Crop Corner

Cheryl Surry looks at the various options available that you can use to make bigger enlargements from your digital photographs. Whether you have a 2 or a 6 megapixel camera, making your images bigger is something you'll want to do from time to time, whether to print a large poster or to submit to an image library. The problem is, just like a 35mm negative is fixed in size at 24x36mm, a digital image is fixed by its pixel dimensions. Negatives are enlarged by projecting their image onto light sensitive paper, and the bigger you go, the lower the quality becomes. Digital images are no different, and whatever you do, you can't make them bigger without suffering some degradation in quality.

ePHOTOzine member, Chris Shepherd, recently organised his first photographic exhibition. Here he shares a few lessons he learnt in the process of setting up and creating this event. I decided to set myself a photographic project in order to improve my photographic skills. The project was a year long study of a local nature reserve and in order to ensure I actually completed the project I booked the gallery space so there was no going back, the project just had to be completed. So the exhibition just had to happen and here is what I discovered in the process.

If youve been shopping for a digital camera youve probably noticed that, for the most part, price points between the various models center on megapixel level. Cameras in the 1-2 mexapixel level are usually priced at less than $100. Cameras in the 3-4 megapixel level are at least two or three times as expensive, and cameras in the 5-8 megapixel level can, of course, sport an even higher price tag. So what do these numbers mean and how do you choose? Whether viewed on a computer screen or printed, a photograph is made up of tiny dots called pixels. With regard to digital imagery, megapixel (or MP) is used to refer to the number of pixels the camera is able to capture. Mega indicates million, so one megapixel equals one million pixels (i.e. dots). The higher the number of pixels in an image, the higher the quality of detail the picture will reveal.