Mt. Rainier from Farm Country

There are some great views of Mt. Rainier from the farms in Orting, WA where we live

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).