Zoom

The camera that I used to take the photos on yesterday's post was the one on my phone.  It has a pretty decent camera on it, for a phone.  It has two weaknesses that I've noticed, though.  I think I've mentioned before that it doesn't function well in low light, and the other limiting factor is that the only zoom it has is a digital zoom.  (It is a phone, after all.  A mechanical zoom lens would be pretty silly.)  What that means regarding the kind of photographs that I take is that photos from it can't be cropped -- just not enough resolution and pictures get fuzzy fast.  Don't misunderstand -- I really like that phone.  It's an amazing piece of technology.  It's smarter than me, more powerful than my laptop, and it weighs almost nothing.  However, it is not primarily a camera.  To demonstrate the difference, here are two photos I took with my real camera on my walk this morning, both of which have been cropped significantly.

What brought this up was TT's comment that he couldn't tell what kind of birds were in the photos in yesterday's post.  I tried cropping the photos before I posted yesterday, but the results were fuzzy.  To further demonstrate the point, here's a photo from the Peace River chapter of the Audubon Society's Facebook photo album from Ollie's Pond.  No problem identifying the species of bird in this one.  (Black bellied ducks, according to the description.)  The photographer was not named, but it is shared publicly.

Ah, Ollie's Pond.  Next time I'll bring my real camera.