To Digiscope or Not to Digiscope? (1 Viewer)

As yet I have only a Sony RX100 pocket camera.

I am interested in both wildlife (including bird) photography & landscape photography, and I am in the process of deciding what "serious" camera to buy.

Until a few days ago I had not even heard of a digiscope, and I had been looking at purchasing a dslr with a lens suitable for shooting birds etc, only to be horrified by the cost of the lenses. There are suitable lenses costing from around £300 to £1000 - I'm ok with that - but the longer lenses seem to start around £4500, which I consider a bit too high.

I can see that good quality digiscope set up will not be chaep, but it looks managable.

Now the questions;

What sort of quality pictures can I expect from a Nikon dslr (D7000?) and a Nikon scope?
Is there a better alternative to the Nikon scope (I want a Nikon dslr for landscapes so I will likely use that whatever)?
Any general advice for a newbie?

Thanks

Mike

I have done some investigating elsewhere, & it seems that on a Nikon 1 you get a crop factor of x2.7, so a Nikon 300mm f4 plus 1.4 teleconverter gives 300x2.7x1.4=1130mm f5.6 with great picture quality! Cost including camera, adapter, lens & teleconverter from £1700 to £2100

Hi Mike, I just go an RX100 last week. A search on the forums will turn up folks that are pretty happy with it as a digiscoping camera (myself included). If you already have that and a good tripod / mount then you could spend £2000 on a spotting scope and have a very good digiscoping setup with ranges out to 2000mm (or greater) equiv.

That said, you would likely not get as many bird-in-flight shots digiscoping as you would with your proposed Nikon V1 setup, though even with that setup your focus speed might not be as fast as you'd like.

The Nikon scopes have a good reputation, though there are plenty of alternatives at all kinds of price points. Kowa, Swarovski, Celestron all come to mind.

Digiscoping Set up

Mike, you can have a quality digiscoping set up for perhaps less than you think. I suggest a Celestron 80mm F scope with the fluorite crystal objective, available for considerably less than $1000 USD. A quality scope. It takes the Baader Hyperion prime astro 1 1/4 eyepieces that have metric threads on top for easy mounting of a small camera. The 17mm prime is suggested and digiscopes fine with 20mm of eyerelief. A 13 and 21 mm are also available. They are a reasonable $140. USD.

Although I have two 4/3rds cameras ( a G1 and an Oly), a Nikon P6000, and Lumix LX-3, I prefer my little Lumix FH-1. Body mounting threads are easy to attach around the lens on a self centering ring. A Lumix LX-5 filter mounting tube properly positions the camera to the eyepiece with a couple of adapter rings.

The good but small FH-1 (FS-10) sensor gives 16 times the shutter speed as a full frame camea, and 4 times the speed of a 4/3 camera, and NO shutter jar. See a breakdown of the parts, and a sparrow shot with the system. Gene

Parts
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7090/7164278389_99b093e787_z.jpg

Sparrow, (click image for a larger view)
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8304/7778422664_71b4cede51_b.jpg

You can do digiscoping and I find it very challenging and fun...unlike photography which I also like...it isn't a matter of just taking a thousand shots and coming away with one that is great. Digiscoping in some way equates to 'film photography' in the sense that you have to take your time, adjust your controls, take your time, have patience etc.... You come away with the feeling that you really know the birds you are digiscoping since you are forced to spend more time understanding their movements and habitat....

Now...the more you do, the better you get. It is important to have a good quality scope and the more money you put into the scope, the better chances of a real quality shot.

Also....ease of taking a pic is important so some Point and Shoots are not easy to use with their navigation...the same holds true for some digiscoping adapters. Some require you to 'hold' the camera 'someplace' while attempting to focus on the bird using the scope and then place the camera on some adapter while others have more of a 'swing away' adapter making it easy. I mentioned that for when you digiscope, 'time' is a premium to take a shot. Too much time and the bird is 'gone!...'...the more at ease your equipment is, the quicker it will be to take a shot...

