Once you have established your transect, you are ready to take photos. Use photo points to qualitatively monitor how vegetation changes over time. Permanent photographs of a landscape are useful for detecting changes in vegetation structure and for visually documenting measured changes.
Take at least one photo of each transect. Using the thick edge of a black dry erase marker, fill out the photo board with the appropriate information. The project, the site, plot, date, and direction. And it's best if you write as big as you can and use as much space on the board as you can. Once you've filled it out, take it to the zero end of the transect.
Set the photo board up against the stake at the zero meter end. Make sure all vegetation is out of the way of the board so it's visible from the center of the plot. After you set up your photo board, come back to the center of the plot, take your camera and turn it on.
Set it on top of the 1.5 meter photo pole. Make sure it's at the widest angle possible. Line up the transect. Put the photo board at the bottom center of the viewfinder. Take the picture and if you have a digital camera review it immediately.
In the case where vegetation prevents you from putting the photo board right in front of the stake, it might be useful to use a backpack or a photo case to set the photo board down on to raise it up from the ground. You can use an extra stake behind it to set it up against. Again, make sure all vegetation is out of the way.
In the case where woody vegetation does not allow you to set the photo board on the ground, have someone push back the vegetation and hold the board as close to the ground as possible and aligned with the transect. Look through the viewfinder and make sure you can see the board clearly. The person is going to get as low to the ground as possible so as not to obstruct the view.
And take the photo. I'm going to review a few examples of good photo points to demonstrate what was done correctly in each photo. In this photo, everything was done correctly.
The photo board is at the bottom center of the photo. The numbers are written very thickly and large on the photo board itself. The photo board is not overly large itself. The line is pulled out straight.
The person taking the photo is at the right distance and height and is oriented directly in front of the transect. This is another good example of a photo point in a shrubby system. The photo board is at the bottom center of the photo.
The numbers are written large on the photo board itself. The transect is pulled out straight and the line is going straight through the shrubs like it should. The person is standing directly in front of the line, not off at an angle. This is an example of a good photo taken in a difficult situation. In this case, the photo board at ground level would have been obscured.
So a person was needed to hold the photo board above the level of the shrubs. Also, the person is crouched down as low as possible, not obscuring any of the view in the photo. And the photo board is right in front of the tape itself, even though the tape is a little bit obscured in the photo.