Bird Watcher's Digest: Birding Resources: Digiscoping

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DIGISCOPING

Take fantastic bird photographs with your spotting scope and a digital camera!

By Laurence Poh

(Be sure to check out some great digiscoping shots in our subscriber Photo Gallery.)

Shoot that bird.

Don't you sometimes wish that you could bring home the beautiful bird you saw on your holiday in Malaysia or Florida? Well you could, photographically speaking, if you have a spotting scope and a digital camera. For the past two years I have switched from mere bird watching to a more exciting hobby of photographing birds. Now I can share the birds I see in the field with family members and friends.

I discovered that I could shoot through a spotting scope with a digital camera and get a highly magnified image equivalent to that produced by a single lens reflex camera lens of 2800mm focal length. This type of photography is called digiscoping.

The camera best suited for digiscoping is the Nikon 9xx series camera, because of certain design qualities such as swivel body, internal zoom, and focusing. Most important is the small lens diameter, which can fit into the rubber eyecup of most scopes on the market. The method described here is about digiscoping with Nikon cameras, but you can apply the same procedure with any make camera. To digiscope, you have to make an adaptor ring in order to center and to place the camera as close as possible to the scope eyepiece. I made mine using a plastic milk bottle cap and a piece of film cannister. The shooting is done afocally (capturing the image with a camera that would otherwise be reaching your eye).

The first step is to focus the scope on the spotted bird. Then very quickly place the camera against the said ring, and shoot. Composition is via the LCD screen on the back of the camera. However, there are some settings best suited for bird photography through the scope. Aperture Priority is my choice setting. Set the aperture to the largest opening in order to let the camera set the highest shutter speed for proper exposure, because with high-magnification photography a slight handshake or camera shake will blur an image. In full sun I might get shutter speeds as high as 1/1000 second. Under cloudy conditions I might get shutter speeds as low as 1/60 second. However, camera mounts are available that allow you to attach the camera to the scope if you feel you cannot hold the camera steady.

Why use a digital camera? Some advantages are as follows:

Immediate feedback. Once the picture is taken, you can check the sharpness and clarity of the image through the Play mode.
Exposures can be judged and corrected by way of the LCD image as it is written to the compact flash card for storage. Bad pictures can be deleted immediately or later on without film and development costs.
No waiting for a third party to process the film. Pictures downloaded to your computer can be self-processed within minutes instead of hours or days.
No more film or print scanning to digitize photos and all the inherent problems such as dust marks in the scans.

Some of the disadvantages are:

Presently, the cameras are still slow when writing to the storage card, and shooting opportunities can be lost.
One has to be computer literate to download files and process the pictures taken.
A dim LCD can be difficult to see in bright outdoor light.
No control of depth-of-field.

Now that you have learned how to digiscope, add a new dimension to your bird watching, and shoot that bird!

Laurence Poh, digiscoping pioneer and friend to many, died peacefully on September 19, 2004, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. This article, "Digiscoping," was featured in the November/December, 2001, issue of Bird Watcher's Digest. Mr. Poh is credited as having discovered the concept of digiscoping, almost by accident. He spotted a very rare bird in a tree on the other side of a river. After confirming the bird's identity using his spotting scope, he wanted to document his sighting and, in a "eureka!" moment he held his digital camera up to the eyepiece of his spotting scope. The quality of the resulting photograph stunned him and digiscoping as we know it today was born.