Has anybody thought about digiscoping?
http://www.birding.bc.ca/community/viewtopic.php?t=2215
It's much easier on the wallet for sure. And give you a reach that you can dream of with a SLR :)
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Has anybody thought about digiscoping?
http://www.birding.bc.ca/community/viewtopic.php?t=2215
It's much easier on the wallet for sure. And give you a reach that you can dream of with a SLR :)
Not the same quality of telephoto lenses, though...
Its a fun thing to do but not practical at all !!!! Have seen amazing results !!!
Agree with Al and Fabs. YOu can get some nice images but I think the subjects have to be perched and still. I am not to sure there would be a very good auto focus capability.
I think digiscoping is very good for the birder who wants to capture record shots and I too am amazed at some of the images. But, I have stood side by side with digiscopers and seen the struggles of trying to get the camera centered on the scope and then the bird moves! You can buy adapters that swing the camera in and out of alignment, which seems to be ok, but, it's just not going to get you many BNP quality images (if any!!) IMO
Dan Brown
Desmond,
First, you can get excellent results with digiscoping. But like with camera equipment, the results depend on the quality of the setup. If you use a simple spotting scope and a point and shoot camera with its lens coupled to the eyepiece of the scope, it works best with 1) quality scope, 2) quality tripod, and 3) good adapters that couple the two. The usual downside is 1) increased optics (the scope eyepiece is designed for visual use and field curvature and other optical issues may mean the match-up is poor and 2) high aperture (f/11 to f/18 and slower).
If the optics work well together, then you can get good images of static subjects. Even quality optics may individually be great but when coupled together don't work (e.g. focal plane curvature does not match).
If you want real reach, beyond telephoto, a big little known secret is get a good telescope, like a 5 or 6 inch aperture apochromatic refractor. They are designed for best performance at infinity and do not have the performance compromises of super telephotos lenses that must also focus close. But they will cost as much or more than a 600 mm super telephoto, and you have no autofocus. Another, low cost but similarly high performance telescope would be a 6, 8, or 10 inch newtonian reflector. While cheap mirror lenses have a bad reputation, the top performing telescopes at all of the world's astronomical observatories are all reflector designs. You can get, for example, an 8-inch f/5 (or so) reflector for probably less than a thousdand dollars, that has performance better than super telephoto lenses (I am a professional astronomer and have designed, built and tested such systems). An 8-inch f/5 telescope is a 8*5*25.4 = 1016 mm f/5 telephoto. You attach a DSLR with an adapter and no lens to the telescope, and that gives very impressive performance (some add what is called a coma corrector at the camera end). The problem is it is big and heavy and no autofocus. But with live view on new DSLRs, focus is better than with older cameras, and I bet you could get some otherwise difficult images. But there is no comparison for the versatility of a super-telephoto lens with IS/VR and autofocus.
Roger
What would you think about a digiscoping forum?
I am getting my ducks in a row for something like that.
James
Sounds like a good idea to me! There are a lot of birders out there doing it. Some are using there cell phone cameras, they call it "phonescoping". Dan Brown
Will be interesting to see what they come up with Can't see much wrong as long as they stay in one forum Have seen some real good work with those devices !!!
Thanks, Roger, for the detailed response.Quote:
Originally Posted by rnclark
Thank you to all of you who took your time to share some of your thoughts with us !
Take a look at Ann Cook's work. http://www.mts.net/~acook/index.htm
I started out digiscoping but found:
1: Works well on stationary birds
2: Calm water conditions only
3: Focus is big problem, loss of light thru scope and camera, so always using low shutter speed, therefore most photos blurry due to bird moving, wind and heat waves. Also DOF is big issue.
4: Equipment costs can be as much as some camera systems. ie Swarovski, Leica, Kowa scopes, adapters, and higher end point and shoot digital cameras. The higher end scopes give you better colors because of gas and optics, you get what you pay for.
Having said all that if I was just trying to get records of perched, stationary photos of birds (mainly hawks, gulls, shorebirds, waders on film, digiscoping is the way to reach out long distances.
What I did is use the A/V cable out of camera to a small 5" color TV (12v) connected to tripod, so I could manual focus scope (Yukon 6 - 100x, cheap) and camera combination using the monitor/TV, to focus and compose image instead of LCD on camera. To power this I used a small motorcycle battery...so weight becomes an issue.
For small foraging birds this system is virtually useless. It worked for water drips, where you can focus in on a spot and photograph birds as they come to water but color and quality leave, a lot to be desired.
The accompanying photo, was taken using the above system...this red-throated loon was taken from a distance of about 1,000 yards. I did get a shot...to this day it is the only red-throated loon I've seen or photographed, hopefully some day I will improve on it.
Anything can be used to digiscope, I've even taken some using binoculars and my cell phone. Horrible picture but it did work.
I still think in some BIRDING situations digiscoping is only way to go. Since I've started using my camera, Digiscoping has taken a back seat. But as stated above some of my friends are getting great results with higher end equipment.
Paul
I agree.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Lagasi
I once watched a woman digiscoping a bald eagle sitting on top of a tree. All she did was essentially shoot the view of the scope through the viewfinder with her digi-cam. Of course the focus was set already even for simply viewing the eagle and not for taking picture. I supposed first she focused on the eagle with the scope. Afterwards, she just photographed the image through the scope with the digi-cam. She showed me the result on the LCD. Looked pretty good (not sure about when enlarged). Your system seems to be very complicated. I asked that woman about the cost of the set up. What she told me definitely costed less than some DSLR body today. Then again, higher quality equipment costs more.Quote:
2: Calm water conditions only
3: Focus is big problem, loss of light thru scope and camera, so always using low shutter speed, therefore most photos blurry due to bird moving, wind and heat waves. Also DOF is big issue.
