Originally posted by normhead Hey, I just thought of another issue. According to my thinking, a K-5 and a D800 have about the same pixel density, so the image should be about the same size. If you had to crop your image 50% in a K-5 @300mm, then you'd have to crop the D800 75%, you'd actually get pretty much the same image, just more image to throw out. But you wouldn't have to be as accurate in your framing. You'd definitely have more room to crop with the D800. I've always thought the advantage to APS-c was, you aren't going to pay for image size you are just going to crop anyway with long lenses.
So that's what I think should happen, what are you finding from your experience?
My other hobby was veneering and I really liked the effect that book matching them produced - here's a link to a PDF file that shows an example,
http://www.mikes-woodwork.com/Papers/Making%20Templates%20for%20a%20Sunburst.pdf and it's all about joining segments. I start with a close-up image of something with an interesting pattern or shape and then crop out a 45 degree segment so with my K-5 I usually wound up with less than half of the pixels. If you duplicate, flip and rotate the segment you then have a square which can then be duplicated and flipped to produce a rectangle and that can be duplicated and flipped to produce a square. I use photo segments in lieu of veneer and I've used 22.5, 30, 45 or 60 degree segments to come up with the final image. Doing this with a D800 image means I have a little more than twice the number of pixels available so I can print them larger. The first sample is the starting image and the other two are results of different arrangements using the same 45 degree segment. I hope this helps explain why the Nikon does a better job for me than the K-5 and let me know if you have any more questions.