Reasons a Daylily May Not Look Like Its Picture (What are you taking the picture with?)

To name just a few frequently given reasons:

1) Northern vs Southern garden, or shade vs full sun (ie, location).

2) Soil type, nutrients, growing conditions (alkaline vs acidic, clay vs soil / loam, or compost vs sandy), or hot / dry climate vs pacific northwest or northeast. - Do you fuss with your garden, adding fertilzers and watering whenever the rain fails to materialize ... or are you determined to be a low-maintenance gardener (plant it and forget it)?

3) Time of day, lighting... (morning, with blooms still freshly open vs late day, starting to degrade) or morning light vs hot afternoon sun.

Take a look at some of the great suggestions posted in the forum threads for similar ideas, such as
The thread "What in soil causes changing colors?" in Daylilies forum

But all other reasons aside... There also are huge differences just in the device you are using to take your pictures - a 'real' camera (vast range of types and capabilities) vs your cell phone - and not all cell phones were created equal, either. Not everyone has (or can afford) the newest / greatest thing on the cell phone market. (And I am not suggesting that you need it.)

Did you know (all else being equal) that using your own cell phone (straight from whoever made it), with the camera that's already programmed into it... you can still have notably different results, depending on the camera app itself?I've only recently discovered this!

I thought: cell phone (operating system, ie 'Android') + camera (lens) = quality of the picture you can take. Seems simple, right? ... Boy, was I wrong!

Below, a photo taken in one of my gardens on a sunny April afternoon, looking towards a fence-line where I am growing shrubs into a (future) living fence.. and taken with the original camera app, as it came installed on my Samsung Galaxy 5 phone (not an expensive phone, not the newest or hottest thing out there):



Okay picture, right? Sunny spring day, decent lighting, basic shot of the garden. Below... same angle, same picture, same everything ... except I took this next one with a downloaded free camera app (not the one pre-installed on the phone:



At first glance, you may just think ... 'Big deal. Same thing.' But one of the issues I have been having is that my cellphone camera (frequently) has been taking pictures that seem to always be a little 'fuzzy' at the edges, not crisp lines or clear edges; and also, I frequently look at a colour and think, 'That's not the real colour I see when I look at it... the colour is off.' Me, I am the ultimate fussy OCD when it comes to taking pictures. Ron says, 'a poor picture is better than nothing...' and I jump all over him, and snap, 'NO picture is better than a bad one!'

So, picking just one section of the (2) pics above, zooming in and putting the results side by side:


This is what the (2) different camera apps took (in quality) when cropped from the two pictures above. I will note: what is a fuzzy brown patch on the right hand photo shows distinct separate twigs and branches in the photo on the left, and that applies to both the areas above the gazing ball and to the side. The colours on the gazing ball are pretty consistent in depth, tone and hue... but they jump and the lines blur, in the picture to the right (and are more distinct in the picture to the left) - and the round sphere itself has a crisper, sharper line in the curves of the left photo vs the right.

Click on the two 'full' photos above to see them more clearly, and notice how much better the details stand out ... how much sharper they are in the second full image vs the photo taken with the originally-installed camera app. Also, I would direct you to note the differences between the 'white/ivory/cream' tones of last year's hydrangea blooms waitng to be pruned vs the pale coffee tones in the other photo.

Again, look more closely at the area around and behind the gazing ball... see how the twigs on the shrub and the dried grass separates into two tones instead of a single brownish patch; notice the pattern on the backrest of the garden bench under the arbor and see how the details change from one pic to the other.

All of these differences stand out (to me with my fussy eye). But what really makes me pay attention is reminding myself: same phone.... same camera lens... same internal computer processing the pictures! Neither of these original (full) images has been tweaked, edited, enhanced or manipulated. The differences between the two photos is the result of one thing: using two different camera apps.

But if you are like me, you are more interested in what the camera does with actual blooms... well, right now I have nothing blooming in the gardens (April in zone 3) ... but here is a side-by-side comparison from the two camera apps, using an African violet bloom to see the differences. Again, straight from the files, no tweaking or enhancing either photo (though I did crop to get the blooms to a size where you can see both blooms at the same time).


And just the fact that more of the fantasy flecks and colouring is visible (yes, with the new app) is something I will be paying attention to when the garden comes into full season and I am taking photos of blooms every day in the gardens. Again: no change in lighting for either shot (which, at the time, was poor) and no attempt to have a better result with either one: just point and shoot with my phone camera.

So, what did I do for better (imho) pictures...? I downloaded the 2023 version of the app 'HD camera' (for android phones).

I am not saying 'changing the camera app on your phone' will work this well for every phone. I am suggesting: if your phone takes pictures that are not sharp or has colours that seem 'off' ... or you just find yourself constantly hunting down the 'real' camera (I do have a very nice Nikon) instead of snapping a shot with your phone, then it may be that the problem is not your phone - maybe it's the camera app. And really: snapping photos - does it matter, whether your picture is a sunset... a pet... or a daylily? Don't you want the best picture you can get?