Digiscoping Doon the Ferry

Most of December and January has been blighted by wind and rain. So the other day when the weather improved and the forecast was merely 'showery' I took advantage of the time between showers to do some digiscoping.
What is digiscoping I hear you ask?..................and is it legal?
Basically if you are a keen bird watcher you will have a telescope and you may also have a basic digital camera. Digiscoping brings these two elements together: by clamping your camera to the correct end of the telescope you will have (in theory) the equivalent of a long zoom lens camera.
What you have in reality is a contraption that looks like this:

Digiscoping set-up

It looks a bit cumbersome, but does it work?
To put it to the test I took a little trip down to the shore-line at South Queensferry to try and photograph some waders. When asked I often advise those starting up on the bird watching trail to get themselves down to an estuary just when the tide is going out and they will see plenty of waders.
I of course arrived when the tide was coming in and the majority of the waders had departed for higher and drier ground.
Even though the waders were a bit thin on the ground (more on the rocks to be honest) the view was still spectacular:


Doon the Ferry

This was taken before I strapped the camera to the telescope.
Once I had the contraption all set up and I finally located a few waders (and other birds) I started snapping away. I must admit it was quite difficult to adjust the focus on the telescope looking through the camera and there was a great deal of camera 'shake' to contend with as well.
That's my excuse for the quality of the photographs I did take........judge for yourselves:

Oystercatcher

Carrion Crow

Curlew

These birds were over 100 yards away from where I was standing so the zoom element definitely worked but the 'shake' did impact on the quality.
What I did find out though is that I got on much better doing some videoscoping!
By using the video recording function on the small digital camera I managed to get these images:

 

 

Not quite BBC HD Wildlife Filming standard but I thought they were not bad considering my filming equipment was a bit more basic. Certainly worth trying a bit more of this in the future.
Buoyed by this minor success I thought I would move upstream of the Forth Bridges and see if I could find some more subjects to digiscope. Anyway it was coming on rain now.
I moved round to Society Point had a cup of coffee from my flask and waited for the rain to go off.
Once the rain had passed I snapped a couple of photographs of the Forth Bridges:

Rain passing over Forth Bridges

Forth Bridges after rain

So with the rain almost gone I thought I could get some more digiscoping done. However the weather had other ideas and a slight wind had got up, enough to stop me getting any decent photos of any birds, which were quite far away.
There were redshank, oystercatchers, curlew and black-headed gulls there but you will have to just take my word for it. All I managed to snap with the digiscope set-up was a blurred image of one of the cranes being used to build the third Forth Bridge:

 

Fuzzy Yellow Crane

You can just see this crane in the foreground of the previous photos of the Bridges, so that shows you how powerful a zoom the telescope can provide........pity about the quality.
Anyway it was time to leave and would you believe it the sun actually made an appearance.
I'll leave you with a couple of photos taken from Society Point:

Beach from Society Point
 

Sunshine over Fife

So if you every decide to take up digiscoping don't ask me for any tips.

Cheers

Teddyedward