I was content to do normal bird photography with my Sony DSC H9, until one day I discovered the world of Digiscoping on the internet. For a few weeks I convinced myself that with my current state of affairs, the equipment was beyond my means and any more oggling would only lead to a non-existant savings account! However, we have a saying that what is meant to happen will not get stuck on its way. I heard the news that ALDI had been selling a good quality spotting scope for a mere £24.99! I read up countless birding and archery forums , all of which described the scope as being exceptional value for the price! I had to get my hands on one. Unfortunately it was already a month and a half past the date that the item arrived in shops and people had already described how the item had gone out of stock hours after it arrived in stores across the country. I still decided to take a chance and cycled an unknown distance to a relatively obscure ALDI, and would you believe it! There were three pieces left! I snapped up one without delay! I can confirm that as mentioned on the above forums, the scope is truly value for money, with great clarity and sharp focus even at 60 times zoom. Branded as a Traveler spotting scope or as an Adventuridge, it is specially made for ALDI by SUPRA .The scope has a 30-60 times zoom eye piece with a 60 mm objective. 60 mm is not exceptional but its good enough for light gathering. …and thus, I was the proud owner of a scope and on my way to digiscoping! The question that I now needed to answer was if the DSC H9 could be matched up to the ALDI scope for digiscoping. Preliminary experiments, holding the camera to the lens resulted in huge vignetting and very blurry out of focus pics as you can see in this picture. I was going to have to find a way to fix my camera to the scope. The only means of doing this is through an adapter, and adapters are quite expensive. They would cost me atleast as much as the scope itself, which I find hard to accept. Thus I resolved to make my own adapter. Initially I tried punching a eye piece sized hole in a brylcreem container , fit it smugly over the eye piece and then slot the other end into my 74mm camera adapter. That did’nt work as the camera wouldnt stay fixed. A few days later, when I was working in my lab, my eyes chanced across some old test tube/ titration clamps and joints, and I thought theyd make perfect building material for a type of adapter…and so they did! With two clamps, two joints and a connecting rod, I could build a customisable adapter that can fit my camera into just the right position. I clamped one clamp over the barrel of the Scope at the objective end, ensuring that the scope did not get scratched by placing a strip of rubber in between. I then connected a rod perpendicular to the first clamp and connected the second clamp perpendicular to this at the other end. This placed the jaws of the second clamp just above the scope eye piece. I could now clamp my camera into this clamp so that it fitted smug over the scope eye piece. In order to protect the lens from accidental scratches I fixed the UV adapter I had bought earlier to the adapter, ensuring that this useless piece of glass would put itself to use. The lens of the DSC H9 is still considerably bigger than the scope and the vignetting is massive but when placed on a tripod, and zoomed in 15x the vignetting is considerably reduced and the blurred focus can be corrected to a certain extent. However, The camera refuses to be without shake and catches even the slightest movement resulting in quite blurred pics. The camera at the end of the scope is also a heavy weight and takes its toll on the tripod and makes what is already a tough job of focussing on a distant bird even tougher. So far the best image i have been able to produce, is this (notice the purple fringing again?): Unfortunately it doesnt speak much for the digiscoping ability of the DSC H9, although it speaks volumes for the zoom ability of the digiscope itself . Heres what the images look like at full 15x zoom with only the camera. If only I could come up with a more stable system to reduce shake and increase focus! But after giving it a lot of thought and try , I`ve established that it just isnt worth it. Even if I managed to stabilise the camera, Its highly unlikely to produce crisp clear images. Also, it would rule out moving it about and that wouldnt get me any bird photos unless I brought the birds to the camera….. It looks like I can conclude this by saying the DSC H9 just isnt cut out for digiscoping. Give it up and try another camera! P.S. Thats just what I did. I bid for a Konica Minolta Dimage X20 on ebay and won it for just £12! Its only a 2 mp camera, but from the images I`ve seen it produce on flickr, it looks impressive. Besides its a 3x non extending optical zoom, which is just perfect for typical digiscoping. I`m looking forward to getting it and trying it out on my scope. Keep watching this space for more.

