The Frog Waits. Buddhist Gardens, Boulder, Colorado, 2018 (Cropped)
Here is a good example of how you can use the extra megapixels of the Nikon D850 (or any other high MP camera) to turn your relatively short walk-around lens into a much longer telephoto lens–and move in close enough to give a froggy a kiss.
The above photograph is a cropped section taken from the image below. The lens on the camera was the Nikkor 24-120 f/4 set at the 120mm focal length. With the crop, you get what is effectively a 300mm lens.
Of course, you will be sacrificing the capability to print yuuuge since so many pixels were thrown away. But, for web use or smaller prints, it’ll get ‘er done.
For comparison, below you have the uncropped, unprocessed, JPEG file as it came out of the camera (neutral picture settings). I took this shot with the very specific intention of seeing how close in I could crop and still get a decent, useable image. I also kept the frog near the center of the scene (sharper there) knowing I would re-crop for better balance using the “Guideline of Thirds“.
See the frog? She’s pretty small relative to the entire area of the photograph. Had I tried to move in closer, she surely would have plunked under the water in an invisible milli-instant:
The Frog Waits. Buddhist Gardens, Boulder, Colorado, 2018 (uncropped and unworked JPEG file)
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