I use an iPhone 11 ProMax, which is not good for moving birds, animals, or insects. It does a semi decent job with nearby, immobile species, or species that will sit still long enough. I’ve always liked photographing plants, since they are so beautiful. And, iNatters have directed my interest to those often overlooked little organisms like galls, scale, fungus, which are easier to photograph and yet very fascinating in their own right.
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In general, I tend to focus more on insects, arachnids and related inverts. I definitely favour butterflies, so far that’s the only taxon in which I purposely travelled long distances and waited long hours to find. But in general I try to be as observant as I can of the environment surrounding me and logging as much as I can, so that includes other insects, inverts, plants, fungi and lichens.
I’d like to partially blame my inatting euipment (iphone and clip on macro lens) and my inactiveness to rectify said inatting equipment for my lack of observations in mammalia and aves, but that definitely forced/encouraged me to look more closely towards the invert-scaled ecosystems.
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Anything dangerous!!!
Seriously though, I find that I lean towards larger animals and smaller plants, especially carnivorous ones. Also things that are hard to catch/ wrangle/ find/ photograph
Basically, I like a challenge😁
As said, it’s an evolving process, I moved from fungi and from insects and spiders as nobody is iding them anyway, my main passion is birds, so I photograph them, plants with my phone and big insects when I can. If people would start iding insects and spiders again (not just common species), I’d get back in it, but now almost everything is not ided yet and when you spend quite some time getting through key to then face no response for a year and more, it’s not encouraging.
I used to focus entirely on birds, with a few plants, but I’ve been branching out. Now I observe more arthropods, because they are easy to find if you can think small.
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Depends on many things. If it’s migration season, birds are my focus. Also carrying the camera lens that’s more appropriate for birds during that time. Doing my butterfly monitoring route, well, butterflies, although other pollinators get a mug shot too. Sometimes I go out with dragonflies in mind. Putting up the moth sheet, I’ll photograph moths, beetles, hoppers, anything that comes to the sheet, especially stuff I haven’t seen before. City Nature Challenge: anything and everything. Plants, animals, and minerals. OK, not minerals…
I tend to get enamored with certain species, too, where I shoot (almost) every individual because I find them fascinating and/or they have short seasons and/or they are variable in appearance. Banded Hairstreak, Soapberry Hairstreak, Little Nymph Underwing, etc.
Finally, I went on a BioBlitz recently where the weather took an awful downward turn and the hoped for birds and butterflies and other pollinators were mostly scarce. Forced me out of my comfort zone and so I did many plants, which resulted in some nice cactus records, etc. for me.
Great topic!
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That’s not how a plant ID remains casual; it would be at Needs ID in that case. From what I saw of your observations, the casual plants are cultivated ones, which is in keeping with iNaturalist practice.
As for me: for observing in the iNaturalist sense, I focus mostly on the ones that I can’t identify myself. That’s why you don’t see the common wildflowers, common trees, distinctive butterflies, etc. in my observations. I don’t need the community’s help with those.
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Before Inaturalist my trips out were usually focused on one of the following groups (birds or plants) with opportunistic photos or documentation of whatever looked good.
After inaturalist the walks are still focussed but the range is much more now its one day insects, another day ferns . yet another day flowers – and best of everything has a place it can go too.
However “ebirding” is a regular feature and this accompanies many of the other “walks”
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I tend to focus on plants, but will include other organisms, such as birds, to document wild organisms on my property.
I “discovered” iNaturalist because the Denver Botanic Gardens sponsors an “EcoQuest” as part of their community outreach efforts which is, of course, focused on plants. I have continued to use this resource to improve my skills in plant identification. I try to take photos that include the characteristics of the plant that I think will be required to key to species level.
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I’m pretty sure that the ones that were not identified by others were wild. I did not plant them - they volunteered. Perhaps plants i photographed when traveling were cultivated, but I know my own property and neighborhood. Even though I am actively planting natives, I don’t post those as observations unless they have spread and naturalized,
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I usually focus on plants because I’m getting a hang of IDing them myself and they are easy to photograph because they don’t go anywhere. I will also photograph insects visiting flowers. Last year I started to document fungi. I think I got burnt out on it though. There are so many at once and IDing is so complicated. This year I’ve started focusing on dragonflies and damselflies after a friend got me interested. I had previously decided to focus on crustaceans this year, but haven’t done that yet.
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I focus mostly on insects (my favourites are butterflies, moths, spiders, bees and cicadas) and fungi. I may take photos of flowers but I keep my observations on iNat to the creepy crawlies and mushrooms.
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