My question relates to photographs of scat, specifically of bears. I’m a retired research scientist who studied American black bears for many years. Being fairly new to iNaturalist, I thought I could contribute by reviewing the many past observations that are only bear scat. The problem I’m havin…

I have been thinking about that, but the problem in my case is that I use to take quick photos of alive bugs (or animals), and they usually don’t want to be freeze an waiting for a scale or my hand. And about bugs, if I take a wide angle, it’s no easy to appreciate the small buddy. Anyway I’ll try …

For people who are mentally good with estimating length in mm, you can write in the Description section roughly how big the organism was – that is certainly better than nothing.

This will likely depend on the location where you find your subjects, but one idea is to identify a noticeable part of the ‘backdrop’ and measure that after the bug has left. Things like pebbles on a gravel path that are also in the photo, markings on railings, leaves that the bug was resting on, et…

Coins can be useful as scale objects yes, I don’t doubt that. But your list of Wikipedia coin articles only covers the major countries of the English-speaking “Western World”.

[image] susanhewitt: But your list of Wikipedia coin articles only covers the major countries of the English-speaking “Western World”. Plenty of other articles here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Coins_by_country [image] ursusont: Is there a way to encourage people to add someth…

Probably the best way to encourage them would be to ID it to Ursus or Carnivora, whatever you think appropriate, and comment that without some idea about size, you couldn’t help further.

I saw a slide talk many years ago which had photos of neotropical herps. One pic was of a remarkably large species of frog and a lens cap was included for scale (the frog was much larger). Someone in the audience asked “is that a frisbee?” In short, you can’t beat using a ruler (preferably metric)…

[image] jwidness: I don’t know if @tiwane would be open to adding more to the video though, sometimes it’s better to keep it simple. Wow, I think that video was made just before the 2016 NPS Centennial Bioblitz, quick and dirty. I’d be happy to redo the video (I think I’ve gotten better since…

[image] tiwane: I have two friends who tattooed dots on the right side of their left index fingers, each dot is 1 cm apart. That’s another possibility… That should be in the https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/you-know-youre-seriously-into-inat-when/1992 thread!

[image] tiwane: I have two friends who tattooed dots on the right side of their left index fingers, each dot is 1 cm apart. That’s another possibility… And I thought I would never get a tattoo. That’s awesome!

Encouraging a sense of scale in photos

General

tiwane August 6, 2019, 5:42am 15

Unfortunately neither are hardcore iNat users, although they post from time to time. I’m also curious how accurate those measurements will remain as one ages.

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Encouraging a sense of scale in photos

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