Cropping and detail

I don't like cropping photographs. I prefer to compose my shot in the viewfinder, and then live with my decision. I chose to crop the photo I published the other day because the photo server I use has a limited amount of space for each picture, so using the uncropped version would result in a scrunching of detail. Here's a thumbnail of the full-sized shot; click on it and compare the visible detail to the detail visible on the cropped version.


Full sized view

(The telephone pole on the right isn't really leaning. My camera's lens produces some fisheye distortion around the edges.)

I wish you could see the original as I have it on my computer, because you would see the amazing amount of detail captured by my Advantix APS camera (using 24mm ISO 400 APS film) as brought out by Sam's Club's processing and recording to CD-R. To give you a sense of this detail, here's another cropped version of the photo. This is just the church, barely visible in the far distance on both photos:


Church (detail)

The amount of detail you can see here is really remarkable. I really didn't expect this from my little camera.

By the way, I finally gave in and bought a digital camera (Nikon Coolpix 4100 4 megapixel, $179.) We'll see what I can do with that.