Digital Photography Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 94 Get Close with Digiscoping

Chances are, you already have the tools to get
close to your subjects, even if they have little beaks and are
perched way across the yard.

Wildlife photos taken with consumer-level digital cameras
are often disappointing. To get a better shot, you must inch forward
slowly, hoping to get close to the animal, or have powerful optics
that make it seem like you're closer than you really
are. Since most birds won't tolerate you standing
next to them while they peck at their dinner, most enthusiasts find
themselves longing for telephoto camera lenses they
can't afford.

To address this situation without maxing out the credit card, birders
have turned to innovation. The most common hack is known as
digiscoping. In its simplest form, digiscoping
simply means using a spotting scope to zoom in on the subject and
then holding the camera to the eyepiece to record the image.

Many consumer digital cameras have lens diameters that are similar in
size to the lenses on birding scopes (or any other optical device), so
they are a natural fit. Digiscoping can be used to get impressive,
high-quality wildlife photos, to help prove and document what
you've seen, or simply to give you a fun way to
share and record your informal observations.

Never let the lens of your camera touch the lens of your other optics, such as your spotting scope. You want your camera and scope in alignment, but no kissing!

Surprisingly good results can sometimes be achieved by simply holding
the camera up to the scope's eyepiece. This method
is useful mainly when you have plenty of light (which gives you fast
shutter speeds) and need to act fast. In lower-light situations,
where shutter speeds are slower, your slight movements while holding
the camera are magnified by the scope, which results in a
soft picture. A variety of commercial brackets
that allow you to focus the scope and then move the camera into place
quickly are now coming to market, but they are pricey. Many people
have had stunningly good success with homemade rigs.

For example, I attached my Nikon Coolpix to a scope with some
industrial-grade Velcro and a Pedco Ultrapod II [Hack #1], as shown in Figure 8-22. I used a Nikon auxiliary lens adapter to fit
the camera lens inside the rubber cup on the spotting
scope's eyepiece. This setup isn't
the height of elegance, but the pictures I captured pleasantly
surprised me. I've also learned that if your camera
doesn't have a lens-adapter attachment, you can cut
the bottom out of a plastic film canister and rig that up instead.

Figure 8-22. A digiscoping rig

This is not to say that I got perfect results with the first
exposure. I learned many little tips and tricks that have really
improved the percentage of successful pictures:

The goal is to get as much detail as you can. Set your camera to the
maximum optical zoom. Do not use digital zoom!
Also, shooting at anything less than your camera's
maximum resolution is a waste of time. Use the highest-quality
settings.

You need to get the lens of your camera within the
eye-relief range of the scope
lensusually, the closer the better (without the lens surfaces
touching, of course!) The eye-relief range is the distance from the
surface of the lens to the point where you can see a full and focused
viewing fieldusually, where you place your eye. The image
becomes focused within this range. If the lens of your camera is not
within eye-relief range, you will get
vignetting: a dark circle surrounding the image
and/or bad focus. Eye relief varies by lens, so if you have multiple
lenses for your scope, you might want to experiment. Fixed eyepieces
might give you better results than zoom eyepieces.

Do everything you can to prevent camera shake. A sturdy tripod for
the scope is essential, of course. You want to do anything you can to
steady the connection between the scope and the camera. For this
reason, digiscoping might not be feasible in windy weather.

If you can use a remote shutter release with your camera, do so. It
will cut down on camera shake immensely. If not, try using the
self-timer to initiate the exposure.

Experiment with focusing. Use manual focus set to infinity and
compare your results to those you get using your
camera's autofocus. Results vary, depending on the
situation and equipment, so find out what works best for you.

A sunshade for your LCD viewer [Hack #10] can help immensely.

In my birding community, the most popular digiscoping digicams have
been the Nikon
Coolpix 950/990/995/4500 series (http://www.nikon.com). Their internal zoom
optics make it easier to get close to the scope's
eyepiece without actually touching, and the swivel joint allows easy
adjustment of the LCD viewer of the camera. The most popular scope
seems to be the Swarovski AT HD 80mm (http://www.eagleoptics.com/Swarovski/Spotting+Scopes/pid3453).
However, don't be discouraged if you have something
else; experimenting is half the fun, especially if you can do it
without going broke. Read on!

8.10.1 Digiscoping on the Cheap

Don't despair if you don't already
have a scope; you can still get some of the benefits of
digiscoping at a fraction of the cost by
using a good pair of binoculars or a monocular.

To
digibinox,
you'll need to attach your
binoculars to a tripod. I was able to get
an inexpensive (US$10) binocular bracket mount that lets me use my
Nikon Action binoculars with any standard threaded tripod head, as
shown in Figure 8-23. Many binoculars have a
threaded socket; sometimes, it's hidden beneath a
removable button in the front, where the two halves meet. Once you
get your binoculars mounted, you might want to keep the lens cap over
one lens and work on getting exact focus on the side
you'll use for the camera.

Figure 8-23. Binoculars mounted to a tripod

It also helps if you can fully extend your
binocular's eyecups and use them to get a snug and
stable fit against one binocular lens. You can try various tubelike
adapters to achieve a nice fit. The Nikon Coolpix 775 is a low-end
camera, but I've found that the optional UR-E3
converter/adapter (normally used for attaching accessory lenses) is
quite useful for fitting the camera lens into the eyecup of
binoculars or a scope, and it keeps out ambient light.

Since binoculars have a lower magnification than scopes, camera shake
isn't as much of a problem, and your results when
hand-holding the camera can be quite satisfying. They
won't give you the super-close views of a scope with
a professional camera-attachment system, but you might be pleasantly
surprised by what you can achieve at a fraction of the price.

Figure 8-24 shows a comparison of the results you
can achieve with your normal zoom lens, binoculars, and a spotting
scope. For all three shots, I used a Nikon
Coolpix 775 two-megapixel digital camera that was positioned 22 feet
away from the subject. The top image was captured with its built-in
3x optical zoom. The middle shot was also taken with the 3x optical
zoom, but the lens was hand-held to the eyepiece of a pair of Nikon
Action 7 50 binoculars. The bottom image also used the 3x optical
zoom, but this time it was hand-held to a Swarovski ST-80 scope with
a 22x eyepiece.

Figure 8-24. Images captured with zoom lens, binoculars, and spotting scope

Also experiment with monoculars, if you have them. Some varieties
even have threaded screws that can be used to attach them elegantly
to cameras.

Special thanks to the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (http://www.ggro.org) for the use of their scope for this hack.

8.10.2 See Also

Laurence Poh
(http://www.laurencepoh.com), the
"father of digiscoping."

Yahoo! Digiscoping Group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Digiscopingbirds/),
an active community of digiscopers.

Tips and tricks by Stéphane Moniotte
(http://www.md.ucl.ac.be/peca/test/tipsl);
includes an especially helpful section on adapter hacks and a page on
digibinox.

Terrie Miller