Photos

Eagle snapped by iPhone!

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OCT 8, 2023

NimishAndAkriti

We had written about the telephoto camera on the iPhone 15 Pro Max a few days ago, and how well it worked. Well, it just gave us something that took our appreciation up a level. It actually captured an eagle in full flight. And did so in astonishing detail. Anyone who has tried using a phone to capture a flying bird knows the problems that can come. Keeping it focused and steady is a headache and well, if the bird is flying swiftly, blurry snaps happen!

edited

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So when we saw an eagle circling one of our apartment blocks in Delhi, we were more tempted to capture it with one of our "proper" DSLR cameras with a telephoto. However, as we were trying out the iPhone 15 Pro Max with its much talked about 5x optical zoom, we decided to just try our luck with it. Our first shot through the 'regular' sensor was decent enough, but did not really capture enough of the bird. Not surprising. So we went for the zoom.

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Moving to 5x zoom suddenly changed the whole equation. And well, we must confess we have not quite seen anything like this on a phone camera. Yes, we have seen much better zoom on the Pixel 7 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but with great zoom generally came a loss of speed. Shots of moving objects tended to be a little blurry. The iPhone 15 Pro Max, however, was being able to track the eagle very well and giving us a remarkably clean view for a phone!

The shots kept getting better as the eagle came closer to us, And what kept surprising us was the relative absence of blur. Let's get this straight - this was an eagle gliding in the open sky about 40 feet away from us and we were snapping it with a phone camera with no dedicated proper long barrelled telephoto lens. We were shooting without changing any settings. This was auto mode, None of these shots are edited. At all.

There were some shots in which we could actually see the texture of the wings and the beak and even the eyes of the eagle. We were tempted to zoom in a little more but stuck to the 5x optical zoom. What surprised us was that almost no shot was wasted. We literally just had to point and shoot and the iPhone did the rest. It was instantaneous and the results were - by phone camera standards - astonishing.

We edited one of the snaps and while it would be naive to say that this gives DSLRs and super zooms a run for the money, the results were staggering by phone standards. The level of detail (feathers, beak) was very impressive.. No, we are not saying the iPhone 15 Pro Max is great for bird photography, but when you cannot get your DSLR out and/or fix a lens and focus it, it is a great option. We never thought we would EVER say that about a phone camera!

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