Photo shooting tips; hand lenses.

How to get the most out of your
inexpensive digital camera.

Today's digital cameras are capable of remarkable quality, but there are some tricks to getting the most out of them, especially when shooting close-ups of plants and insects.

This download provides some help.

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Brett Hall of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum provided these tips for selecting a hand lens. These small lenses are invaluable in the field for quickly viewing tiny details of plant structures, insect bodies, mineral crystals, splinters in your fingers, etc.

How to choose a handlens.

iNaturalist assistance

iNaturalist is a fantastic platform for developing your own citizen science projects. Here are some great tutorials about power-using it. Even if you already use iNat, you'll probably learn some useful things here.

How to create an account...


iNaturalist: Creating an Account & Changing Account Settings from S Cadwell on Vimeo.

Adding a basic observation through the website, rather than with a smart-phone...


iNaturalist.org: adding an observation from S Cadwell on Vimeo.

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Got an account now? The following is a really rich and powerful video showing:

• What is iNaturalist and who uses its data?
• How to add an observation, 
• How to batch observations, 
• How to use iNaturalist as a field guide, 
• How to incorporate your Facebook and other social media photos in iNaturalist,
• How to invite other Facebook user photos to your project...

Turning your Facebook photos into ctizen-science observations with iNaturalist from iNaturalist on Vimeo.

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Once you are comfortable, you may want to learn how to set up your own project on iNaturalist...

Setting up your own citizen-science project with iNaturalist.org from iNaturalist on Vimeo.

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More iNaturalist video links here.