Gear:
When I first started uploading to Calflora it was nice to finally have a cheap hobby. Just an iPhone and cost of gas to a trail is all it takes. That is no longer my opinion of iNaturalist as a hobby. As an engineer, I perhaps got carried away with getting expensive gear when something a tenth of the cost would produce the same scientific value.
The primary setup I have produces spectacular results for macro photography at the costs of mediocre photos of anything farther than about a meter way. It consists of a Sony a6300 camera , Sony FE 90mm macro lens, and a Sony Twin Flash. I also have a GoPro Hero 4 Black which I use underwater (a mistake, an Olympus TG 4 would have been much better) and a Sony HX400V which I don't use much anymore but occasionally bring when I want photos of birds.
Lastly, I have a Browning Strike Force Elite Sub Micro Trail Camera. I have not had much luck figuring out where to put this, but it is at a very promising location in the San Bernardino National Forest at the moment so hopefully it is now producing good observations.
On-Site:
The first thing I do when I get to the location I want to search through is turn on the Trails app for the iPhone. This records my location while I walk. Some of the older iPhones will need cell phone service for this to work, but the last couple iPhones have had in-built GPS which does a good job of getting location.
Then I proceed to find as many different species as I can and photograph them. Since I typically have two toddlers along for the hike I rarely make it more than a mile or two and am almost always on established trails.
At Home:
I download all the photos to my computer then put them on Lightroom. I email myself the GPX file from the Trails app then use Lightroom to geotag all my photos. In lightroom I adjust brightness of photos as well as white balance to try to fix the camera settings.
Once done, I drag and drop all the photos for the day into the new submission tool. I have learned that I need to let it sit and wait until all metadata is loaded before touching anything which with 300+ photos can take a while. Once metadata is loaded, I drag and drop photos until each submission is one organism, add names, then hit submit. If any observations include multiple species I then go back and use the copy/paste commands to make the last few observations.
Once species are loaded, I try and go back to add entries for "Second Associated Species" "Eating" or a few other related species associations. This data seems much harder to get than species location data so it seems good to add.