Digibinning/Digibinoing

[Colin]

I know that somewhere here, someone mentioned taking digital pictures thru one eyepiece of a binocular. The problem was keeping the whole thing steady.
I was sitting one a rock on a beach in northern Scotland a few days ago resting after a long hike and thought about this. I had my Nikon binnies (10x42) with me as well as my Nikon Coolpix 995. I tried an experiment and it worked. Firstly I was pleasantly surprised that the camera lens fitted snugly against the eyepiece. Hand holding the whole lot was a complete failure. Then, an idea. I 'straddled' the binnies (having focussed them first) over my thigh near to my knee. I then offered up the camera to one of the eyepieces and with the screen part swivelled upwards I could easily see the image. A tiny bit a refucussing and I had a good image. By altering the angle of my thigh with the ground I was able to alter pitch and I tried out a couple of shots of a cliff ( no birds ) and I was very happy with the result. A bit more practice and the pics should be OK. The critical thing is to get into a sitting position which is comfortable and thus avoids shaking.
Anyone else tried this or is there a better way.


Colin

[ralph]

Can't think of a better way of keeping 'em steady, Colin. Believe me, I've tried. I got a few 'passable' shots of Egrets with my Coolpix 775 through my Leica 8x42BA's. The annoying thing about the 775 is that you can't take an instant picture - you can't just hit the shutter button and get a picture - there's a really annoying delay, which means the action has happened by the time the shutter has 'gone off'.

Unless anyone knows otherwise, of course ...

B (:

[Andy Bright]

Hi Ralph, dunno if you mean the delay that's caused by the camera's auto-focus locking on (or trying) to the subject or the usual bane of our lives.... shutter-lag. The AF can be bypassed by using 'infinity' focus mode on some Nikons, you can fine tune the focus on your bins to get a sharpish image on the camera's monitor.
Andy B,
Watford