You Wanna Come A Little Closer? No. Not Like That.

Barley, a dog, gazes longingly at the camera from the comfort of her crate.

Barley, a dog, is viewed in the closeup of an extreme digital zoom, with substantial digital artifacts resulting from the camera’s smoothing algorithms.

I have to be careful using the zoom function on my camera because the optical zoom is rather limited and the digital zoom kicks in more or less without warning. I’ll occasionally forget this, and when I zoom in all the way, I’m immediately struck by the squishy, smeary weirdness of the smoothing that the phone does automatically, presumably to reduce the color noise from across the image sensor.