When I re-initiated my birding hobby, one of the first ideas to strike me was to have a bird feeder in my garden right above which is my window on the first floor. Technically its not much of a garden as I live with 3 other male housemates. However I doubted how effective a bird feeder would be in the garden as I had never ever witnessed a bird visit the garden even by mistake! not even a magpie or a gull! However, there was only one way to find out and I ventured forth and bought the cheapest feeder on the market and some mixed bird seeds. The only place I could find to hang the feeder was on a rose bush at the corner of the garden.
It was still winter when I hung out the feeder and the rains refused to go away and the winds refused to die down….miserable conditions for a bird to explore neven familiar territory, let alone new unexplored territory….and so the feeder hung out there for almost a month being lashed by the rain and the wind. When a sunny birdy day would happen, the birds refused to come anywhere near, not even to eat the seeds that the wind had succeeded in knocking onto the grass below. I almost gave up on it.

Then one day as I opened my door to check the feeder, something darted into the bushes! I instantly shut the door like nothing happened and went over to the window to watch unseen…and hey there was my first bird – a dunnock! Ever since I`ve been clicking away numerous pictures of it . The bird is a shy creature and will initially jump about within the adjoining hedge, before it finally sticks its head out and surveys the garden for quite a few minutes. It the jumps onto the rose bush and heads for the feeder and has an untidy meal, dropping almost as many seeds as it eats.
I put up pictures of the bird on Flickr forums for the experts and I was told that dunnocks usually dont feed off feeders as they are generally insect eaters. The same is mentioned on wikipedia too.
So let me take the honor of revealing to the birdwatching/bird feeding community proof of the dunnock feeding from a feeder. If the above pics dont whet your appetite, heres a video thrown in.

p.s the sound track which is a dunnock call has been added on.

As you can see from the video, I have since moved on and have upgraded from the feeder on a bush to a DIY feeding station.The frame was created out of a mop handle and some left over copper tubing. The hooks which hold the feeders are made from chopped off clothes hangers! And I`ve added a peanut feeder to attract finches as well. On advice from the flickr experts, I also bought two terracotta bowls, the smaller one which I use for placing bread crumbs and the larger one which serves as a bathing / drinking bowl.

Months have passed but my bird visitors seem almost static. The dunnock seems to have brought its mate along, and I`m yet to photograph the two of them together as only one of them comes onto the feeder at a time while the other one waits in the hedge.
Once I spied a magpie stop over and have a sip from the water bowl, and on another occasion a collared dove hovered over waiting for an opportunity to descend onto the feeding ground but was frightened away by noisy kids passing on the road. I did see a robin briefly and I was so excited that i made the mistake of opening my window to catch a snap of it. That scared it off and its never returned. A couple of starlings descended onto the garden a while ago but they ignored the feeder and the food completely.

I hope that as time goes by and one little bird whispers into other little birds ears, the word will spread and more birdies will visit my feeder. Until then I dream of the day when there will be finches and tits and robins and siskins and sparrows all competing for the food at my feeding station!

Digiscoping, is simply a combination of digital photography and a spotting scope i.e, using a digital camera with a spotting scope to come up with hugely zoomed in images. In its simplest form one would just hold the lens of the camera against the eyepiece of a scope , focus and click. However digiscoping is evolving and there is now specialised equipment for connecting the camera to the scope and holding it in place. The following site will give you a better idea.


However, digiscoping is still an evolving art and the big camera/scope manufacturers are yet to come out with a single piece digiscope (Im told its already happening) so, for the time being one has to match a camera with a scope. Not all cameras will match all scopes. Usually cameras which work have a 3-4x zoom no more. Any higher and images occur vignetted – a phenomena where dark circles occor at the outer edge of the image as shown in the image below:

The Nikon coolpix series of cameras are the cameras of choice as they have just the right zoom, little vignetting and most of them have an internal zoom which means that that their lens does’nt move out of the body on zooming. This allows the camera to be placed against the scope eyepiece and eliminates fear of damage to the lens while zooming.
However, other cameras will work well too. Its a matter of trial and error to find the right match between camera and scope.
The following links will give the reader more information on Digiscoping:
http://www.surfbirds.com/Features/digiscoping.html
http://www.digiscopediary.co.uk/technique.html
http://www.digidylan.co.uk/index.htm
http://www.digiscoping.co.uk/
http://www.sherwoods-photo.com/opticron_scope/opticron_scope_digital_adapters.htm
http://www.srb-griturn.com/digi-scoping-information-sheet-129-c.asp
http://www.acecameras.co.uk/content/infopages/digiscoping/digiscopingw50.htm

I`ll leave you with a slideshow of digiscope related images. Hold your breath cause some of these images can take your breath right away

My Camera is a Sony DSC H9. I must say with 15x zoom it is among the better non-SLR cameras for Bird Photography.