4: Equipment costs can be as much as some camera systems. ie Swarovski, Leica, Kowa scopes, adapters, and higher end point and shoot digital cameras. The higher end scopes give you better colors because of gas and optics, you get what you pay for.
Having said all that if I was just trying to get records of perched, stationary photos of birds (mainly hawks, gulls, shorebirds, waders on film, digiscoping is the way to reach out long distances.
What I did is use the A/V cable out of camera to a small 5" color TV (12v) connected to tripod, so I could manual focus scope (Yukon 6 - 100x, cheap) and camera combination using the monitor/TV, to focus and compose image instead of LCD on camera. To power this I used a small motorcycle battery...so weight becomes an issue.
For small foraging birds this system is virtually useless. It worked for water drips, where you can focus in on a spot and photograph birds as they come to water but color and quality leave, a lot to be desired.
The accompanying photo, was taken using the above system...this red-throated loon was taken from a distance of about 1,000 yards. I did get a shot...to this day it is the only red-throated loon I've seen or photographed, hopefully some day I will improve on it.
Personally, I think as long as you're not shooting flight shots, action shots, digi-scoping works, especially for those who don't want to haul those heavy, super-telephoto lens around.
Here's a link on digi-scoping and its setup:
http://www.digiscoped.com/Digiscopingindex.html
Here's a link to the pioneer of digi-scoping:
http://www.laurencepoh.com/
Oh, just found a flight shot by the late father of digi-scoping, Laurence Poh:
http://www.laurencepoh.com/gallery/a..._copy.jpg.html
Link to his gallery:
http://www.laurencepoh.com/gallery/australia/
Thanks for the links Desmond The one flight image is really wild !!! Just having the bird in the frame is an accomplishment !!
Sorry, but this is a bogus claim. Attaching cameras to telescopes is very old. I was doing it in the 1960s and read about it in books. It dates back to at least the 1950s and I would bet much much earlier, perhaps even before 1900. One may argue that only digital cameras qualify, but as soon as those using film cameras on telescopes got their first digital cameras, they put the digital cameras on their telescopes. It was not some new fangled idea invented in 1999. I was attaching CCD imagers to eyepieces on observatory telescopes in the 1980s (these were not consumer cameras) and recording the video output. We were recording digital data from a 480x512 pixel vidicon camera attached to telescopes in 1976 ("homemade" at MIT). And I'm sure others were doing it sooner.Quote:
Originally Posted by Desmond Chan
Specifically, the method I read about in the 1960s and periodically used was and is still called "afocal eyepiece projection." This is where the eyepiece is kept in the telescope, the camera lens is kept on the cameras, and
the camera lens is placed at the eyepiece ideally so the iris diaphragm coincides with the exit pupil of the eyepiece. Then the camera focuses at infinity. Autofocus cameras do quite nicely in this situation, when there is enough light. One book I remember with the description of the setup with equations for calculating the magnification is "Photography with Your Telescope" by Sam Brown, published be Edmund Scientific.
Perhaps someone in 1999 coined the term "digiscoping," but they did not invent it then,
Roger
Desmond,
Try googling "phonescoping" for an interesting site.
I'll just pipe in for a moment on this old thread :eek: ...regarding Laurence Poh and digiscoping:cheers:.
In 2000 I was doing bird migration research in Malaysia - on the northbound migration of raptors from Sumatra across to Malaysia. I met Laurence then along with Ooi Beng Yean and Cheang Kum Seng. All worked more or less as a team chasing down Malaysian birds and photographing them:5. Laurence, along with Beng and Cheang, were the first people to get widespread recognition for their work with birds. Why? First they had exotic birds to shoot, and lots of them. Not many people were (or are) familiar with SE Asian tropical species...so their subject matter was special because no one had seen it before. Second, they were great in the digital realm - they could take an image and work on it in Photoshop on a laptop (remember this was 2000 and not many folks even knew about Photoshop) and email it to others...these images spread quickly around the world. In 2000, Laurence Poh had the best eye of all the digiscopers so his images got a lot of attention :S3:...very few in North America were "digitally literate" from processing their digital files with Photoshop to emailing them out on a regular basis - and the Malaysians had stunning subjects - and results.
Laurence's bird photos hold up against the best I have seen today. The reason why the had to digiscope and not use standard 35mm equipment? He and the others could not get close enough to the birds they wanted to shoot - birds in SE Asia were shy because they are often shot at by hunters, boys with slingshots and/or trapped for the pet trade. Also, a 35mm Nikon digital (D1?) was really expensive and heavy - but the Nikon 990 was perfect - lightweight and easily pressed against the eyepiece of a Swarovski scope.:bg3: Cheang designed the adapter (that Swarovski ultimately used as a basis for their system) :bg3: - though today he mostly spends time with his grandkids :cheers:. And Beng continues to shoot today - getting fine images of birds in flight and even doing some digital video this way too :5.
Anyway if you saw the images in 2000 you would be stunned by how lovely they were - everyone else was still scanning film! So yes I consider Laurence the Father of Digiscoping - he died of pancreatic cancer at age 52 just three years later. His photographs live on...do visit that site.
So yes, Laurence invented the digital way of using a scope to shoot birds - he had lots of help, encouragement and admiration from the rest of us.
Robert DeCandido PhD
NYC:w3
