I'm a complete beginner. I have a canon a95 and an aspen ( cheap ) scope with 20-60 eyepiece. I've just ordered the baader adapter to connect them together. Firstly, can anyone give me some basic camera settings to get started and can anyone suggest a better scope that the a95 and baader adapter will attach too. I don't want to spend a fortune but if I get hooked and the pictures are excellent then who knows.
Any help would be really appreciated.
Tiger3663,
Here's the settings I use with the A95, they work very well.
Turn the mode dial to AV.
Press the FUNC button and select AWB, Continuous Drive Mode, ISO 50, Effect off, Spot metering, Large (L), and Superfine (S).
Press the FUNC button again to exit these settings.
Press the MENU button and select Flexizone, Red-eye off, AF Point, MF-Point Zoom on, AF assist Beam off, Digital Zoom off, Review 3 secs, Reverse Display on.
Then the most important bit, Save settings to C, this will put all the settings into C (custom) Mode, from now on use C Mode all the time.
Press MENU again to exit.
When you've sorted out the zoom needed to clear vignetting this setting can also be saved to C by simply going back to AV mode, zooming the camera to the required position and Savings Settings to C again.
What you have now is Aperture Priority Mode, auto focus and spot metering position linked together, i.e. focusing and metering are both done in the rectangle in the centre of the screen - which incidentally can be moved to 9 different positions in the screen to help composition or avoid small obstacles in front of the bird etc.
These settings I use for perhaps 95% of shots taken and find they work quite well, however for situations where there are branches, etc in the way of the bird I switch to Manual Focus. (If using MF I find that because the camera goes through Macro first the distance scale that appears with MF has to be reset, between 7 mtrs and infinity seems ok).
This will give you a good starting point but experiment as you become more accustomed to digiscoping to see what works best for you.
Regarding a scope, I should wait a while and see how you get on, expect quite a lot of disappointments initially, it's not easy, but if you persevere you'll get some good photos.
Most important thing is to keep everything rock steady, vibration kills good images.
regards
John