Sony DSC-H9 Specifications

The above specs might read as awesome, but in reality the DSC H9 disappoints on many fronts. Firstly, the cameras greatest criticism is its aggresive nise reduction which causes great loss of detail and sharpness. At 8 mega pixel setting I find that there is too much compression of the image and thus prefer the 5mp setting. This means that I have far less pixels in my photos and thus image cropping is limited.

As an alternative, I considered purchasing a teleconverter lens, so that I could get close enough to the birdies without actually having to crop images. Besides, quite often, a 15x zoom is just not enough for framing distant birds. Now, Sony makes an excellent 1.7x TC lens (VCL-DH1774), but at over a 100 GBP, its far beyond my reach at the moment. And thus while Iwas oggling at the sour grapes, I came across this on Ebay for only 23.00 GBP. I was instantly hooked. A 3x teleconverter! Almost double the magnification for about 1/5th the price!

They say that in lenses, you only get what you pay for and how right they were to be. With just 23 pounds to lose I took the gamble and ordered it. It took almost a month for the item to reach from Hong Kong, but it finally did arrive and I was overjoyed.
The lens turned out to be a generic make, which ships with a 74-58 mm step down adapter ring. This adapter enables one to screw it onto the 74mm adapter that comes with the camera.

I wasted no time in testing it out and I must say I was heart broken. The magnification was great, but the images suffered from massive amounts of purple fringing.

Although, one can remove purple fringing from photos through image editing software, such as photoshop, it is laborious and not feasible to work with tens or hundreds of photos that one can accumulate in a day. Furthermore the results are often not very satisfactory.
.
I did a little bit of research and found that the reasons for the purple fringing could either be the lens itself or the camera or both.
This white paper on Sony cameras says:
“You’ll find a slew of bargain-basement high-power tele-converters on eBay, and each costs less than the other. But each produces more distorted images with more chromatic aberration. Low-end conversion lenses are no bargain unless you don’t care if your images look like a kaleidoscope with heavy purple highlights. That’s not an exaggeration. They really can be that bad.” …almost as if they were talking to me!

and again….. “2X adapters and 3X adapters get you into a range that no digicam can support. A good quality 1000+ mm lens costs many thousands of dollars. You’re not going to duplicate that quality in a $100 US add-on lens, no matter what the manufacturer claims. In my tests, 1.7X seems to be the maximum effective telephoto adapter you can use on an H-Series camera without running into image quality problems.” little wonder then that the manufacturers themselves dont make bigger TC lenses.
“It’s a minor miracle that the H-Series lenses produce crisp, undistorted images at 432-465 mm. You’re tempting fate when you add on a lens whose quality and capability are not up to the standard of the Carl Zeiss-engineered lenses on the H-Series cameras.”
So there you go! I wish I had read this before buying the lens!

However, all the purple fringing maynot be because of the lens. The sony DSC H9 itself produces a good amount of purple fringing as reviewed by numerous sites:
dcresource.com
This user review
neocamera.com
digitalcameratracker.com

The lens could just be amplifying this effect. I wonder about the images that would be produced if I added the lens onto some other make of camera. I may have to wait a few months for a test on my brothers Canon S3IS.

I tried one option to try and reduce the purple fringing – adding a uv filter. However this seems to have no effect and I`m left wondering if i purchased a normal piece of glass claiming to be a UV filter!

Meanwhile, I`ve used the lens more and every now and then I get a few good pictures which makes it worth the while. I must say the lens work remarkably well with mallards for some reason. Here are some of the pics taken with the lens :

I have mostly given up on the lens now, as my attention has now been diverted to a much better way of getting awesome bird photos- the art of Digiscoping. More on that in another post.