Digiscoping for dummies

I’ve experimented here and there with digiscoping over the last couple years. Not with any specific equipment or anything mind you, my technique is quite a bit more rustic than that. I hold my digital point and shoot up to the eyepiece of my scope and let her rip. Because of this the quality of the resulting shots is somewhat varying. While I occasionally get around on one that looks pretty good (the old broken clock is right twice a day maxim), I typically get more bad pictures than good ones. For the most part, I’ve been ok with that, but a good blog runs at least partly on eye candy, so any help I can get to improve my meager digiscoping skillz is much appreciated.

That opportunity came this past weekend when Swarovski savant and digiscoping guru Clay Taylor came to Chapel Hill to run a digiscoping workshop out of my local Wild Bird Supply Store. I jumped at the chance, after all Clay is an ace photographer (and a great guy besides, should he turn up in your neck of the woods) and even though he mostly had his hands full with folks even more clueless than me (I know, I thought that would be impossible too), I learned a lot.

While the marriage of camera and scope is far less perfect in my rig than in others, the general camera information was invaluable. I’ve always been frustrated that my photos always seem to come out a bit overexposed. Turns out I hadn’t been fiddling with the dials on my camera nearly enough, as a few clicks on a manual setting helped me out big time. The knowledge to go to town on exposure and ISO was worth the price of admission (which was free, but you get where I’m coming from)

But I get ahead of myself. We spent the morning at Duke Gardens in Durham, a bit well-manicured to be considered a real birding hotspot, but a place with many exotics ducks that sit still long enough for a dozen or so novice digiscopers to train on them. In other words, a great place to start. So here are some photos I took. First, an Eastern Cottontail on the lawn.

See what I mean? A tad overexposed. This was before I made the magical adjustment….

Clay had brought a bunch of corn to attract ducks. It didn’t work as well as he had thought, we mostly got House Sparrows. Good enough.

And a Common Shelduck, one of the previously mentioned ornamental ducks. I actually though this one turned out ok.

The best bird, at least from my perspective, was this juvenile Green Heron that sat tight for nearly 45 minutes fishing from an overhanging shrub. I really enjoyed photographing him and I got some good shots, which I’ll share in a future post, of him dropping twigs into the water to attract tadpoles and minnows.

The background was a little busy to be a great photograph, the bird was about 100 meters away, but I’m pretty happy with the results for the most part.

The Green wasn’t the only Heron around, in a pine tree nearby we were surveilled by a Great Blue Heron who went entirely unnoticed in the excitement over his smaller cousin until he screamed at us. By this point we were ready to move on, so all of the scopes turned in unison to tackle this big guy.

As important as the tips in the field proved to be, I found the second part of the workshop focusing on editing photos, just as useful. Even with a simple photo editor, Clay was able to make even mediocre shots looks downright presentable. That’s precisely the sort of magic I was looking for. So with that in mind I feel as though the photos I took look this weekend look quite a bit better than those I’ve taken before.

Thanks to Clay for coming to Chapel Hill, and Cynthia at my local Wild Bird Center for hosting. I’d like to think the readers of this here blog will be the beneficiary of my new found quasi-expertise, but don’t hold me to it. Maybe I’ll just get it right slightly more often.