Best book for Wildflower Identification in South Carolina

I have many wildflower identification books. My all time favorite and most useful is: Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and The Southern Appalachians by Dennis Horn and others. I have identified more flowers though this book than any other. So if you need to identify wildflowers in SC or the surrounding area I highly recommend that you get a copy of this book.

Good Website for Regional Lists of Butterflies and Moths and Using DownloadThemAll for getting the Items on the List

I find this site http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org to be excellent for identifying moths and butterflies in my area. I like the way you can specify a region in the US down to the state and county as shown below.

What would be fantastic would be to have a pdf of all the species pages for the region entered. I am working on this. The first thought is to use a tool like DownLoadThemAll for Firefox to select and download all the species pages. The images below show how this can be accomplished.

Unfortunately, with the page downloads, you get a lot of extra stuff that you don't really need as shown below.

You can edit the HTML source to clean up the page resulting in page shown below which is much cleaner. 

It would take quite awhile to edit each file individually. It would be great to find a way to automate this. Any ideas would be appreciated.

The Importance of Notes in Nature Photography

I have discovered more than once the importance of taking notes and multiple shots in

nature photography. In my case it is usually flower or plant photography. The number one reason is that it gives you a chance to identify the subject. Even if you think you will know by the image, it is wise to record the following:

1. Time of year
2. Plant size
3. Flower color/unusual features
4. Location
5. Leaf structure
6. Soil type (clay, sandy, marsh, etc.)

There may be other features that are important. You can't record too much. Presently I am working on a cyanotype of a beautiful purple/blue flower. Unfortunately I do not know what type of flower it is. I do not know where I photographed it. Even if the image turns out magnificent, all I can do is label it "Purple/Blue Flower". Wish I had taken notes.

Plant Names for Photographers

If you like to photograph and tag wildflowers, vines, trees in the US there is an excellent source for finding the scientific name of plants. This database is provided on the web by the USDA at Plant Database. I like to use this to add scientific names to the plant photos I take.

I have taken this a step further and add this database (with some filtering) to my Android phone. I imported it into memento . Memento is an app that lets you create databases and add/view data. I was able to import the plants id data into memento. Now I can search by common name or scientific name for plants from my phone.