Best of luck... jim

I photograph and have been doing latest digiscoping. both have their incentives!
digiscopig is not suitable for action. But the equipment is smaller, lighter and cheaper.

Shooting with long lenses is much more expensive to get the same image quality.
But in moving motives certainly better!

We are talking about distances of twenty meters and more.

Make fun doing both. There are just two different disciplines.

I bought a little Lumix and a Celestron gizmo to attach it to my Celestron 20-60x80 scope just over a year ago, and spent a reasonable amount of time trying to get it to work well.

I have seen many fine digiscoped pics here and elsewhere, but I can tell you it ain't easy. I had some pics worth keeping, but many more went straight in the trash, and I never really managed to get anything much better than I could take with my Canon SX30 superzoom camera. I have now replaced it with a Canon SX50, and get better results than I ever managed to digiscope.

I'd suggest a good look through the Canon SX50 thread http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=240202 looking carefully at the pics people are posting taken with that camera, and how they are improving as people learn more about how to use it.

I've given up on the idea of digiscoping, as a camera with such good IS that it is capable of getting very good images hand held at 100x gets better results than I ever managed, you miss less because you don't have to set so much up, and carry a lot less around with you. If you doubt the 100x hand held the link will show that it gets good results.

OTOH, if you want to buy a little Lumix and a universal digiscoping adaptor, I have both for sale.

David

I personally carry both a superzoom (Sony HX 100 - since improved to HX 200) for middle distance and moving stuff, flight etc) and a cheap compact (Lumix TZ6) for digiscoping with my Swarovski scope.
I hand hold so don't expect every shot to be pin-sharp but am happy to get good record shots and sufficiently good images to use for talks using Power Point or to illustrate the local bird report. I don't have high expectations to am never really disappointed. I don't really think I can compete with a DSLR with a long lens for photo quality ... but I'm not really looking to do so.
It is really what you want out of it ..... I said on one of the other threads that I'm a birder that would like to get some useful images, not a photographer. I really couldn't be bothered lugging round a several kilo DLSR with a long lens. The scope and tripod are sufficient and the 2 cameras together weigh less than a kilo so represent no effort on my part to carry them .

So the superzoom takes care of the moving things that are sufficiently close to get a reasonable image .... and also allows me positive ID of distant raptors that I would be unable to ID through binoculars. The hand-held images with the compact are simply taken of anything I look at in my scope - if focussed correctly and the subject remains in view I can get an image in seconds by snapping off an image whilst watching something. I have the scope anyway so adding a cheap £100 camera is really now bother and indeed with a 15X zoom it in itself is no slouch if that is what is to hand.

So decide what you want to do ... go one way , the DLSR route if the quality of the images is the most important criterion ... or go the other way if birding is the real issue and the photos are a bonus.

Ray

That's a good thought, Ray.

Maybe I'll take my little little Lumix with me when I'm out with my scope and see what results I can get hand held. I managed to get some reasonable images years ago when I had a Kowa 25x50 and a very expensive early Fuji compact with 3x zoom, that I had to use some of to avoid vignetting. Both those have now gone, and my much cheaper Lumix way out-performs the Fuji, as my Celestron outperforms the Kowa - as it should with so much more light gathering capacity.

With the Canon SX50 too, of course.

David

I too went with the super zoom option, again the Canon SX 50, my usual birding set up is Nikon 8x36 binocular, Minox 50mm travel scope and a Giotto's mono-pod, mainly because I use public transport, the SX 50 suites my style of birding and delivers good results.
For organised trips to the coast, other big water body's or lifts with birding buddies, I digiscope using a Opticron ES 80 GA ED 'scope with SDL v2 Eyepiece and a Panasonic Lumix FS 40 camera, plus Opticron's own adapter, on a Giotto's tripod, again delivering the goods ! if space allows I take the SX 50 too.
So I think its "horses for courses" and personal choice and goodness knows there are many nice people out there in "birding land" that will help.
So' Mike its all out there, the method, the means and the know how, good luck with your quest. :cat: