When I went outside in the morning today, the first thing I tested was to zoom to 105mm. I saw a traffic light and zoomed in. It’s not a big zoom lens but there is a range you can play with. For the start it is really enough because I come much closer to subjects now. Here is the photo…
Diary of Dennis 
Very sharp. Test passed.
Cool, thanks. The original is even sharper, it seems that I lose a lot of detail if I save the jpeg again, but I have to do this after resizing as I won’t upload 6MB files to my blog. I wonder if I should shoot in RAW to save it to jpeg later or if I just should decrease the resolution settings in the camera. But maybe I do lose detail anyway due to a lower resolution, I am not sure.
Dennis, I don’t play in RAW, so nothing to add there. This I know, your photo is sharp. You will lose detail at a lower resolution, and how you get there shouldn’t matter, I don’t think.
Ok thank you Mike. I think too it shouldn’t be a proplem to resize them as they are still sharp and I can save the originals for future editing on my PC.
I don’t play in RAW either, not because I am against it, but because RAW files are huge. I’m having enough problems saving JPG files. Your image is more than sharp enough for the Internet. Unless you are printing (on paper or canvas), you really don’t need more than 72 dpi. That’s all the computer’s monitor can reproduce.
True, I decided to just resize and save the best original photos in a folder on my hard drive for future editing (and how know, maybe printing, although I probably wont). The resized versions should be enough for the web.. that’s what I thought too later on. I mean, I shot with a point and shoot earlier and I shouldn’t scream about quality now with a DSLR, the resized images are still extremely superior to the smaller photos that came out of my point and shoot. 😀
You make a good point with the size, I am already very limited (I have also huge software and computer games installed), it seems I need to buy an additional hard drive very soon. Space is running out 🙂
I need to amend my statement. The reason I shrink everything to 72 dpi is because if you keep uploading multi-megabyte images to your blog, you will run out of space. Not only that, but you will overload your site and it won’t load. Regardless of what display anyone uses, there is a limit to the capacity of servers and space allocated to you and your images. There are lots of high def screens. Even my Kindle is high def. But if I load images at 300 dpi, I won’t be doing it long. Every website tells you to shrink your images before posting. You can ignore the advice, but you do so at your own peril. I shrink them as small as I can. The more complex and detailed the image, the bigger it will be. I tryy to keep pictures big enough to display full size on a big monitor, but sometimes, I have to bring the size down to 9X12 at 72dpi to keep them from being more than a megabyte file size. I’ve got almost 3,500 posts and 6,000 (maybe more) images. If I don’t conserve space, I will be out of business.
Yep, that is one of the reasons why I wrote a resizing tutorial a while ago. We both know it, but many don’t. I saw several people complaining that they did run out of space here at WordPress and I thought this is absolutely not possible which is why I had to write this tutorial. Today it’s even fairly easy to blow up the webspace with images taken with a point and shoot camera or witha mobile device, because they do already have high megapixelcount and so on as well.
I also agree with the loading speed if high-res imagea are used. Not only will you slow down your blog, you will also get bad ranking signals in Google. They mentioned several times that they don’t want to rank slow websites high in the search, understandably, because who wants to visit a slow site anyway?
I think I can give advise here too. I’d say it’s not so much about the resolution, it’s much more about the file size. I usually keep each image below 150kb in size. I probably have some with 200kb. but most of them are rather below 150kb of size. Even if you have some with 300kb, it doesn’t really matter that much anymore, what matters is that you of course shouldn’t upload megabyte images. Even 300kb files are loaded in a second considering that most people have access to fast internet today.
Even a person with a slow connection like 1mb/sec would load them fast as it means 1000kb a second. But most have a much faster connection. So, I just keep things below 200 or 300kb. Jpeg compression is of course a difference too but I keep things at 80% to 100% because it’s negligible if the image is resized properly. That is my experience. And I noticed today, even with a 200kb file you have still quite big resolutions like 1600×1200 or what not, it depends of colour informations of course too, I think. I just take a look that I don’t upload super huge files.
I have now three external hard drives for back up. I think we are all going to explode!
Haha, yea, the original files do take space 😀 I do need to upgrade asap as well.