This Brown anole photo I took on my phone in texas.
You all make me feel much better about the stuff I upload in iNat
My worse one may be this clearwing butterfly I encountered in a place I could NOT leave the trail, with only my phone and a lot of zoom to work with. It’s pretty clear on this cropped photo, but I stared at the full photo bellow for a full 10 minutes trying to find the butterfly I knew was right there before cropping
Love that link… thanks for a good companiable laugh with fellow nature watchers!
…might be a good candidate for this topic, too: Winning at Camouflage.
That’s not so bad – easily identifiable. You’re going to have to downgrade your photography game to compete in this topic!
Realistically, this image is outside the ‘worst’ zone by quite a margin. I mean, it has decent focus and acceptable detail. A little image editing rubdown reveals that it’s very much okay.
Yeah, sorry, it really isn’t all that horrible. I had no idea it would be salvageable to quite that level, though. Thanks for the effort.
I only entered this because the topic was worst pic uploaded to iNat. If we add the ones I haven’t uploaded, my portfolio clearly shows I am quite adept in the art of crappy photography. In fact, I once wrote an illustrated ten point guide to the craft. Sadly, this was lost for good in the great fhf crash of 2010. The Stupid didn’t have a local backup.
To illustrate my true prowess, here’s just a couple of random examples. Amazingly, though I have more pics of both species, these are actually the best.
Algerian skink, Eumeces algeriensis:
Spotted crake, Porzana porzana
…and since owls seem to be a theme here, here’s another couple of “best of the species”. Though clearly better than the other shots I added now, as well as a great many others I have lying around that any sane photographer would also have deleted instantly, I still offer kudos as well as points for anyone who can name the species ;-)
Those are better… er WORSE!
Proving your skill is just fine!
Is it a barred owl?
Thanks :-)
…and decent guess, but no. Pics lack a sense of scale
lol! I’ll see if I have any worse to compete.
Great Grey Owl maybe?
Indeed
One of my worst ones is this one:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/224650631
And lots of others, because of my bad camera, an old Olympus

Hopefully I’ll improve image quality this year, with my new OM system TG 7
This is when I’m glad to have a camera that I can kick the shutter speed up to 1/5000 on–if you look through my Socal observations, you’ll see a lot of roadside weeds I photographed from a moving vehicle :P
I know I already posted on here, but here is another one of an Aedes mosquito: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/259048165
I hit a new low here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/260339225 The only thing out of focus in the whole photo is the Anna’s Hummingbird. Posted because it had been visiting the wells a sapsucker had made.
This isn’t a bad photo, but a frustrating one: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/259926718 I’d never seen a Yellow-billed Loon before – and I didn’t truly see one then. I persuaded myself that this was just one more Common Loon and didn’t try to get a better look. However, this individual was the Yellow-billed that everyone else was seeing. Sigh.
This reminded me of the American Bittern I never really saw – I just fired off my camera in the general direction where some other birder said it was skulking. I found it later by searching through my pics.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/139549334
I’m not proud of this one.