Thanks
@MoonTang420 @littlegiant Very nice of you to say. I use my phone's camera - it's an LG G3, few years old now.
Much like pheno hunting, I take a few photos and pick the keepers. Sometimes they're a little overexposed, like this one, but still look OK.
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I don't apply any filters, method 7 or other lenses, post-processing, or color correction. You see what the phone camera sees - I only resize or crop.
There are two tips that help the new plant photographer:
1. Get your subject in focus - this might require cleaning the lens before shooting. Focus is what makes your photos and videos POP - who likes to watch 5 minutes of video where the operator struggles to get focus and you never see the money shots in their full glory? Same thing goes for pictures.
If your camera can't focus close up, pull back away from the subject until it comes into focus. Phones are fairly easy, because the software is so quick to adjust when you tap a new part of the screen to focus on. Make sure to turn off your fans so the plants aren't moving around a bunch, too.
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2. Frame your subject in an unique way. Use the rule of thirds: If you divide the picture into thirds from top to bottom, and side to side, try to fit interesting things in the corners or the outside thirds. Don't always put everything right down the middle - this encourages your audience to look around the picture and notice more nuances. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad - you'll know when you have a quality photo.
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Lastly, filesize. Smaller filesize pics don't lose much detail, but are much faster to load. I use a drag and drop program called PhotoResize that I've attached. Extract it from the zip file, rename the numerical portion of the file name to match the width you want your pics to be (1920 is approximately 1080p size, so that's a good one for most things - 1600 is also good). In a folder, drag your full size pics onto this EXE, and it will resize them in a DOS window (copying the resized pics with the suffix "-1920" into the same folder), AND it removes all metadata tags.
Hope that helps someone. Enjoy!