Digiscoping advice please?

[Paul J Williamson]

Hi there, I am an avid photographer with a passion for birds & have just joined the Forum.
I can't quite believe the content of this site!
Perhaps you might have some advice to offer on buying a suitable Digiscoping set up for a Canon EOS 350D?
I'm off to look at some of your pictures.
Having seen some of them already, perhaps I should take a night class!
Cheers
Paul

[IanF]

Hi Paul,

It's possible to use a DSLR for digiscoping but it's far from ideal. You can either mount the camera body directly to the scope body using a SLR adapter - but you lose the main advantages of digiscoping with a compact camera namely the magnification from the eyepeice and from the lens. Also it's very dark so you can hardly see through the viewfinder which means very longer exposure times as aperture is around f11.

An alternative is to fit the camera with a short fast prime lens something like a 50mm f1,8. That way the camera can be mounted on the scope eyepiece using an adapter - but you still lose the camera zoom you'd have from a compact which would normally be 2-3x the eyepeice magnification and the view is still quite dark.

Decent results can be obtained but really a digital compact camera is much easier and likely to give better results.