Crow’s Nest: Camera technology

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

Yesterday, as a tiny eastern tailed blue butterfly (Cupido comyntas) landed on my hand and I took a photo of it with my phone, I pondered how good the photos are that the phone can take. So good, that I rarely carry my SLR with macro lens around with me. Yes, the quality of that glass is superior, and a tripod would make all the difference, but it’s hard to argue with how sharp is the small aperture of a tiny lens supported by good built-in digital processing in 2020.

Above, the cell phone photo. Below, a photo of a similar-sized butterfly—a hairstreak (either banded or hickory) with the SLR and macro lens in 2014. Both required taking about the same number of photos to have one worth sharing. Both are cropped and reduced in size and quality here as a result of being exported and uploaded to the weblog.

You can read the original weblog post: The Extraordinary Ordinary, from July 2014 here.