Digibinning

2010-05-16T01:14:00.000-07:00

Digiscoping Today - A Weekly Blog Carnival

2009-05-06T02:20:00.000-07:00

Digiscoping Today is a new blog carnival/meme where digiscopers can add links to recent photos. The thing is, there are so many people digiscoping out there (all over the place) that it would be nice to get together somehow.

Digiscoping Today is for:

Showing off your great digiscoping images
Getting advice from other photographers/digiscopers
Whether it is your first digiscoping photo or your 10000th join in the fun!

Here are some general guidelines:

Post your photos or video to a blog, flickr, youtube, etc.
Add your name/blog name in the linky box
Add a link to the specific URL of your photo/video/post
The content or subject of the photo does not matter as long as it is not offensive. Photograph birds, bugs, mountains, clouds or the moon, as you like.
Any photo or video counts as long is it was taken through another, external lens; a telescope, binoculars, a hand lens, whatever floats your boat.
Please add the words "Digiscoping Today" somewhere in your title, and please paste the widget in your blog so that your post links back to the main host site.
If you are linking to a flickr or youtube video, then please insert the linkback in the description, and make sure that the image title has the words "Digiscoping Today" in it.
Digiscoping, videoscoping, digibinning, phonescoping, anything goes

Insert the large widget by copying and pasting this code:

Insert the small widget by copying and pasting this code:

Two other carnivals you may want to participate in are:

and

you can use the same post/image for Digiscoping Today and for any other meme/carnival as long as they fulfill the requirements of all carnivals involved.

Check out www.birdfreak.com for tons of interesting birding and bird conservation stuff, Eddie also runs Bird Photography Weekly, so go ahead and have a look at some of the cool photos people are placing there.

Digibinning techinque

2009-04-10T02:08:00.000-07:00

Taking digital photos through binoculars can be rather difficult, particularly if the light is poor. The two hardest things about digibinning the snowfinches was that the light was low (because of the heavy snow and fog), and blown out (lots of matt, bright white and dark areas too dark for detail). These are tough lighting conditions even for the best dSLR cameras, let alone a small point-and-shoot like the Canon A590IS I use for digibinning and digiscoping. With a little bit of patience, I found that I could get some okay shots through my binoculars (well, they are swarovski EL's after all ;-)

The trick to taking photos through binoculars is to:

get good light
get close enough to not have to use the camera's zoom (a real image-killer as the lenses on the small point and shoot digital cameras are rather poor, in general)
get good light
hold the binoculars vertical in your left hand, having access to the focus knob with your left hand's fingers, and freeing up your right hand to handle the camera
use a good pair of binoculars - high quality lenses are likely to give you much more light (faster shutter speeds = sharper images) and a better quality of image.
if you are lucky, your camera's lens will fit snuggly in to the eye-cup of your binoculars. If this is not the case, you will either need to use something like the swarovski snapshot adaptor, or try your luck with holding the camera lens at the right angle and in the right position (no easy feat, but I have done it for some decent video and photos of leopards and black rhino as well as an African Fish Eagle - beautiful!)
With the binoculars rested on your lower hand, lower fingers focussing, and right hand free to operate the camera, you are all set to find subjects.
Backlight is a real photo-killer for digibinning, so you will want to position yourself with the light shining on the subject.

If you look at the three snowfinch images above, you will immediately notice a few things:

Vignetting can be an issue. This can be avoided by zooming the camer a little bit, but this has two major side effects: 1. you put more strain on the camera lens which tends to produce softer/blurred images, and 2. you reduce the maximum possible shutter speed
Because the lighting was harsh, the image resutls tend to have blown out whites, and feature-less darks. this can be corrected to some extent by post-processing (see the first snowfinch image with the one snowfinch flying towards the feeder). In this image I reduced the intensity of the highlights and brightened the darks. The result is that one can now see more details, but - unfortunately - the image looks photoshopped and artificial.
Even under tough conditions, digibinning can help you get a few photos to take home with you! (even if they are not always national geographic-ready)

Happy digibinning!
Dale