Digiscoping - Tips

[Chris Moore]

Question please for Andy Bright + all other comments welcome.
My Coolpix setting used is Macro; Aperture Priority & 100 speed.
I was trying the other day to take a Green Sandpiper which was constantly on the move feeding on the waters edge. As a result most of the pics are not as sharp as they could be. If you up the 100 speed does this help? or is there anything else you can do other than superglue the bird down?

[Andy Bright]

Digiscoping doesn't lend itself to shooting moving birds..but increasing the iso setting to 200 or even more will allow faster shutter-speeds to freeze (or help to) the action. There is a price to be paid for this, and the results will look rather grainy compared to iso 100....but it's often better than no shot. If you have the cp4500 or cp995... iso 200 should produce quite reasonable results.

Shooting in continuous mode may also help to get one reasonable shot of a moving bird out of a series of shots.

If the birds are really active and running around, things do get very difficult as you'll need to pan the scope (and focus the scope) to follow them, in these circumstances I'd advise you to go into 'infinity' focus mode on the camera for sheer speed of use.
Regards,
Andy

[Doug]

So can I ask, when light is at a premium is it better to opt for aperature priority to maximise the light but risk an offsharp shot or use shutter priority to get the sharpness right and then up the light artificially in Elelments/photoshop?

Sharpness is the biggest problem I have and would love to crack it once and for all.

[IanF]

Personally I always go for the fastest shutter speed as depth of field gains through using a smaller aperture when digiscoping is negligible. Having said that, if I gain get at least 125th sec then I'm happy, but that is seldom attainable using my equipment in our climate. Even at max aperture 1/30 or 1/60 is more the norm.

[Andy Bright]

So can I ask, when light is at a premium is it better to opt for aperature priority to maximise the light but risk an offsharp shot or use shutter priority to get the sharpness right and then up the light artificially in Elelments/photoshop?

Sharpness is the biggest problem I have and would love to crack it once and for all.
Use aperture priority mode but always keep the f# at the lowest you can get for the given camera zoom setting (rotating the control dial)...by and large, this applies all the time as the fastest shutter-speed is desirable in all conditions.

Regards,
Andy