Quote Originally Posted by djzuk
But I feel that it's quite infrequent where 10mp is not enough. Especially in the case of wildlife and maybe sports photography, which was my original theme of this thread.

Brendan has a point. For wildlife, you often want to fill a substantial part of your frame with the subject. There are a several ways to achieve that:
  1. Get physically close. Getting really close to the wildlife is possible in some circumstances (I've been literally 3 feet from mountain gorillas in Rwanda), but not many. Wildlife is wild!
  2. Get optically close. Use a really long lens (Moose Peterson uses a 600mm f/4 VR lens - he calls it 'essential for wildlife photographers') - the Nikon version of that lens will run you >$10K, the Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS is just over $8K. 12 megapixels are fine for Moose Peterson, since he has a 600mm lens.
  3. Crop. Unless you're willing to shell out >$8K on the lens, using a shorter lens and cropping the resulting is the only 'real' option for most people who want to shoot wildlife.



Most times, images are cropped by at least 50%. If you must crop, you generally need more megapixels. Now, if you are only planning on viewing your images on your computer or printing them at 8x10" or smaller, the 4-6 megapixels you'll have left after cropping your 10 megapixel 1DIII image will be fine. But at the beginning of this thread on choosing a lens for wildlife, you didn't list a 600mm ("essential for wildlife") lens among your choices. So if you want to 'get close' without actually getting physically or optically close, you're likely going to be cropping them - which means you'll benefit from the additional pixels of a newer camera body.


Quote Originally Posted by djzuk
As I said before, Moose Peterson uses cameras with 12mp for everything he does. Instead of cropping later, he composes for the shot he wants in camera.

Exactly. For wildlife, he can do this primarily because he has a 600mm lens.