December 16th, 2024

Tips for taking the best photos of your bin catches

Your bin photos may feel as easy as the click of a button, but they are the essential step in the protocol that allows the Crab Team dataset to be used by researchers. Namely, they are the tool for validating all your findings in our data QC process. As data submitters know, Crab Team staff (Emily!) cross checks every single trapping sheet and photo from every single site. This allows research to rely on even the rarest sightings and for trends to be gleaned from even marginal changes. (Curious what’s “normal” or “unusual” for your site? Check out all Crab Team data on Tableau)

Miriam Stearns’ 2024 Capstone poster. Learn more here and click to enlarge

As an additional bonus beyond just backing up your trapping data, bin photos also provide further opportunity for future research deeper into ecological trends. This might involve answering questions we didn’t even think to ask at the start of the project. You may have heard that Crab Team has been tracking the spread of a species of shrimp that had yet to be reported in the Washington portion of the Salish Sea – stay tuned for more on that project soon! That discovery was only possible because Crab Team could go back and in the photo archives and reevaluate previous catch data through the photos. As another example, UW undergrad Miriam Stearns used Crab Team bin photos to assess whether European green crab populations may be affecting fish size. To do this work, Miriam relied on bin photos from all coastal monitoring sites that were of high enough quality to identify each fish and make use of the bin scale bar for measuring all visible staghorn sculpins.

All these efforts, and even the basic reliability of the dataset rely on photos that enable us to identify and document as many organisms in the trap as possible. So what can you do to be a Crab Team photo star? You truly don’t need amazing equipment or even a dedicated camera, but focusing on a few key elements can help tick all the boxes to make sure we can see what we need to from our office chairs.

Overall Impressions

Is this photo any good? It can be hard to know what Crab Team is looking for, but a good guide is to ask yourself: can you see the hairs on the legs of HEOR in your photos? This is a good test of light balance (should I shade it? Add flash?) and clarity (so murky!). This can be hard to do in the field, looking at a tiny screen. We recommend taking several photos with slightly different settings or set ups, and then looking at them on a larger computer screen to see which are the best. Sometimes, these extra photos also come in handy if we need to see a slightly different view of something to be confident.

1. Clarity and light

   

   Two photos of the same bin on the same day. For the left photo, a shade was held over the bin, blocking direct sunlight. While this reduced shadows relative to the bin on the right, it also darkened all of the organisms, and added glare. Which photo can you see hairs on HEOR legs better? Click to enlarge.

• Light bright?
  • Direct light, shadows and glare on the water can all be the biggest photo challenges we face. Sometimes shading can help, but sometimes, blocking direct sunlight can actually make it harder to see the organisms in the trap. Try a few options in the field so you can pick the best at home.
• A note on cameras: 
  • Nothing fancy is needed and definitely avoid “portrait mode”! But if you own a Google Pixel, boldly declare yourself photographer–those tend to balance light best for our needs.
• Low or no water
  • Consider taking your photo before filling your bin fully with water. Cameras can have a hard time focusing on and seeing through even clear water. So, if no fish are present, consider a fully-dry photo. Water helps reduce stress while you count, but for your quick photo session, you can avoid glare by adding only the minimum amount to keep fish submerged.

2. Dealing with mud

• Bucket of wash water
  • Before kicking up mud at your site, consider filling a bucket of clearer rinse water to use throughout your counting.
• Rinse/dunk your traps
  • Before leaving the water with your trap, give the trap a few repeated dunks to slosh off layers of mud and excess debris. If things fall out through the mesh, it is OK, they were too small to be part of the sample!

3. Dealing with critters

   

   From the side, the yellow bars are unmistakable on this lovely shiner perch (CYAG). A flatsided clear container, even a clean ziplock bag, can help you photograph fish from the side. Nice work Kiana!.

• Take special care if they’re rare!
  • Notice a single purple shore crab? Never seen that shrimp before? Taking an extra photo of unusual finds (even if you know what it is!), particularly if they’re hiding in your bin helps us support the dataset. If the critter is hard to get a good look at, sometimes a very short video clip of it moving, or different angles can help. 
• Fish fotos
  • Our standard top-down bin photo is great for sculpins, but that angle makes many of the “skinny” fish species look alike. To help you ID tricky fish, or to support validation of rarer varieties, be sure to capture a side-view of the swimmers, too! 

4. Easy to forget

• Scale
  • As Miriam’s work demonstrates, measurements can be taken long after the fact if only the scale-bar is visible. Sometimes there’s far too many crabs for that; feel free to add your calipers on top of the mix if so.
    

    Calipers can stand in for a faded scale bar, and can be placed on top of a pile of crabs that have hidden the scale bar. Way to go Dungeness Spit!

• Bin cards
  • Check your cards for the date and your site information. If you find it’s missing after the fact, edit the photo itself (not just the file name) with updates before sending to prevent data mixups.
• File size
  • Always send the largest version of the photo that you can (at least a “Large” size, if not “Actual” size). Too large for an email attachment? Many sites choose to spread files between multiple emails each month, or will share via a link to a Google drive or other cloud storage to work around size limits. There are lots of ways that it works for us!

The Bottom Line

Every good photo adds even more strength to the dataset you have helped build for the last 10 years. The quality of the photos ensures the effort you spend to slog through the mud, wind, rain, fog, smoke(?) is as well documented as we can make it until they invents a real life version of the Star Trek tricorder. But even with great photos, you all in the mud have “best perspective” on the critters you encounter. Nothing, not even AI (yet), beats taking a good hard close look at these charming local pocket estuary denizens. You never know what you might discover!

— Emily Grason & Lisa Watkins