Pixels are what makes up every digital image we see, they can be described simply as a single block or square of colour, every block of colour is known as 1 pixel.
Photography Techniques, Megapixel or MP is simply a shorthand way of saying one million pixels, therefore a 6 megapixel image is made up of six millions pixels, or six millions different blocks of colour. The average digital camera today takes pictures of 5-8 Megapixels although cheaper cameras, such as mobile phones cameras are only 1-5 megapixels, more expensive cameras have 8+ megapixels, of the cameras that are currently on sale right now, the king of the megapixel world is the Canon EOS 1DS Mark III, as it has a whopping 21 Megapixel sensor, so images taken with this camera will contain 21,000,000 pixels.
Now onto file size, generally pictures with more pixels are bigger in file size, for instance the average picture taken with a 6 megapixel camera will be approximately 3 megabytes, whereas the same image taken with a 12 megapixel camera will be approximately 6 megabytes, because it contains twice as many pixels. Although the file size of your photograph will differ between photographs depending on how much varying detail is in the image, for example if I take a picture of a busy city scene with lots of people and buildings with a 12 megapixel camera it will be approximately 7 megabytes whereas if you take a picture of a blank wall with the same camera on the same setting it will probably be around 4 megapixels.
Higher megapixel photographs means bigger prints, for instance, the max print size you can get from a 6 megapixel image is approximately A4 whereas a 12 megapixel photograph will look good printed up to A3 size. If you are considering selling photographs or become a professional photographer it is advisable that you spend money on getting a 10+ megapixel Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera, as this will give you the flexibility to create reasonably large, good quality prints.
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