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Spotted pardalote. Canon R5 with RF 100mm f2.8 L macro lens. Very heavily cropped, see original below |
I was out photographing wildflowers with my recently acquired RF 100mm Macro lens a few days ago.
I saw a little bird calling and hopping about in a nearby tree. It was so small and far away I could not identify it. But I focussed as well as I could on the general area where the bird perched briefly and fired off a few frames with the EOS R5 just for fun.
Here is the whole frame of that shot. This has 45million pixels.
Spot the bird
The header photo at the top of this post is a massive crop, run through Adobe Super Resolution to clean up the edges a bit and output as a JPG.
The crop measures 532x398 pixels giving an area of 211736 pixels. That is 0.0047 of the original or 0.47% or in round figures about half a percent of the original whole frame.
Adobe Super Resolution doubles the pixel resolution in each dimension producing 4x the original pixel count.
The result is not by any means the best ever photo of a spotted pardalote. But it is quite good enough for sharing on social media and for publication in places such as this blog.
And that is quite remarkable. Spotted pardalotes are tiny. They measure only 80mm from tip of beak to end of tail. The fact that I was able to produce such a photo points us, I think, to the way forward for camera photography.
The latest crop of super high resolution lenses like the RF 100mm Macro on high pixel count cameras like the R5 now enables a degree of cropping which I have never experienced before.
But wait, there’s more. Well, more to come anyway. There are persistent rumors than Canon intends to release an ultra high pixel count model in the not-too-distant future. They already have the technology to do this. If the current 32Mpx M series sensor were to be scaled up to 24x36mm size it would have 83 Mpx.
I think it very likely that many of the recently released RF series lenses including the RF 100mm macro have been designed with this level of pixel count in mind.
The RF 100mm f2.8 L Macro is an excellent macro lens but is much more than that. It also delivers an amazing level of resolution and overall image fidelity when used in the normal range.
I will be reporting more about this lens in the coming weeks.