No.
So, which do you want? The larger image straight from the camera or a smaller image by cropping?
Anyway, with the view you have from your balcony, just adjust the framing in the camera by changing the focal length. Cropping reduces the image quality by removing pixels.
Iâd just like some lightning activity 
We used to live near Liverpool in England, where the most exciting weather seemed to part on its way, from the south west, over the North Wales mountains and rejoin further to the north.
Now we live in a part of Brittany where the most exciting weather seems to part on its way, from the south west, over the Monts dâArrĂ©e and then rejoin over the other side of the English Channel. 
What I want??? Gee. Very simple answer, a D880, or D7.
I would like the resolution of the D850, along with all the new features on the D780., and all of this was provided in a body based on the D6, that would be perfection for me. Not that I could afford it⊠Spending was easier when I was working.
For right now, Iâm satisfied. The D780 has just about everything I want, and I have yet to learn about the Z6 functions that it also includes, and I havenât yet learned about or tried. I wonder why they didnât bump it up to 50 megapixels, while they had the chance to do so. The D850, for me, is becoming affordable, almostâŠ
https://www.keh.com/shop/nikon-d850-digital-slr-camera-body-45-7-m-p-1.html
Back to your question - âwhich do you wantâ?
True Answer:
I agree, but when it comes to lightning, I never know where that will appear, so I cover a wider area, and crop as needed. I do zoom to what I hope will work, before starting. But honestly, seeing the lightning over the wider view of Miami seems much more effective to me than seeing a close-up of the lightning.
Should I be happy for you, or sad for you, that you no longer get to see lightning?
This is from their website:
ownersguide
(I just called them, and yes, the device does control the camera, and yes, itâs about $400 as shown on the website. Adding this to my âwantâ list, for some time in the future.)
According to that it simply keeps the metering alive to ensure the camera is ready and then trigger the camera to do an exposure.
It does not do exposure metering, set ISO, aperture and shutter speed to my knowledge.
I have an older type of miops which do lightning, sound, laser at al. for triggering.
I, usually use my own eyes to watch 
and yes, the colour was there, although it is not easy to make out because the flash of the lightning is so bright. Looking âawayâ from the action helps to not get blinded and perceive the colours. Moreover, the colours were captured by the camera, tweaks wer minimal as shown at the end of this post.
As you can see in the first screenshot, the original RAW (the one marked with an âMâ) is quite dark and needed some lifting to show the channels. As we can see in RawDigger, the channel is barely visible and not clipped:
Lightning is variable and some of the takes had clipped channels:
Anyways, it takes some experimentation and patience ⊠as well as a few scraps. I kept 13 takes out of 40 and consider a hit rate of about 1/3 fairly usable.
Customising of the VC shown in the upper capture was fairly minimal, a spoonful of tone curve and a pinch of HSL:
BTW: The channels lit by lightning light up for a while and lightning can come in several blasts down the same channel. A trigger can therefore work, but will not allow to capture the original strike. More about lightning in Wikipedia
Re-strike
High-speed videos (examined frame-by-frame) show that most negative CG lightning flashes are made up of 3 or 4 individual strokes, though there may be as many as 30.[66]
Each re-strike is separated by a relatively large amount of time, typically 40 to 50 milliseconds, as other charged regions in the cloud are discharged in subsequent strokes. Re-strikes often cause a noticeable "strobe light" effect.[67]
@mikemyers what do you expect me to find on the manufacturerâs website which contradicts this?
I recall these things from long ago, also thinking âWow, coolâ and shortly after âJust a trigger⊠how much? wtf?â That may even be the same product from decades ago 
Donât know if it was online or in a magazine.
This has made me wonder if the optical trigger from a flash can be converted to be used as shutter trigger. Could the sensitivity be increased with a few modifications? (would it need to be?). I think the next time thereâs lightning here Iâll leave my flash in slave mode at the window and see if it fires.
Careful with that one. You might want to check the triggerâs output to prevent damage to the release electronics of your camera. Old âearplugâ style flash triggers should be less of a problem.
hahah, I donât mean directly ⊠just solder on matching plugs⊠that would be cool (I did things like that when I was 10 and sometime things went âbangâ)
I meant of course converting the trigger signal accordingly. In the simplest case use a flash trigger and a remote shutter and combine the two (use flash trigger to simulate pushing the button on the remote).
