I thankfully by chance got past the problems I was having. I had to swap GPIO pins out since they were getting stuck in active high... I changed:

• GPIO 1 to 22
• GPIO 20 to 16
• GPIO 22 to 18

Also the OLED is hard to see in a super bright day like today (clear blue sky, sun about 30 deg in the sky)

I did not have the zoom-crop pan enabled yet so I was just trying to get the image somewhat clear before taking a picture. The code is still problematic but at least it all works now, just a matter of writing better code.

Mmm I like this pic

These are the "best" photos that came out, this is just calling picam2.capture_image() no custom settings yet and barely focused/contrasted images (aperture)

I did have some new ideas though like a timelapse mode and those camera settings

video of today's outing