|  Digiscoping
Extreme digital telephoto photography
All of the telephoto images on this website have been taken with Nikon
and Contax digital cameras attached to a Swarovski spotting scope.
Although these products were not designed to be used in this manner,
this type of combination has bought about a small revolution in wildlife
photography for hobbyists such as myself.
The digital camera can either be handheld, as close to the eyepiece of
the scope as possible, or secured via an adapter that effectively joins
the two instruments together.
The technique requires that the scope be kept as stable as possible,
as any vibration of the scope will cause the resulting images to be blurred.
I use a cable release attached to my camera, which is attached to the
scope via an adapter ring which is in turn mounted on a tripod.
How to get sharp images
 There
are a number of limitations to bear in mind with Digiscoping (or any extreme
telephoto photography for that matter). The three major factors that will
introduce blur into your images are camera/scope movement, atmospheric
disturbance (eg heat haze) and pushing optical zoom too great a distance.
To get sharp images your camera and scope must be absolutely still! I
cannot stress this one enough, a bit of wind vibration or movement caused
if you press the shutter release with your finger will cause blur. At
the focal length your taking images the slightest movement is massively
amplified. I use a mechanical shutter release with a universal adapter
arm purchased from Jessops, you can purchase an electronic one for coolpix
cameras, but they are quite expensive. I would advise that you do need
a remote shutter release though.
My technique usually involves frantic movement to get on the subject followed
by a pause to allow the scope to settle and become completely still before
I take an image, even then I have to be careful not to introduce movement
via the shutter release cable, alot of birds fly off during the pause!
If you are out on a nice day you'll notice heat haze. This will seriously
undermine your ability to get a sharp image. Also, digital cameras do
not cope well with harsh middle of the day light, especially when reflecting
off water or contrasted with areas of shadow. Birds with white plumage
can be particularly challenging.
Don't expect too much from your equipment. All of my images are taken
at 20x magnification with my 20x60 zoom. I usually just try to zoom the
coolpix just enough to eliminate vignetting. At this setting you are using
the equivilent of a 1200-1600mm lens on an SLR which is a massive amount
of telephoto power. In my experience if you push the scope zoom up it
becomes impossible to get the crisp images that can be achieved by operating
at the low end of what the scope can do. I've noticed that Eagle Eye have
introduced a range of scope eyepieces that provide about 10-12x magnification,
Paul Hackett has been testing one and it seems to work very well.
Finally, I always do a small amount of post processing in Photoshop (
Photoshop Elements is bundled with the CP4500). I generally make a copy
of the image and keep the original if it's any good in its original form.
Use the Lasso tool to select the area you want to sharpen, perhaps the
bird and the branch it's on, then apply Unsharp mask (don't apply unsharp
mask to out of focus backgrounds as you want these to retain their soft
blurred appearance). Apply several small doses of unsharp mask using the
settings below rather than one massive dose. You may also try subtly applying
Unsharp mask around the birds head and eye (be careful not to go too far,
to the point when someone can see that the image has been sharpened artificially).
If you resize an image to display on the web, try one last subtle unsharp
mask after you've created a smaller copy to sharpen it up, as the resizing
process introduces a slight softening of detail.
Here are the Unsharp Mask settings I generally use:
Amount: between 50% and 100%
Radius: between 0.6 and 1.0
Threshold: 0
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