EDIT: I have several âpurpleâ lightning photos too.
Well, what you write sounds very logical.
I read this:
âŠand perhaps jumped to the wrong conclusion. What you say sounds correct. The device itself is adjusting for changing light conditions, but not the exposure. Thanks.
I think Iâve been reading that the device reacts to âsomethingâ, some kind of pre-flash, so it is fast enough to capture the lightning strike, but even when I called them for more information, I never got a clear answer.
Maybe next time I take the hundreds of 10 or 15 second exposure captures, and hope one of them captures a lightning strike. Thatâs one of the methods that was described. Not sure if I want to spend $400 for one of these things yet, and maybe one of the $200 devices at B&H is âgood enoughâ.
Câmon @mikemyers , keep that money or give it to charity.
200, let alone 400 USD is a lot to spend for something that looks like a temporary fancy to me. Take the low-tech challenge and youâll see that getting a few nice shots is no magic.
Your D750 might even feature automated timelapse. Capture the lightning while you sleep.
Good advice. There are more useful ways to spend some more money, rather than on a fancy toy.
Today was a rather strange day. With my mind going in circles trying to sort this out, I walked away from my computers and went out on my balcony to relax. Just watching the general view, and the cruise ships off in the distance, and two tiny boats on the water coming towards me, only my mind was telling me it was two cars. Impossible. The more I looked, and the closer they got, the more confused I got. I grabbed my D780 with the 300 on it. I got two photos, one of a âMcLarenâ, and one of a âCorvetteâ, although obviously despite the looks thatâs not what I was seeing. I have no idea what they were. Hereâs one of the photos - the other car/boat looks just as real/fake⊠âŠnow, if the wheels had been spinningâŠwow!
They went down a small canal a little North of me, and went out of sight. I waited, but they didnât return. Instead, this medium-size dark colored bird came flying across, and landed on one of those floating things that are connected to an anchor - boats can tie up to them. The bird stayed there for a good long time, long enough for me to go get my tripod and leave the camera aimed at the bird. The image below would have been better if I had a longer lens, but itâs just not enough pixels. I even got a photo of the bird coming in for a landing, but itâs not what I hoped to capture.
Interesting day.
@platypus, youâre right. Of all the things I might be interested in, a good long tele lens ought to be much higher on my list than an electronic toy.
If you wish to play around with triggers in any different ways, look for some older versions of the Miops on the second hand market.
You should be able to pick them up for under âŹ100 with ease.
And they offers far more cool trigger features than simply lightning. 
Even the 600 mm you considered wouldnât be enough. And that was already too heavy for you to hold in your hand.
Of course you can crop the image, including to even out the horizon, but not like this
Instead of trying out the advices and understand, you just hopp from one topic to the next without any practical consequences for you.
Indeed. I just did a bit of mathematics and, in order to fill the frame as you and @mikemyers have done, you would need a 750mm lens.
As it stands, the cropped image is only 1501px x 1269px, which isnât even large enough to fill a 27" iMac screen, let alone to create a reasonable size print.
Here are two screenshots taken at a reasonably high magnification, in order to show the problems you will encounter when trying to enlarge for printing, or even just for screen use.
Look at the wings and you will see, not only a lack of detail but, also, a horrible haloing around the edges caused by a futile attempt to sharpen in order to bring out detail. The problem is, if there arenât enough pixels, there is no way you can ever hope to get a decent image. You can even see the individual pixels.
So, in order to increase the pixel count, I ran the resulting cropped file through Topaz Photo AI to double the sizeâŠ
What you get is simply larger pixels, because there is no way that a detail that is only one pixel wide can be anything other than the same line doubled in thickness. Hence the halos around the wings being even more prominent and the âfeathersâ on the head and body being nothing more than a scrambled mess. Not to mention the âplastificationâ of detail.
Mike, Iâve told you before and Iâll repeat it here - if the subject doesnât fill at least half the frame, you stand absolutely no chance of making a half decent image.
In this example, you are trying to make an image that is not even 2Mpx look like it came out of your 24Mpx camera.
Mike, do us all a favour and stop taking long distance photos of small things without either a massively longer lens or getting a lot closer to your subject. Yes, I can see some detail on the moon, which is about 239,000 miles away but that is because the human eye has an amazing zoom capability and your brain convinces you that, because you can see detail, so can an expensive but still very inferior camera.
