A common question from registrants is “How do you compensate for shaky hands?”
I personally don’t have much experience with this, but I’d like to offer advice in the webinar. Does anyone have any advice on how to take photos if you have shaky hands? I’ll only be focusing on smartphone cameras in my talk, but please feel free to share any advice you have for other types of cameras as well. Thanks!
(the webinar will be recorded and up on iNat’s YouTube channel later on the 4th)
if there is something to rest your hand on / against (wall, tree, branch, rock) that helps. Otherwise take a few photos in the hopes that one will be okay. Trying in our Southeaster – the camera wobbles, the iNatter wobbles, and as you click the shutter the target plant dances out of sight. Hold your breath … and try again.
I have had very shaky hands my whole life. I find the most useful things are finding a comfortable grip, slowing my breathing and taking many photos of the subject.
Most of the specifics I can give are related to full size cameras rather than smartphones, e.g. a really helpful thing for me is to sort of use my eyebrow ridge as an extra support for the camera, but that’s obviously really only gonna help you when peering down a viewfinder of a full camera, I don’t exactly recommend that approach for a smartphone lol. Shutter speed is another thing that may or may not be applicable on your phone, I find even for (admittedly stabilized) telephoto once my shutter speed is at 400ish my tremors have a pretty negligible impact.
That being said, I think if you are shooting in auto (as I imagine most people would be if they’re using a cellphone) the number one thing is to try and get as much light as possible, as my phone will drop down to ridiculous slow shutter speeds if I let it. I regularly use flash for cellphone shots of insects when I don’t have my camera on me and it makes a big difference in perceptible motion blur.
Hi Tony, here is some advice for smartphone nature photography tailored for people with shaky hands that I’ve been able to personally apply, now I shoot mainly with a mirrorless camera and a lens with IS, but I still often use many of these when shooting in low-light. For your ease of addressing I’ve addressed them in three specific sections:
Physical Bracing & Posture
Tuck Elbows: Pull elbows for a feel as if you are bracing against the ribs or stomach rather than letting them flare out. This shifts the phone’s support to the core torso. I find that if you focus on squeezing your abdomen instead of holding your arms steady you accomplish less shake as your brain is focused on larger muscles. As an athlete being able to view it like this is super helpful.
If you can lean your hips or shoulders against fixed natural objects like large trees, fences, boulder surfaces, or the ground. If you are in a grassland bring something to steady yourself if possible.
The Free Ground Pod: Rest wrists directly on knees while crouching, or flat on a park bench/railing to create an stable surface. Alternatively if the subject is lower lay down with elbows on the ground. This creates better photos in general as well as you are at eye-level with your subject.
Camera Settings & Native Features
Equivalent to Shooting in Burst Mode: Hold down the shutter button to take a continuous rapid stream of photos. Micro-tremors fluctuate; I’ve heard statistically, at least 1 or 2 frames in the middle of a fast burst sequence will land perfectly sharp.
Avoid Screen-Tap Shake: Tapping a glass touch screen forcefully introduces massive camera shake right at the critical moment of exposure. You could tell users to use the physical volume buttons on the side of the smartphone to trigger the shot instead.
Utilize a 2-Second Timer: Set the built-in camera timer to 2 seconds. Tap the button, use both hands to firmly steady the frame, and let the software capture the shot hands-free after the vibrations settle down.
Avoid Digital Zoom (if possible): Zooming digitally magnifies physical tremors exponentially. Take the photo from a wide perspective instead, then crop into the organism later using an editor
Equipment & Field Workarounds
Headphone Cable Shutter: Plug in wired headphones and click their inline volume keys to act as a cable release. This should isolates the smartphone from finger contact shake. Landscape photographers and people shooting the sky use this a lot as they are on very low shutterspeeds often.
PopSockets or Phone Grips: Attaching an ergonomic grip onto the back of a smartphone case distributes tension away from fingers, letting the hand squeeze tighter without trembling. Side note on grip, if comfortable position one hand adjacent to the lens which keeps the whole area stable.
Flexible Mini-Tripods: You could suggest a flexible tripod (I’ve heard good things about GorillaPod but really so many options exist I recommend taking a look as this can be the biggest life saver) it could be wrapped tightly around a hiking stick or branch to steady or on a monopod.
Also, you could put your phone on a small beanbag or fill a bag with rice, etc. to help stabilize.
