Today’s photo was actually taken in 2017, and I’d almost forgotten it until yesterday when I was trying to search my photos for pictures of Sow thistles. This morning, courtesy of the Google Photos app , a bunch of photos I took a year ago to the day popped up on my laptop and I was immediately reminded that it’s the first anniversary of my resolution to get my pictures properly catalogued. In spite of what they say, Google Photos can be used as an elementary searchable database. I could always search on date and location, and using a phone camera (Pixel 6a) gives very accurate GPS data that’s not too hard to convert to the British national grid. My discovery last year was that by clicking the ‘info’ button on a picture there’s a section called ‘add a caption’ which, if you type in the common name for any plant or whatever; followed by the Latin name and separated by a comma acts as a comma delimited database. Bingo! Do a generic search on, say, Speedwell – and the programme will use its AI capacity to find anything that looks like a Speedwell including, for instance, Forget-me-not, but if you’ve captioned the picture with a full common or Latin name – let’s say Veronica – then only those plants you’ve captioned with the name will show up. It’s a massive timesaver. Eventually! You could apply the same technique to almost any interest you have – birds, antiques, ceramics , butterflies stamps or dog breeds.
The trouble is, I started photographing plants for all sorts of reasons long before I got into field recording, so I had about 10,000 photos of all sorts of places and objects with no real organisation at all. Tagging the plant photos accurately often means going back to scratch with the ID, which takes absolutely ages. It’s a good thing I’m a bit of a propellor head!
The other thing I’d say is that the photo at the top was taken with a pretty expensive set of kit that didn’t include location in what’s known as the EXIF data. The additional control I had over exposures, depth of focus and shutter speed really slowed down the process of taking a shot. These days mobile phone cameras have automated the process so brilliantly that I almost never take the old kit out. The added bonus is that I can also access all sorts of other databases if there’s a decent signal and the whole of the new Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland 2020 Flora is there at my fingertips to tell me whether the plant I think I’ve identified has ever been seen in the place where I’m kneeling in wet grass looking as if I’ve been struck by the urge to pray! I can take a picture, identify the plant to the best of my ability and send a copy with a grid reference for verification to the local County Recorder in a few minutes. The days of lumbering about with a heavy bag of massively expensive kit, seem as remote as Betamax video recordings.
Anyway, I’ve decided that the dozen or so photographs I took a year ago today are so nerdishly technical I’m not even going to put them up. There may be other readers who get inflamed at the comparative knee joints of Cow Parsley and Rough Chervil but I wouldn’t want to encourage it; and that leads to the last point I want to make.
When I started doing plant photography I had no idea which bits of the plant I would need to record in order to identify it. Sometimes the tiniest details make all the difference and so, over the years I might take a couple of shots trying to capture the beauty of the plant in its surroundings; but then get down and dirty with the macro shots. That way my success rate has risen from 10% to about 12% – well maybe a bit more!
Below I’ve put up a lovely stand of Smith’s Pepperwort that I identified and recorded this time last year, going through exactly the process I’ve described. My record now sits in a little black spot on the map with my name attached to it somewhere in the BSBI database.
