I believe to shoot the photos at the camera’s maximum resolution at all time. Here are my reasons so.

Make Full Use of the Sensor
The most common difference between a newer camera model and an old one is the megapixel number. A newer camera model can take photo at a higher megapixel than an old one. So we buy a new camera, especially to replace the old one, we are effectively paying for the higher resolution.

This makes logical sense that we have to make full use of our money. And to do so, is to take photo at the maximum resolution available by the camera.

Never Know When We Need It
Recently, a friend was asked to submit high resolution photos at an event for internal public relations material. This friend has shot all his pictures with 600 pixels on the long side. This limited the photos’ use as public relations material.

We never know when we need the high resolution photo. We could be needed it for some publicity material or even just for printing. And the quality of the print depends on the resolution of the photo taken. Furthermore, storage space is getting cheaper by the days.

So this also makes logical sense that we take the photo at maximum resolution, just in case we need to use it.

Flexibility for Post Processing
When we take the photo at maximum resolution, this gives us more flexibility to do post processing. A high resolution photo allow us to easily crop the portion we want, rotate the photo or tune the photo without losing much quality.

Furthermore, we can easily reduce the resolution of the photo using post processing but modern post processing technology still has its limitation to increase the photo resolution.

Overall, the above are the reasons, why I believe in taking digital photos at maximum resolution.

At idea came to me as I open my eyes. Why not, I set my lens to manual mode, switch on the flash, set the shutter speed to be very fast and shoot at the rain? Maybe I could get some shots of the rain drops.

I quickly got out of the bed and tried it out.

100mm, 1/200s, f/2.8 ISO 400

Shooting straight - 17mm, 1/200s, ISO 400

Shooting Downwards - 17mm, 1/200s, f/2.8, ISO 400

The effect look very snowy and artistic to me.

After the a few rounds, I concluded the following:

• It does not matter, if I set to manual or automatic focus. The best is the distance subject is in focus. It provides some form of background. Even if the subject is out of focus, it could be artistic in some form.
• I set the highest shutter speed. I don’t know why, when I switch on the flash unit, the camera only around 1/200s as fastest shutter speed. I think I need to read up on this.

I had some fun using my camera.