Before I say anything about our equipment options, I want to say a few words about RESOLUTION: In general, the more resolution your camera has, the more detail your photos have. (That is assuming you take the highest resolution photos available from your camera.) A seven megapixel camera will theoretically give you a 7 megapixel photo, more than enough for an excellent-looking 8 x 10 size print. A 12 megapixel camera will give you more than enough to crop out the center if you need to and still have a photo with good detail. So in general, photos of higher megapixel cameras show more detail.

The reality, though, is that different cameras with the same resolution can produce very different results depending on the size of a camera’s sensor, the quality of the lenses, and how many of those pixels are being used to take the picture and to process it. Some of the pixels aren’t even used.  For example, my old 6.3 Canon 10D took much cleaner photos than almost all the other higher megapixel cameras I have owned. (The main reason I gave up using it involved the difficulty of getting down on the ground low enough to see through the viewfinder!  Getting back up was harder! All of my cameras since then have had articulated LCD monitors). Bear in mind that no digital camera is a match for the human eye.  It cannot capture the variety of tones visible to the eye. Detail is lost in the bright and dark tones.