There are untouched landscapes, black sand beaches, dramatic skies, and active volcanoes like Mount Pagan, whose plumes have been seen from space.

“No tours go there,” says Russ Wilcox, who visited recently. “You have to know someone who is going up north to go fishing and get in on that.” 

Wilcox joined a private boat trip to the island, leaving from his home of Saipan, 200 miles away. Once there, he relied on his Pixel 6 camera to capture the highlights of his adventure with pro-level images. 

The volcano’s scale in relation to the beaches below came into sharp relief thanks to Pixel’s ultrawide lens¹, which also helped him snap the clouds’ reflection on the ocean. “It was especially helpful with cloud structure on calm ocean days,” he says. The lens helped him capture a wider field of view to accommodate the volcano’s large size, and corrected distortions in the clouds to get sharper contours. He stored the images on Google Photos and shared some with his followers on Instagram.  

Thanks to Pixel’s advanced camera, travellers like Wilcox are able to capture images that once required expensive professional-grade cameras and specialised photography skills. It has powerful AI and features that help sharpen images taken at a distance, draw out details up close, excel in low-light settings, and remove unwanted objects so you can preserve the memories without any extras in your photos.

For example, Pixel 9 Pro’s Super Res Zoom captures multiple frames and merges them into one to get sharp images of faraway details.² Its Portrait Mode focuses on subjects within a shallow depth of field, blurring the background to make those subjects pop. And Magic Eraser makes it easy to remove elements in a frame³ – for example, another tourist in the way of an otherwise deserted beach – thanks to machine learning algorithms that fill in the background based on the context in the picture.

Pixel’s custom-built Google Tensor processor helps it run these cutting-edge computational photography tools right on the device, helping to improve both photo quality and the processing speed of your camera. And because they don’t rely on the cloud, they’ll work even when you’re in the middle of nowhere.

Once you take your photos, you can easily store them in the cloud with Google Photos, which frees up space on your phone and makes it easy to share with others. A Google One subscription gives you even more storage space. For even quicker sharing, Social Share lets you share photos directly from the viewfinder of your camera to your favourite social apps. 

Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL

All pro. Pure magic.

Portrait Mode and Magic Eraser³ came in handy for Gavin Scott on a recent trip to Bulgaria’s Rose Valley, where he was scouting out its famous Rosa Damascena flower. Cultivated there for centuries, it’s a symbol of Bulgarian culture. 

“I’ve never seen roses so big and colourful,” he says. “The smell in the air was incredible, and seeing them was quite a humbling experience.”

He couldn’t bring the roses home with him to the Scottish Highlands, so he took out his Pixel instead. He focused on capturing the flowers’ pink and yellow hues and intricate details, like their heart-shaped petals and speckled patterns. “I took the time to find the best ones,” Scott says. 

A full bush with vibrant colours caught his eye. He used Portrait Mode to create an artful background blur and snapped some images. He later noticed that a stray slug had crept into one of the pictures, and he edited it out with Magic Eraser. “The eraser corrected it as if it wasn’t there,” he says.³ For close-up shots like these, Macro Focus on Pixel 9 Pro’s updated ultrawide lens adds depth and texture, turning even the smallest details into magnificent shots.

Travel, whether near or far, always means memories – and it’s easier than ever to preserve the best shots when you have pro-level capabilities in your pocket.