Forum > The Fruit Stand (Photography)

Zoom question

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Sarah Good Times:
Point and shoot, if that matters.

In terms of clarity, is it better to zoom in or to be zoomed out and do the zooming with picture software later?

Yogi:
Zoom in as close as you can while shooting. That often means getting physically close and then zooming in.

I've noticed that post-processing adjustments (cropping/straightening) often mean loss in quality. That might not be the case with super professional software but that shit is $$$$... in Gimp, Picasa, etc, you will lose quality the more you play around with the exposure.

Yogi:
Also, a photo taken from a distance might not be in perfect focus... which you won't realize until you try to crop and then resize. So it's better to get it as close to what you want while shooting and then just do minor retouching afterwards.

That is strictly my opinion.

omega lambda:
Yogi is correct - zoom with both your feet and the lens. 

The difference between the two in your question though is that if you zoom with the lens (and your feet), the image you take will be the subject you want and all of the pixels will be used to make the photo you want, so you'll have a full resolution photo and you can do whatever you want with that; crop it, print it, print it really big (30" x 40" for example).  If you use software to zoom in on a much smaller part of a photo, your resulting photo will be far fewer pixels and you'll be throwing away the rest of them and you will not have a full resolution photo.   Depending on how much software zooming (or cropping) you do, you might you will be limited in what you can do with it, and you might not even get an 8x10 photo out of it without it being pixelated.

I also just realized that by clarity, you might also be referring to what is in focus.  The answer is the same though, because as you zoom in with the lens, you're also telling the camera what is important to you and therefore what you want in focus.  You may still have a little trouble, so make sure that you actually hear the focus lock beep and that the square for the focus point is directly over the subject you want in focus.  At high zooms, this is really important.

Yogi:
 :heartbeat:

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