Clear Zoom

 Since it is very cold today, I didn't venture beyond the screened porch door, leaving me a little farther from the birds than usual.  I decided to explore one of the zoom features on the RX10iv.  The camera has an excellent 24-600 Zeiss lens but also has the ability to digitally zoom in further with Sony's Clear Zoom technology.  First, you must turn the feature on and shoot in jpeg, and then when you are at 600 mm, you can zoom in up to 3x beyond. Essentially what the camera is doing is cropping and then upsizing the image to original size, without any loss of quality.  You can do this in Photoshop as well, but it is nice to be able to do it in the camera. This image is uncropped, taken at about 1200 mm equivalent, on a dreary cloudy day. I am stunned by the quality of the image.  The only problem was that it is pretty hard to find your subject when you zoom in that much, so I had to keep zooming out to find it, leaving plenty of time for the birds to fly away.  Fortunately, cardinals sit for long periods, so at least I could find them in the lens and get a shot.