Someone once said that if your photos don’t seem interesting, that’s only because you weren’t close enough! Given physical limitations, we often resort to zoom lenses or print enlargement to get closer to the subject. However, digital image magnification now gives us another way to do this. This image of the bumblebee is actually a digitally magnified portion of the original. Let’s see the original and learn more about this technique.

One of the only good reasons to have a digital camera with high resolution (5 megapixels and above) is so that you can digitally zoom in on an area of the image and not have that zoomed in portion become all choppy or noisy. The lower the resolution of the original, the worse the magnified area will be. Realize, too, that with most digital cameras, you can choose low, medium, or high resolution. Best to use the highest setting if you think you’ll want to enlarge or edit the images later on.

I made this original image of the bee and flowers with a Canon Digital Rebel XT DSLR equipped with a Canon 28 - 135 mm zoom, fully extended (135 mm). I was about 16 inches from the bee, and a bit frustrated that I could not get a more magnified image. I’d have preferred to get a much closer original shot of the bee since nothing takes the place of a high quality original image. This is the Holy Grail of photography–always do as much work as you can through the lens, because your ability to sharpen, saturate, or recompose an image becomes much more difficult after you’ve captured the image!

Now, getting macro shots of still flower petals is one thing, but a moving bee is a bit difficult to shoot! Even if I were able to zoom in much more, I’d be trying to follow the fast-moving bee all over the place, trying to recompose the scene while attempting to keep the rascal in focus. From this respect, its a better choice to pull back and shoot the wider scene with the intent of cropping/zooming a bit later on.

The caveat here is that you need two things to do this:

1. A hi-res original image and
2. Photo editing software

The Canon Rebel XT is an 8 megapixel camera, so it’s got enough resolution. I used Adobe Photoshop CS2 to crop and magnify the image. Oh, and one last thing–how many shots do you think I took before I got a keeper? Would you believe twenty-six? Sometimes a photographer gets lucky, but skill and persistence usually have a bigger payoff!