here’s another crop, roughly corresponding to what a 300mm lens would see:

That last image is also at 100%, and provides the actual resolution of the lens (subject to the compression and blurring of the image that occurs when turning it into a JPG).

First rule of photography: whether your favorite thing is color, details, contrast, fidelity to subject, etc.—having too much is sometimes just what you need to accomplish your goal. A camera with sharper lenses, higher dynamic range, more accurate color, provides source material with some room to correct (and, if you like, enhance).