Friday, August 17, 2007

Digiscoping with my Fuji e900

So I headed out early to Gillson Park hoping for some migrants and hoping for some digiscoping practice with my new Fuji Finepix e900. Well, the birds were few and far between. I saw Chipping Sparrows, Red-breasted Nuthatches, American Robins, Baltimore Orioles, a Black-and-White Warbler, Northern Cardinal, Canada Goose, etc... So I focused on trying my hand at digiscoping.

I don't have an adapter so I used a Gatorade cap, cut a hole in it and taped it on my scope (Kowa TSN-4). I have to hand hold my camera up to the scope and hope for a steady hand. That is not very easy.

Here's what my scope looks like with the bottle cap. can you see the cottontail?

Here's an attempt, a bit blurry, but you can tell it's a rabbit!


Here's a still of a Baltimore Oriole.

Here's what it looked like with the naked eye. He's at the very top of the middle tree.

Here I started messing around with the video function. The shaking at least seems appropriate with the live action shots!




I still need a lot of practice and some more subjects to practice on, but I'm at least happy that I can get record shots in case I come across something rare.

2 comments:

P. Ollig said...

Nice job with the digiscoping. I've gotten some great results using a pair of 8.5x44 swifts. Can't imagine how much fun it would be to use a scope!

I think my best results came when I was birding south Texas for the first time (all the images in that post were digiscoped). Even using a crappy 3.2 megapixel camera and blowing the image up to an 5x7 the Altamira Oriole photo still turned out framable. Good to see others experimenting with this "poor man's SLR" technique.

Chet said...

It's a challenge, especially without all the best equipment, but it's fun to mess around with.