Recently while photographing Tūturiwhatu/NZ Dotterels on the beach I had a problem with a bird being too close to me so it would not fit into the frame. I had the option of just shooting for a head and shoulders portrait or focussing in on feather detail, both of which were valid but I also decided to try a stitched panorama photographed in portrait orientation. 6 images covered the scene and when assembled in Lightroom gave me the above image with 104 megapixels revealing lovely detail.

Web presentation cannot show the detail in the full res file well so I have cropped some full res segments .

This next image shows the skin textures on the leg with adherent sand grains. The individual shapes of the sand grain are clearly shown.

This image was processed on my travel laptop while away and the high res crops show some noise in keeping with ISO 1600. Processing the RAW files through DxO PureRAW would provide much cleaner files as a starting point and I will go through that exercise to share.

Will put these images into a post that will make comparison easier next week.

Photos with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S