When we started birding (and it wasn’t so long ago) my wife and I merely pressed into service a couple pairs of old binoculars we had laying around. Even modest quality binoculars were pretty good to get started, especially for backyard birding.
As we got further into birding, we inevitably wanted to save some of our experiences and share them with others. But when we looked at the beautiful images in the bird books and even the beautiful close up views our old modest binoculars provided, we thought we’d never be able to capture anything like it without a significant outlay of cash for photography equipment.
Being somewhat old school, big beautiful bright close ups of flittering birds meant only one thing to us: Big expensive telefoto lenses. Wrong we were. A little technology and some cleverness came to the rescue. Enter digiscoping.
Simply take a digital camera and aim it through your favorite optics and voila! You’re digiscoping. The results were pretty impressive considering the meager inputs. Most of the snap shots on our old West Seattle Birdcam blog were shot this way and so were the recent videos on this blog.
I had recently purchased a small Canon PowerShot SD1000 digital camera (about the size of a pack of cards) and just held the lens up to my binoculars. The PowerShot SD1000 has a 3x optical zoom, so when combined with your typical pair of 7x35mm binoculars, you get a magnification of 21 times. A ginormous effective focal length and all by only combining your already existing equipment. More than enough for backyard birding and great for hikes.
Many folks have setups with tripods, spotting scopes and handy brackets to hold your digital camera over the eyepiece, but to get started all you really need is a monocular or pair of binoculars and a digital camera. It takes two hands– better if they are steady hands– but you will be astounded by what you can achieve.
So far, my cheapo digiscoping high water mark was during our trip to Joshua Tree last spring. We were lucky enough to stumble on a Bighorn Sheep while hiking. All I had was the PowerShot and a pair of compact Nikon binoculars. Still I was able to get these shots from about 150 yards away.
All told, the camera and the binoculars must have weighed only about a pound and both fit nicely into a jacket pocket. There are lots of tips about how to digiscope, so I encourage you to search for tips and read through the links above, but above all just try it and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Enjoy!
