I’m loving iNaturalist, but my phone’s inbuilt camera isn’t capable of sufficiently legible photos! Although my snake pics are usually fine (they’re much closer to me), my turtle pics often come out as just a particularly shiny… something. In the distance. Sometimes more shine than shape.
I’m looking at buying myself a digital camera, but unfortunately my budget is flat-broke-i-shouldn’t-be-spending-ANY-money-on-this. I’ve currently got my eye on affordable second hand Nikon CoolPix cameras (the L320 and L120 specifically), but the guy with the L320 just flaked on me, so I’m looking around for another affordable camera - my question is this: what camera parameters turn my lovely turtles into highway reflectors? Clearly a zoom lens would help to get better definition on the turtles, but why do they sometimes go supernova?
My current “camera” is an iPhone SE 2nd Generation, which is clearly not as fancy as the high end iPhones, but I honestly expected better from it. It’s 7MP (not great, as I understand) with a ƒ/2.2 aperture (have no idea what this means for photo quality, tbh) and 5x digital zoom. I know that optical zoom is preferable, which is why I’m aiming for a separate camera, instead of upgrading my phone (which is busted in several other, unrelated ways, too).
I’m not trying to get into photographing birds or anything super fancy, but I feel like getting a picture of something sitting perfectly still shouldn’t be this hard for me!
Had the same problem when I started on iNaturalist last year with just my phone camera. Found a used Canon PowerShot SX40 HS for around 200 € and couldn’t be happier with the choice. 35x optical zoom helps a lot!
Download an editing app. Snapseed is quite decent. Go into tool and tune image. Reduce the highlights, reduce the contrast a touch, increase the black, reduce the white and have a good play.
Also, every image with any side longer than 2048 pixel, will be scaled down to fit into a 2048x2048 box. This way detail will get lost. So if you have a small subject far away, cut into a region of 2048x2048 or smaller around the subject to get the most detail out of your pictures for iNat.
Would reducing my aperture size help with that at all? It seems like it might be overexposure? I’ll definitely try changing my levels, but it would be swell if the initial photo also looked a bit better.
Edit: I think I mean exposure time. Possibly both?
Woah, really? Like, iNat will reduce my image size like that? I guess it makes sense, it would really bloat the site if people could upload 4k pics, but I did not know that! Thank you! (edit for spelling error)
Oooooh 35x optical zoom. Colour me jealous. I’m seeing affordable cameras with a max of 26 on my local classifieds ads, and I refuse to wait patiently lest I miss nesting season lol.
Yup! Turtles are difficult because they’re shiny, often wet, and often like to sit out when it’s bright. It’s really difficult to get a good shot of them if you’re far away, you get a lot of reflected light. Some of that can be mitigated by editing and trying to get an angle with less direct reflection, but the above factors play a big role.
@star72, depending on your budget, you might want to add both the CoolPix P520 and L330 to your list for consideration. The 520 has a 42x zoom, manual controls, presets, and onboard GPS. I picked mine up used from eBay, and it has given me nary a lick of trouble for coming up on two years now.
The downside of the 520: it takes rechargable lithium-ion batteries instead of regular AAs. I don’t see this as a downside because first, the batteries aren’t that expensive and they’re rechargable. (Four batteries and a two-slot charger was less than $20US.) Second, my previous Nikon (the L330) ate AAs with a spoon. That being said I liked the L330, and you can probably pick one up for a reasonable price. It has a 26x zoom, and good macro capability. I just got frustrated by the lack of manual controls.
Now, for the issues with your phone and its habit of turning turtles into road flares: my guess is that it’s the aperture. The smaller the number, the bigger the opening, so ƒ/2.2 is pretty wide. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of the concept:
A camera phone doesn’t have much in the way of glass to let light hit the sensor, so a wide aperture lets the camera pick up darker areas of the image, often to the detriment of highlights. Usually recoverable, but kind of a post-processing pain.