I do not know if it would be useful for photography but I have a friend with essential tremor for many years and one of the accommodations that has helped her tremendously is adding weight to her wrists. She used to wear smaller bangles but now finds exercise weights and fitted sleeves to be more useful in steadying her hands for fine motor tasks.
Tripod brackets for smartphones are a thing, similar to the suction cup brackets for mounting them in your car. They’re usually fairly cheap plastic, but not a bad starting point. They won’t work for fast moving subjects, but I’ve known them to be effective and helped some kids get their own pictures of a comet with one a few years back at Lake Fairfax park where light pollution is an issue.
A flashlight also probably helps, as most phones will try to do image stabilization internally, but the more light you can give it, the better it’ll do.
If you can control your shutter speed, try to keep it to 1/90th of a second or faster, which should give you a decent focal length to shutter speed ratio on most smartphones (this is a back of the napkin estimate, they’ll need to look up the specs on their individual phone to know for sure).
Avoid most third party camera apps, as a lot of them are just spyware in a trenchcoat.
Older used point and shoots are usually pretty cheap, and will usually offer better image performance even if they don’t have the same resolution as your phone (this gets into things like sensor size, how physically big the pixels are, image stabilization performance, ISO performance, and a lot of details that are likely beyond the scope of what you’re aiming for).
Even shooting with a Zf, or Z9, where I’ve got in body image stabilization, and stabilization in the lens, I’m going to miss shots from time to time (daily) so don’t get discouraged, pro level gear helps, but it’s not panacea.
I’ve been wondering how users hold their phones for photos.
Did you find having one hand higher isn’t helpful? In personal experiance a hand closer to or across from the lens is my choice to limit movement but you have inspired me to look into other ways.
I rarely use a cell phone as a camera, but when I do, I employ the same holding / stabilizing methods that I do when using a “real” (interchangeable lens) camera. When stability is an issue, I will always try to find some physical object to rest the phone or my hands on.
Often, I will sit down on the ground with my knees bend, and then and put my hands (which are holding the phone/camera) on my knees.
Or, I will lie prone on the ground and put the phone/camera directly on the ground, or hold it in my hands, but have the base of my hands resting directly on the ground. I may look around for a rock or a chunk of a log that is a particular size, and then set that on the ground and then hold the phone/camera with my hands resting on that object. This is done if there is a specific height at which the photo is best taken from.
If one has something solid to rest the phone/camera, or one’s hands (holding the pone/camera) upon, it is amazing how sharp and clear of a photo you can get, even with minimal light and resultantly slow shutter speeds.
It is worth taking a tripod out with you, even if there is no way to attach the camera/phone to the tripod. How so? Because the tripod can simply be the thing that you rest your hands on as they hold the phone/camera. It can be adjusted to any height and any position, so that your hands will have something solid to rest on, no matter what height they need to be at to photograph the subject from the best angle/perspective.
So, my left hand is supporting the phone fairly high up in this method. I explained the position of the right hand more because it seemed less natural/intuitive but maybe I should have explained both.
The tip of my left thumb is resting on the left edge of the phone near the top, with that edge of the phone sort of squeezed into the crease between the muscle at the base of my thumb and the rest of my palm, bottom left corner of phone landing near bottom pinky-side corner of left palm. All four fingers of left hand are wraped around behind the phone to grip the right edge of the phone from behind, about halfway up. On my phone, this puts my top finger only half an inch below the flash, and about an inch below the lens.
It’s just the normal grip I use - like how I’m holding it right now while typing - because it allows my hand to be fairly relaxed without dropping the phone. I never really tried other positions for the left hand for taking photos, just adding the right hand and bracing my elbow.
i don’t have particularly shaky hands, and i don’t often take photos using a phone, but i do take a mix of photos and videos, and because i lean more heavily towards video, i do my have to use tricks to stabilize my shots. for me, i mount my camera on a mini tripod with rigid legs. when the legs are together, they can function as a small monopod. i find that i can position the monopod feet on my chest or hip while standing to shoot comfortably. or if i’m squatting, i can position the monopod on my knee or on the ground to shoot slightly elevated off the ground or use it as an actual tripod on the ground to get a super steady shot. if there’s something on a tree or wall that isn’t too skittish, i can also put the tripod feet on the wall or tree in either tripod or monopod mode and use that to help stabilize the shot.
i don’t use it much as a selfie stick since i’m not usually using a phone, but i imagine that using a phone mounted on a selfie stick would provide a much surer and more comfortable grip than trying to hold a phone with just your fingers.
i also clip the camera’s neck strap to the front of my right backpack strap, since i’m right-handed, and i find that that gives me one more possible brace point. if using a phone, i can imagine just tying a string to the mini tripod and clipping the other end on my backpack or looping it around my shoulder, neck, or torso.
