Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Tarapoto, pre-supper birds, Day 1




Canary-winged Parakeets

Blue Dacnis

Great Kiskadee

Spot-breasted Woodpecker
All digiscoped in the grounds of Puerto Palmeras, 14.9.07.

3 comments:

digdeep said...

hi Mike

I'm mightily impressed by your digiscoping pics using the Canon A640.

I'm wondering whether the A650 might be suitable for digiscoping, since it has IS. Some say that the lens diameter may be too large or the zoom too big (6x).

Can you offer any advice?

Thanks

Dave

Mike Weedon said...

I'm afraid I don't know much about the A650 apart from it is the 12MPixel successor to the 10Mpixel A640 and has IS (image stabilisation). Finding out if the diameter of the lens is too wide for your eyepiece should be straightforward. And to test whether it works for digiscoping, get hold of the camera, turn it on and hold it up freehand to your scope's eyepiece an see what you get.
Optical zoom does play a part in digiscoping efficiency. For instance, for the A640 I use two plastic rings for adapters, one for low mag and another for slightly higher (and vignetting takes over at the highest mags), whereas with the A95 I could just use one adapter for all mags (though the higher ones were blurry, anyhow...). So the 6x zoom may present the odd problem – try for yourself to test it, thoguh I wouldn't sweat it if the highest mags aren't much good for digiscoping...
I'm not sure of the value of IS in digiscoping, simply because I don't know what is being stabilised. If the IS works based on movement of the camera, then this is not necessarily going to help an extra magnified image...

Mike

digdeep said...

Thanks Mike