Today I would like to know what was the worst photo you took (either because it’s blurry, you weren’t in a good position, etc.) and that you uploaded to iNat.
I’ll go first: I don’t have a camera, I only take photos with my smartphone (which is not very new) and binoculars (I’m thinking about buying some additional lenses, so if know about this, you can give me some recommendations.). But that day I forgot them and I saw this, which is a chalk-browed mockingbird (Mimus saturninus), a bird found in most of Brazil, and parts of Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Suriname. It’s a bird of open wooded areas, including urban and suburban gardens. It feeds on fruits, insects and small vertebrates.
And i think that’s the worst pic i uploaded to iNat…
I also take photos with my smartphone, and boy is it a struggle. Much suffering when it just… refuses to cooperate and focus, no matter what tricks I employ. Still, by far the absolute worst observation I’ve uploaded is this. Plenty to ID by, but I was unable to get closer without risking spooking the sparrow, and the door window was smeared with my dog’s nose art. Horrible to look at
I don’t know how many photos of ants and birds I’ve deleted once I realized they were so bad I couldn’t upload them. I think this Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is definitely up there for my worst. Definitely need to get some decent binoculars to complement my smartphone.
I think you’d be surprised (and impressed) by how many terrible photos can still be useful for iNat.
That being said, there are things that I won’t upload because there’s bad…and there’s BAD.
Oh, too many to count. And I’m sure many people know that…
My son has autism and compulsively documents things, and was very comfortable with the system he had made for himself initially. Meaning, he was not willing to use any type of lens or tools to enhance image quality for about a year and a half because it wasn’t what he had became accustomed to. So, he would take pictures constantly and try to use whatever he possibly could, even if the quality was really awful. It was upsetting actually, because he would really wind himself up about it and he would be really stressed about what was usable and what wasn’t. It took a while but he uses binoculars and different lenses now. He’s even learning to use different cameras. And he is not as frantic or stressed, because he knows he will have other opportunities. We delete a lot of those old ones, too, because he is a lot more interested in maintaining a good quality of what he uploads. I call it “cleaning up”.
If something’s unrecognisably bad I don’t upload it but taking pictures of water reflecting is always tricky, taking pictures of something fast-moving is tricky, taking pictures of something small is always tricky – and if you put those all together you get this black oval that somehow reached genus-consensus as a whirligig beetle:
Oh, definietly roadkill. Those observations can be of the utmost importantce for wildlife conservation efforts, but they also tend to be rather gory and unsightly. iNat really should have a graphic content warning option for such uploads.
Of course, that only works when the roadkill has been annotated as dead.
Also doesn’t work if the roadkill isn’t the focus of the observation.
eg. I have an observation of vultures eating…something?..in the road. the observation is annotated alive, because it is for the vultures, not the carrion.
But still, for those who don’t want to see it, annotations are at least a little helpful for filtering.
RG