If you would want to, most any tripod or monopod, cheap or expensive, is adaptable with a simple phone accessory that can be turned to many different angles.
I’ve been using a walking/hiking stick for years to stabilize myself for macro and telephoto shots. For Telephoto I use it like a monopod. For macro sometimes I will put it out in front of me on a tree or a rock and brace my chest on it leaning to get in close to something on a wall, rock or tree. Sometimes I’ll brace the phone or camera on top to steady myself. Sometimes I’ll brace on my device on the side of it while steadying myself. One can also use the phones voice activation to take the picture instead of trying to fumble with the shutter button.
Edit: If it wasn’t implied, the walking stick is adjustable so I can vary the length needed depending on function. eg. short for leaning into a wall, long for telephoto
What kind of stuff are we talking about shooting here? Birds? Plants? Bugs within phone macro range? All of the above?
Here’s a few ideas that might be useful for shakey-handed smartphone shooting:
Gear: you can get camera cages for phones of varying complexity. I’ve seen them with two handlebars and top of handle shutter buttons. Kind of defeats the whole small/portable aspect of phone shooting though. Same could be said of gimbal mounts, as compact as they are these days.
Some phones have voice-controlled shutter options. This allows you to use two hands to hold the case steady and just a short word (usually something like ‘capture’ or cheese’) to take the shot.
Does your phone case have one of those ring stands built into the back of it? You can run a cord or small chain or thin bungee through it long enough to clip to your belt or even to the ground so you can step on it. You pull to put pressure on it to help stabilize. Make it a triangle to each hip belt loop for further stability.
Does your phone support 4k or higher video? Go in with that on and recording and you can have hundreds of possible frames to choose from in seconds. 4k (or higher) vid frames are larger in pixel dimensions than the iNat upload max so you can even handle some cropping.
How to get the images out of the clips? Most phones that support 4k let you pause the playback and then drag through it to search for good frames. Then when you find a good one, there’s usually a button to save that frame of as a JPG still image. If not, there are apps specifically designed to help you do this.
Yeah, it takes time, but it’s amazing how many frames achieve good focus even in a shake filled clip or when you are trying to focus.
For smartphones, I’d recommend bracing your elbows against your body or leaning against something solid whenever possible. If there’s a rock, bench, railing, or tree nearby, using it to support the phone can make a huge difference.
Lighting is another big factor. In brighter light, the phone can use a faster shutter speed, so even if your hands move a little, the photo is more likely to be sharp. For close-up observations, a small LED light can help quite a bit.
One tip I don’t hear mentioned very often is simply taking several photos. Even if your hands shake, one frame is often noticeably sharper than the others, and digital photos are essentially free.
Like @bobmcd, I’ve developed a technique using my crutch as a monopod. My suggestion would be for people worried about shaky hands to invest in a walking stick of some sort. No particular type, but it should be both comfortable and sturdy; so substance over style. (Don’t laugh; I’ve hung out with too many late-Victorian-aesthetic obsessed fashionistas to ever think that such a thing should go without saying.) You can lean on it to steady yourself as well as your hand, use it to just stabilize your hand, or even use it as a mini-platform.
I also agree with the folks who have suggested using the burst-shot technique. It gets good results, and it’s been a secret weapon of mine when photographing small, fast, and uncooperative subjects.
With my giant (and very heavy) camera and lens, I find that using a monopod helps if taking photos of things above me / at eye level. But if I’m taking pictures of rabbits/ducks/shorebirds (or anything low to the ground) I’ll rest my camera on my knee, leg, or backpack.
That being said I generally have steady hands, but 8 pounds of camera gear tends to make my hands shake after a while.
For reference I use a Nikon z6ii with the Sigma 150-600mm. (As well as the FTZ ii adapter)
I suspect a lot of people who are primarily using a cell phone for taking iNat photos are doing so because it is pocketable and always with them – that is, they may not want to bring extra equipment with them or it may not be feasible to do so. Or they may not wish to buy such equipment.
So I think it would make sense to focus on stabilization techniques that make use of what is likely to be available when one is out and about, whether one’s own body, objects in the environment (walls, rocks, etc.), or things one might be carrying anyway (walking stick).
