I have an iPhone SE 2 with pretty standard 12MP camera and as I was sitting on our porch and browsing the web I randomly enabled the main camera and took a shot of my sweatpants fabric (no joke here):

I was pretty impressed with the quality as I could see fibers etc.

Just 10 minutes later I attempted to take a few more shots at the same macro level. No matter how I tried I could not get even near if the shot above:

So I am puzzled as to what allowed my phone camera to take that perfect shot and then fail to capture it next time?

I was not using any special apps just standard photo app.

I have an iPhone SE 2 with pretty standard 12MP camera and as I was sitting on our porch and browsing the web I randomly enabled the main camera and took a shot of my sweatpants fabric (no joke here):

I was pretty impressed with the quality as I could see fibers etc.

Just 10 minutes later I attempted to take a few more shots at the same macro level. No matter how I tried I could not get even near if the shot above:

So I am puzzled as to what allowed my phone camera to take that perfect shot and then fail to capture it next time?

I was not using any special apps just standard photo app.

UPDATE:

I copied the EXIF data and I "think" there was in fact digital zoom used by the camera. But I am not sure auto focus is able to leverage that cause surely I was not using digital zoom myself:

https://exifinfo.org/detail/S0dqdJAlf1K72asyTCsCww

I have iPhoneSE2 with pretty standard 12mp camera and as i was sitting on our porch and browsing the web I randomly enabled main camera and took a shot of my sweatpants fabric (no joke here). The shot is above. I was pretty impressed with the quality as i could see fibers etc.

Just 10 minutes later i attempted to take few more shots at the same macro level. No matter how i tried i could not get even near if the shot above:

So i am puzzled as to what allowed my phone camera to take that perfect shot and then fail to capture it next time?

I was not using any special apps just standard photo app.

I have an iPhone SE 2 with pretty standard 12MP camera and as I was sitting on our porch and browsing the web I randomly enabled the main camera and took a shot of my sweatpants fabric (no joke here):

I was pretty impressed with the quality as I could see fibers etc.

Just 10 minutes later I attempted to take a few more shots at the same macro level. No matter how I tried I could not get even near if the shot above:

So I am puzzled as to what allowed my phone camera to take that perfect shot and then fail to capture it next time?

I was not using any special apps just standard photo app.