What about group shots??

[Tom_Coles]

We all know that todays digitals can produce great H/S shots but what about group shots? I'm thinking of 16x20's of 15+ people in it. How much detail can these cameras record.

Tom C

Here's one I did a couple of weeks ago Tom.

I cropped a small 4"x5" section at 200 ppi from the large image to get it down to a reasonable size for uploading to the internet
http://www.carolsteele.btinternet.co...up_section.jpg
I also downsampled the group to a small size so that you could see the group as a whole
http://www.carolsteele.btinternet.co.uk/group_whole.jpg

[Walter_Guasch]

Carol,

Which camera did you use? was that with you new D1x?

Walter

Yes Walter, shot with the D1X

[Tom_Coles]

Carol,

What was the final size. How did it look? I assume the detail would be better at 300 dpi.

Tom

>I assume the detail would be better at 300 dpi<

No, it wouldn't Tom - going to an image at 300 ppi would mean further interpolation of the image, so it wouldn't be adding more detail, merely adding guessed at pixels to pad the file size out.

[Ron]

Tom, groups are no different than head & shoulders images. I have a 30x40 print from a D30 in my studio window. 30x40 is pushing it a bit - but it's excellent and very sellable. Everyone is surprised when I tell them it's digital. I tell them to check it out up close and to look at the curve of the neck. I can see a slight jaggy edge to this curve from a few inches away from the print. (they look closely and say - I think I see what you mean).

A 16x20 is no problem (for any subject matter) from one of the good 35mm format digital cameras.

(not sure what Carol did to that group crop, but it looks really bad to me - almost appears to have some sort of motion blur and the detail is really weak and includes some strange color artifacts.) Don't let that scare you off from shooting and printing 16x20s from digital files. It's not a problem!