Thatâs life; one can âactâ or âreactâ. Yes, Iâm hopping from one thing to another, as I react to things.
Yes, the bird was too far away.
My thoughts: âDo the best you can with what youâve gotâ.
About cropping, and straightening the image, when I edited to correct the horizon, the photo looked boring. I made the floating thing âhorizontalâ, as I thought it should be, but I didnât like the result.
Iâm not yet searching for good bird photos to capture, and I no longer have any plans to buy a 600mm lens. They used to sell Celestron telescopes with a camera mount. I found several on Amazon. Maybe they have a coupling for a Nikon? No plans to buy one though.
As for the cars, I found the source a few minutes ago:
Behind the Scenes | Watersports Car (this is the link to the gallery)
I never knew these ârealisticâ looking cars existed.
My translation of that is to take the photos anyway, but never post them in this forum, but in response to my group email last night, anyone who commented on the images loved the bird photos:
Looking at the bird through my viewfinder, at full (300mm) zoom, I could âseeâ a nice photo. Rather than buying a 1000mm lens or equivalent, maybe I could put the $$ towards a 50 megapixel camera like yours.
For printing, my photo is junk. I accept this.
For email, people think itâs great.
I think I have accepted the reality, and stopped beating my head against a brick wall, or hoping that overnight, my camera suddenly became more powerful (ha!), and while from my balcony I couldnât see any detail in the bird, looking through the eyepiece it looked good, to me.
Perhaps when I eventually get to one of the bird sanctuaries, Iâll be able to capture images that will be acceptable here - but not from my balcony.
As to the photos you posted, Iâm impressed. I clearly see the flaws, but your last image, cropped, would make for a much more beautiful email, to most people.
Oh yeah, I can add that even though you and @Wolfgang see the flaws, the people I email to think Iâm capturing amazing images. A lot of that goes to PhotoLab, as it helped me so much to get even this close to a âgood imageâ.
Which leaves me with a question for you and @Wolfgang - is this image, for better or worse, a better choice than having never picked up my camera at all, knowing what I did from past discussions what to expect?
What you are saying here is that there is no reason to use âTopaz Photo Aâ, as all it does is increase the size of the pixels, and doesnât help bring back any image quality, as the image is already too poor for that. In your opinion, did Topaz âhelp improveâ the image in any way? From what you wrote, I guess not. Topaz canât ârecoverâ data that was never created by the camera. I suspect that somewhere, there is an AI program that can do this.
I was thinking that maybe there is an AI software that can improve an image that is small and pixelated. Iâm wondering if any of you have tried this?
i think thatâs a fair translation. After all this is a discussion forum hosted by DxO, for the benefit of their users to find help using PhotoLab. It is is not there for you to continually post photos, that you should be well aware by now, cannot be âfixedâ.
If you were discovering different editing problems or challenges, then folks would be more willing to help, but you keep posting the same kind of badly taken images, time after time, when you have been advised, time after time, that there is nothing any software can do.
If you are looking for compliments, share them with your family and friends, but not in this forum, where you should, by now, expect criticism.
Or save your money and simply accept that some subjects are just too far away to make a good photo that experts will appreciate. Even with my D850, with my 80-400 lens, I have abandoned some shots, knowing only too well that, although I might be able to see something, there is no way there are ever going to be enough pixels to do an extreme crop and hope to keep anything other than a vague and indistinct blob.
Then send it to âpeopleâ but, please, not to this forum.
But, as I have just said, this forum is not for âmost peopleâ, it is a learning forum for a sophisticated editing tool.
You really need to ask? After all our replies?
What I am saying is that, if there are not enough pixels in an image, there is nothing that create anything other than abstract art.
AI can never replicate what you saw, at best, it can make algorithm based guesses at what might have been there, but then the resulting image will no longer be yours, but a composite of parts of other folks images that have been stolen from the internet.
Not in a million years! The âdemoâ âbeforeâ shots donât look anything like the genuine âfaultsâ they are meant to represent. And Topaz does everything mentioned and more.
Just bear in mind that even Topaz, which is a market leader and that I have been using for decades, canât do that well over 4x magnification unless the source image is exceptionally detailed. And your cropped cormorant has less than â of the pixels that I had in my Nikon D100
