The Rusty Digiscoper

A female purple finch at our feeders. Shooting through window glass decreases the sharpness of digiscoped images.

Still missing an adapter for my new digital camera. (A Canon Powershot A520. It's a lightweight, fast, small camera that shoots at 4 megapixels--ideal for digiscoping.) An adapter, I hope, will permit my camera to mesh perfectly with my Swarovski spotting scope, so they can make beautiful music together.

But do I let the fact that I lack the right equipment stop me? NO! There's no such thing as a bad digiscoped shot--at least until you look at them on your computer.

I banged out a few images of our feeder birds through the studio window--knowing full well the images would not be sharp.

Northern cardinal digiscoped shot showing the classic bane of the digiscoper's existence, vignetting around the image.
This black "frame" can be cropped off, but if you take lots of pix, this can be very time consuming.

Same shot, cropped, using iPhoto.

I took a short walk after lunch, into our meadow, to try my new set-up outdoors, just like nature intended.

these are some of my earliest (least unsuccessful) attempts. It seems I have a lot to re-learn about digiscoping. Including whether or not to shoot un-zoomed or zoomed, and whether or not to take pix that will need to have the vignetting cropped off later...So many questions...

Male eastern bluebird, getting in a little pre-spring house hunting.

If you want to see how the pros do digiscoping, here are two excellent places to view some images and get some tips:

The Swarovski Digiscoping Gallery on the BWD website.

Mike McDowell's Digiscoping Blog.

BTW, if you are unfamiliar with the term "digiscoping" here's all it is: taking pictures using a digital camera held up to, or attached to, a spotting scope or other magnifying optics.