Looking for Signs of Jimothy With the Pixel 11 Pro XL Cameras

My editor had an inspired idea: Take the new Pixel 11 Pro XL into my familiar stomping grounds and get photos of Seattle's newest celebrity,  Jimothy the raccoon , who lives somewhere in the greater Ballard neighborhood near me.

To be upfront, I wasn't setting out to track down the actual animal. Seattleites have gone nuts over the viral critter – I happened to attend a Seattle Mariners baseball game during the first of two sold-out Jimothy nights – and we've gotten a little defensive about protecting the short-spined raccoon. But in my wanderings with the Pixel 11 Pro XL in hand, I found plenty of Jimothy-related items as well as other curios in this Seattle-area community with deep Nordic seafaring roots.

I also took the phone out of the city to capture a few days of camping in the woods in the North Cascades for a change of scenery.

But first, a note about these photos: They were all captured using the Pixel 11 Pro XL , with the new Vanilla Camera Look applied and with the 50-megapixel setting enabled, unless otherwise noted. It also captured raw files in addition to processed JPEGs, which, in a few cases, I've edited in Lightroom to straighten horizons or show differences between what Google's photo processing pipeline produces and how I'd edit them. But mostly you're seeing the photos straight out of the camera.

The Pixel 11 Pro XL is now on sale starting at $1,299 .

Here's a surefire way to see Jimothy without intruding on anyone's backyard. This mural by artist Andrew Miller, behind Ballard Clay pottery studio, is fittingly right near the garbage cans, perfect for a little trash panda. I also used the Magic Eraser feature in the Google Photos app to remove a piece of garbage on the ground near the blue bin; that editing tool is also available in the Camera app, letting you remove distractions right after taking a photo.

A Ballard store added this cutout to its sidewalk sandwich board, and the colors matched perfectly. Yes, you can buy a scented Jimothy candle – fortunately, it smells more like wood than a pile of garbage or wet fur.

Bars on Ballard Avenue are also riding Jimothy's short-tail. I doubt the little fella would travel to this heavily trafficked street. But if you spend an evening drinking at each bar, you just might see a Jimothy in the haze.

Ballard is also home to the Edith Macefield house , which inspired the house in the movie Up, which is surrounded by modern buildings. Edith reportedly turned down a $1 million offer to sell her house, so construction went on around her. I'm not sure why it's painted red now, but as a photographer, I appreciate the splash of color amid the surrounding gray walls.

Down near the waterfront is a collection of old Seattle signs, including this Westernco Donut House sign spied between buildings.

The sign company also has miscellanea, like this Russian-towed listening device, known as Putin's Hearing Aid, recovered by a boat captain off the Washington coast.

Ballard is also home to lots of environmental artwork, like this mural painted on a fence. The plants growing up in front of the bird give it a sense of sneaking up on prey. Looking closely at the wispy leaves, though, reveals Google's fairly aggressive processing – the details are oversharpened and crunchy looking.

We often think of school buses as being bright yellow – or maybe that's just me – but the Pixel 11 Pro XL's camera has accurately captured the true orangey-mustard color in this large parking lot.

Google says its Night Sight processing is faster in the Pixel 11 Pro, which was good because I was parked in a pedestrian loading zone when I jumped out of my car to grab this snapshot of the Great Seattle Wheel downtown. There isn't anything technically wonderful about this image, other than I'm glad the camera has preserved the darkness instead of pushing the exposure too high.

Moving away from Seattle but still cognizant of wildlife, I went camping in the Cascade National Forest. Bears are a relatively recent addition to the Newhalem Campground, so each campsite now includes a sturdy metal storage locker for items that might attract them. I would have loved to run into Jimothy in Seattle, but I was happy not to encounter this larger, furry animal in the wild.

I go a little weak in the knees for late-afternoon backlight on forest moss, so you won't be surprised that my family continued ahead while I snapped photos of these trees. Although I like how this turned out, closer inspection reveals a crunchiness that looks like the phone is over-processing the details.

But there's more to it than that. I shot this using the 2x zoom, which is actually a crop of the 48-megapixel wide camera sensor. When I look at the raw image, it's 12 megapixels (3,048×4,064 pixels). To maintain that 50-megapixel size, the Pixel is upsampling the rendered image to 6,128×8,160 pixels. So the end result is a digital enlargement that is then oversharpened. (To get both photos to appear the same size here, I had to scale up the edited version at right.)

It's still a fine photo, but photographers will want to keep these types of compromises in mind when they're shooting. If I'd gotten closer to the tree and shot at 1x zoom, the raw file would be at full resolution, and (because I didn't think to do this at the time) the processed version would, in theory, look better.

The Pixel 11 phones feature Magic Capture, a smart AI implementation that records video and then extracts high-quality stills from it. Instead of tapping the shutter button to capture action, just start Magic Capture and point the phone at a subject. In this test, the Pixel 11 Pro XL picked three photos of me being unusually active while grinding coffee beans. (Since it happened pre-coffee, it's a wonder I had any energy at all.)

The photos don't have the type of motion blur you'd get when saving stills from a regular video, and they're processed for tone and color just like any other still image. The video is saved so you can grab other images from it; it's not as smooth as a regular video because it's capturing lots of frames intended as stills. The resolution is also limited to 1080p, which means 3,064×4,080-pixel images, but I think that's an acceptable compromise for what you get with almost zero effort.

Although I wasn't super impressed with the Night Sight photo of the Ferris wheel, I love this one of my family reading at night. Because the Pacific Northwest is currently dry and many areas are on fire, a burn ban is in effect. No campfire meant no toasted marshmallows, but portable lanterns still create a nice ambiance for reading. And Night Sight did a good job of cleaning up digital noise while retaining detail.

When traveling, always pop into local restaurants and shops. This fishing wall at the Double Barrell BBQ in Sedrow-Woolley, Washington, includes snapshots of customers and their aquatic hauls, plus fishing signs and gear that evoke an earlier time.

The Pixel 11 Pro has a massive zoom range up to 120x, but you'll get the best results sticking with the optical 5x and 10x zoom settings. Wildfire smoke settled into the area, giving earlier years' fire damage a ghostly look in the distance (left). When zoomed in at the full 120x, generative AI takes over: It reads the raw image, which is blurry because only a small portion of the sensor is being recorded (middle) and then rebuilds the image to match it as close as it can guess (right). (The red outline superimposed in the middle is the raw image at the size it's recorded, to give you an idea of how little of the sensor is being used at 120x zoom.)

In this case, it's done a fine job with the angles and lack of fine details. As I use the Pixel 11 Pro XL more, I'll see how other scenes are rendered (and whether the AI hallucinates things that were never there).

Read more: I Tested the Pixel 11 Pro's Camera in Beautiful Paris

CNET and Yahoo may earn commission from links in this article.