Digiscoping with a Digital SLR

The Concept

As a concept, digiscoping is as simple as it gets. Put your camera up to a spotting scope's eyepiece and take a picture of what the scope is focused on. However, we often find that in practice things are not as easy as they seem. It's been my experience that one of, if not the biggest challenge of digiscoping, is to get the right mix of scope, camera, and adapter that can easily and effectively be assembled as a complete, photography-ready unit. Why is this?

The Problem

I think the biggest hurdle here is the camera to adapter interface. In today's point-and-shoot camera market there is no uniformity in regards to shape, size, and features. It turns out that camera makers could care less about their products' suitability to digiscoping. As a result, the manufacturers of scopes and digiscoping adapters are forced to come up with intricate, highly adjustable, and often complex universal adapters to fit the plethora of cameras offered to consumers. I'm not interested in making digiscoping any more challenging than it already is. I'll always opt for the route that is fast, simple, and effective.

Pictured above are some of the "universal" digiscoping adapters. Large and mechanically intricate, they offer a less than optimal solution.

The Adapter Solution

The best hardware for digiscoping is that which requires the least amount of forethought or effort to put into use. In regards to camera adapters, the simple tube-style adapters on the market fit the bill perfectly. These tube adapters are simple, both in design and functionality. The premise is a hollow tube screwed onto the front of your camera lens that can slide over a scope's eyepiece, effortlessly centering both lenses at the proper depth. Not only are these adapters easy to deploy, they are compact and lightweight. Question: what's not to love about this type of setup? Answer: it doesn't work with a lot of cameras.

Pictured above are "tube" style adapters offered by Kowa, Vortex, and Swarovski

The Camera Solution

Very few point-and-shoot cameras have the functionality to attach adapters, filters, or boosters to the front lens. The absence of this feature is a design trend that seems to be picking up momentum, and as new models are introduced each year, fewer and fewer of them support filter thread attachments. Here is where a digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) fits the bill nicely. Almost all DSLR camera lenses are inherently designed with filter threads that easily adapt to those wonderful tube style adapters. Warning: not all DSLR lenses are suitable for digiscoping. The best lenses are the short focal length lenses. Both Canon and Nikon make 50mm f/1.8 lenses that are relatively inexpensive and perfect for digiscoping. If you're shooting with a Pentax DSLR, you will want the Pentax 40mm f/2.8 “pancake” lens. When using a DSLR for digiscoping, you will need to disable the auto-focus, put the camera on its full manual settings, and set the lens aperture wide open. You will also need to adjust the camera's shutter speed to obtain the proper image exposure.

An exploded view of a full DSLR digiscoping rig, minus a tripod.

Nothing's Perfect

Using a DSLR for digiscoping doesn't come without compromise. DSLR benefits include universal adaptability via a threaded lens and the ability to use, and compose images through, a viewfinder. The drawbacks to DSLR cameras are the inability to use the lens' auto-focus and working with a bigger, heavier camera body. Because of a DSLR's size, I would NOT recommend allowing the camera body and lens to hang unsupported from the spotting scope for any extended period of time.

My current digiscoping set up: Leica 82mm APO Televid with Swarovski DCA and Pentax DSLR

What Are Your Options?

If you've got a DSLR or point-and-shoot camera that uses filter threads, and you need a good digiscoping adapter, I would take a look at the Swarovski DCA, Vortex Razor Digital Adapter, and Kowa DA10 adapter. These three brand-specific adapters accept rings to accommodate various lens thread sizes. I have had some limited luck getting some of these adapters to work with other brands of scopes. For instance, I'm currently digiscoping with the Leica 82mm Televid and, much to my delight, found that the Swarovski DCA adapter fits nicely around the new Leica eyepiece. Be prepared to get creative; if you are going to try to mix and match brands of adapters and scopes, you might need to make your own bushings or modify the adapters in one way or another.

Digiscoping VS DSLR

Wow, I've been absent from this space for awhile and for those 3 or 4 readers that may still be following 600 Birds, thanks for hanging in there. For parents in particular, summers tend to be time vacuums filled with lazy days at the local pool, camping trips, canoe trips, family reunions, soccer leagues, etc, etc... (notice that I didn't mention blogging in the aforementioned activities))

Even though I have been slacking as of late, many of the other birding bloggers out there have stayed the course and are producing insightful and regular postings, most of which I check in on daily. Some of them even have kids.

One of those bloggers who seems to be able to pull off amazing feats of travel, publishing, blogging, business running, kid parenting, bird festival organizing, keynote speaking, music playing, etc..etc...etc... is Bill Thompson. This brings me to the point of this post. Bill recently got back from a trip to Trinidad and recently blogged about his experience digiscoping with the new Leica Televid spotting scopes, and how that rig performed compared to his DSLR. For the full scoop, I recommend you check out the latest post at Bill of the Birds.

I've also been digiscoping with one of these new Leica spotting scopes and they are truely superb. I haven't gotten around to editing newer shots, post-processing, cropping, etc... but when I do, rest assured you can see more here. For now though, I've got to get the kids to horse camp.

On Digiscoping

As digiscoping is going to be one of the primary facets of this blog, it seems appropriate to begin with a post about what I love about this blend of birding and photography. It's simple and fun.

Simple in that you can just hold a camera up to the scope and shoot a picture. My 7 year old could do it if I gave her a scope and camera.

Fun in that it has really enhanced my enjoyment of wildlife observation. I find that when I'm digiscoping, all the movements and body language of my subject become so much more important to capturing the picture. I tend not to focus so much on how many birds I'm finding, but rather what the birds in front of me at any given moment are doing. This observation and appreciation of behavior has certainly made me a better birder and photographer. I've also found it to contribute to a higher quality birding experience overall.

Digiscoping equipment runs the gamut of costs and complexity. Among the easiest, ready to use set-ups out of the box are offerings from Zeiss and Nikon, though almost any camera and scope combination can be put together with a simple, universal adapter.