Digiscoping with the Oly C-750 and a Kowa 77mm scope (1 Viewer)

I have a Kowa spotting scope (the TSN-2 with 77mm objective,
bought in 1987). Recently Kowa introduced a low magnification
eye-piece specially designed for digiscoping, Kowa calls it
"TSN-VA1 Photo and Video Adapter" but it is in fact a large eye-piece
with very long eye-relief (57mm) and includes a built-in adapter for
attaching cameras. It provides 8x magnification on the 77, 66 and
60 mm Kowa scopes and 8.7x on the 82mm Kowa scopes.

This works very well with the Oly c-750 [zoom lens, 6.3 -63mm,
SLR equiv. 38-380mm]. With my old 77mm Kowa
it provides an effective telephoto range from 580mm focal lenght
up to 3040mm focal lenght (ie, it is usable with the c-750 lens
focal lenght varying betwen 12mm and 63mm). One of my first photos is posted in my gallery (the bird was at about 40 ft from camera):



The camera produced file for this photo, including the EXIF, can be seen at http://www.pbase.com/dacolphotos/c750kowa77

The major drawback of the above system is that when birding one
has to change the eyepieces in order to photograph (as 8x is not what one usually uses a scope for...). Thus setting-up for a photo takes a bit longer than in traditional digiscoping.

See attached photos of the set-up.

Dalcio

Hi Dalcio; very interesting. Had a look at the original. See you got the focus spot on on the eye and the bird is all pretty sharp with some nice detail. Was a bit of purple and vignetting which might some mightn't like. Good thing was, to keep them happy, seemed fairly easy to address these in Photoshop without spoiling the picture, IMO. Here's my attempt : http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v319/normjackson/cardinal2.jpg
Not sure how difficult it is for you to achieve this standard consistently. Technically though, on this evidence, would have to say your setup can produce really nice web sized pictures at, I think, about 1500mm focal length equivalent on 35mm film. Good show, I say.

normjackson said:

Hi Dalcio; very interesting. Had a look at the original. See you got the focus spot on on the eye and the bird is all pretty sharp with some nice detail. Was a bit of purple and vignetting which might some mightn't like. Good thing was, to keep them happy, seemed fairly easy to address these in Photoshop without spoiling the picture, IMO. Here's my attempt : http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v319/normjackson/cardinal2.jpg
Not sure how difficult it is for you to achieve this standard consistently. Technically though, on this evidence, would have to say your setup can produce really nice web sized pictures at, I think, about 1500mm focal length equivalent on 35mm film. Good show, I say.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the comments Norm. You did a fantastic job with this picture in Photoshop! What I did in Photoshop was: one application of unsharp mask, followed by an adjustment of brighteness and contrast, resizing and then a bit more sharpening. Evidently I have much to learn in Photoshop (as well in other things but I won't go there!).

Notice that the TSN-2 that I have is not an ED glass (or fluorite lens like the top end models of Kowa) this probably accounts for the CA in the picture. Also I didn't use a cable release device or the remote control for shooting. Finally both my tripod and the tripod mount of my scope are pretty banged up and so the assemblage is not as firm as one might want... Thus I braced the camera and tripod with one hand and shot with the other. In other words, even with my current photographic skills there seems to be room for improvement. The bright sunshine was very helpful in this particular picture.

Evidently the TSN-VA1 is of more interest to those that, like myself, happened to have a Kowa scope and a longer zoom camera that is not suitable for standard digiscoping.

Dalcio