Yes!! That is one of my worst enemies when it comes to photography for me! My camera and I have a love-hate relationship, where it MUST focus on the foreground, or the background, or a branch, or a bush, but NEVER the insect! I have some photos that I have had to post with a perfect background and a blur of color in the middleground because my camera wouldn’t cooperate. Often it is birds on the power line that throw it though…even though the bird is RIGHT THERE, my camera ultimately finds the trees behind it more interesting…it is like it is insisting: “You have enough photos of birds! But look at that pretty tree! Even though you see it every day, and almost never see that bird, have you ever stopped to realize just how riveting it is?” Yes, unfortunately, I have–after the bird has flown away! Oh, well, at least sometimes it surprises me with a nice pic!
After reading this, I literally just now double-checked my SLR camera for a memory card and charged battery. Just in case I dash out tomorrow to take some pics. I usually remember to carry a spare charged battery with me but sometimes forget and that’s been an almost-problem on a couple of trips.
I have in the past had a too-small memory card and found partway through a trip that I was out of space. Which meant having to page through my pics on the camera and delete the bad and mediocre ones to make space. Also: best to make sure your card is cleared before a trip and not still loaded with pics from the last trip which you’ve already downloaded on your computer.
Reeks of conspiracy… Are you sure you were the one who took the card out @mkanimallover? 
I’ve been stopped by the rozzers (that’s the police for international audiences) before. Fair enough to them, but still!
The first time was walking alongside an walled urban river, occasionally crouching down to get pictures of the stuff there. Fascinating site, it backs onto houses on one side, so has interesting garden escapes, but also rare natives like Wall Pennywort (which is very rare in London compared to the wetter west). It also has the standard stuff for urban walls; the 2 bellflowers with long names, red valerian, Mexican fleabane, the occasional duck having a paddle.
Van pulls over, two of them get out. I’m wondering what I’ve done. Mistaken me for someone wanted? They were concerned that I was pointing my camera through windows. A quick flick through my camera’s latest pictures - with no blurry, long zoom shots of windows, and they were reassured - though they weren’t that interested about me blabbering on about Wall Pennywort. “Plants” gained an “oh, is there knotweed here?”. No - only a plant that’s extremely rare in this area, that almost nobody who lives locally will have noticed!
Oh, and Macroglossum stellatarum, a moth that nectars like a hummingbird. I have never been able to get a photo of it’s darting, erratic flight and the one time I saw one resting on a pile of rubble it decided to stay resting on that pile of rubble for quite a while. Reach for my camera, still there, unzip the case, still there, slowly pull it out, still there, turn it on and have the lens unfold, still there, point the camera at it… oh, it’s decided to go somewhere else. Really, couldn’t wait another few seconds mate?
Haha, I hope so! I thought t I took it out to upload photos to iNat… 
I have two: Taking my phone somewhere with no reception (they still exist) and not realizing that until after I’ve uploaded tens of observations. Putting the location in manually is an option but it takes longer.
The other is I went on an ID spree of something I thought I knew well enough, only to realize after a few days of “free time” that I was wrong….. I’m still not sure if I’ve cleaned up all of my mis IDs.
Most frustrating is when you ID unknowns and some professionals picture a whole botanic garden and to each plant a pipe with a qr code on a pipe where they take the genetic samples and on top they also picture the names which are some times hand written on a plastic and more or less readable … but while they batchupload some 100 observations they dont care to apply just one absolut basic ID them self
That is depressing, they have all the data and use iNat to host theyr pictures, cultivated or not, which have no real worth to the community without an ID.
Passion to gencode all this stuff, but no passion to provide any ID them self.
That is sad.
Sometimes, especially in Autumn, there is a nice sunny day and a lot of bugs come to the garden to make use of my pollinator friendly flowers…
I take the phone out and start taking pictures, but I don’t see the screen very well because of all the light, and when I go inside to look at the pictures…. most of them are too blurry to upload!
Another iNat-related frustrating moment: I see a new bug in my garden and I go ‘oh hi, new bug! let me take a picture, so cute!’ and when I enter it on iNat I find out is a terrible pest of my fruit trees! Damn!
During the City Nature Challenge I went to a local country park. About half-way through the day my camera battery runs out. It’s OK, I always carry a spare. Put the spare in. Oh… I never charged the spare…
I managed to keep going because I decided to stop for lunch to recharge the battery from my power pack. Once I’d finished lunch I put the slightly charged battery in and charged the other one until that ran out (half an hour or so), swapped batteries, and kept cycling batteries like that for the rest of the day!
I’ve gotten back from a productive weekend away and when I inserted the memory card, to upload and I got the message ‘card cannot be read’ with the option to ‘format card’, since then I make sure to buy a new card for each month and keep my card in my camera or unless I’m uploading
A burrowing owl landed in front of me and I scrambled to my camera. A jogger was running by, and I asked him to stop because he was heading into the direction of the owl. By the time I got the camera on and aimed it at the owl, he ran through and spooked it off. I was livid.
It’s common for a blundering human to ruin a photo op. You can recognize the non-photographers and non-naturalists right away because they’ll walk right up to you while you’re trying to shoot something and ask “whatcha looking at?”
First I filled the woods with lens caps… now I’m leaving clip-on lenses scattered about…
Not all smartphones have manual focus in which case you need to poke at the object you want it to focus on, repeatedly, like a pigeon pecking at bread crumbs. It’s especially frustrating when zoomed in for close up/macro.
In pretty much every phone I’ve used (iPhones, Samsung, Pixel phones, mostly), if you hold down on an area for a few seconds, you can lock the focus and exposure. Then you can just manually move the phone until the subject is in focus. This can be useful for macro situations.
Great long day spent in fascinating habitat where I rarely go. Saw a plant I’d wanted to see and never seen before. Well camouflaged bird you really can’t hope to see without a dog. Great wildflowers. I snapped away all day long. It was just a great day. Got back to the motel and the camera wouldn’t work. I drove home the next day, stopping at the camera store on the way. Good news: the camera was OK. Bad news: the memory card was malfunctioning. Hopeful news: software could retrieve pictures from a bad memory card. More hopeful news: the software did retrieve over a thousand photos! Bad news: the photos included 3 species I’d seen early in the day (none of the others) and thousands of earlier photos going back about as long as I’d had the camera.
I was already carrying a spare battery – you know why – and now I carry a spare memory card and occasionally check to see if I’m getting photos on the card in the camera.
And then there are the chronic problems. Camera refuses to focus on plant or insect in the foreground. Or else it insists on focusing on the foreground branches rather than the bird behind them. I get the camera focused on the animal but zoom in for a closer view and it leaves! (Should have taken the more distant photo and hoped it would be identifiable.) And Parnassians (butterflies). Parnassians never stop flying. They just never, ever stop.
That basically sums up my issue
Yup, that’s probably the most common question a naturalist is asked 
When I photographed in public parks my most often asked question was “ Are you ok?”
Oh, yes, I have done this SO many times! Now I try to remember - take the broad photo BEFORE moving closer!
Once, on a late autumn day when I was short for time, I went out to collect mistletoe leaves to feed Black Jezebel caterpillars I was raising. I decided not to take the camera, but after picking the leaves at the edge of a bush area, I sat for a few minutes looking to see what other butterflies were around. One passed over with the erratic flight of an Azure but a wing pattern I didn’t recognise. It landed in a visible location and opened its wings—a Sydney Golden Azure, out of range and late in season! I swear it was that, and no-one can ever prove me wrong. 
Then, I took the leaves home, and the Jezebels all died.