Mickey at the start of Fantasmic! (one reason for a lot of Megapixels)

Mickey in Fantasmic 

Fantasmic has to be the greatest live show in the world, or dead show of all time, in the universe, for all time to come.  OK, maybe I like it, what do you think?

Here is Mickey at the start of the show with sprays of water coming down on him.  Click on the picture so you can see the detail.  

I took this with a Nikon D600, 1/400 of a second so I could stop the motion of the water, with an f/2.8 (so the only thing that was going to be in focus was Mickey, but it also opened the lens as far as it could to let in as much light as possible) ISO 1600 to off-set the high shutter speed (I might have gotten away with a slower shutter speed and a lower ISO setting but I can try that next time) with a 200mm lens zoomed in all the way.

Even with the longer lens I still had to crop the picture by about 60%.  If you crop pictures a lot then having a high megapixel camera really helps out to keep a lot of the detail.  The original picture was 24.7mbs in RAW format and the final cropped one in JPG is only 993KB.  A lot of the drop in size is converting it from RAW to JPG but with so much of the picture cropped out that reduced it a lot as well.  So if a picture starts off with 24MP and you crop it by 60% and then increase what is left to the same size as the original you end up with a picture that is about 10MP and you need ever megapixel you can have to keep as much detail as possible.  If you started with a picture that was 16MP and cropped it in half you would end up with a picture that was only 8MP.  So when someone asks if having a camera with a high number of MPs matters now you know that it can if you are going to crop a lot.