Digiscoping is a photography technique where you use a specialist adapter to attach a scope – typically a spotting scope or binoculars – to your camera, in place of a more conventional super-telephoto lens. The advantage of this is that you can achieve longer focal lengths than even the longest of lenses, and it’s oftentimes more cost-effective, too.
However, digicoping isn’t particularly common, and I don’t mind admitting that I’ve never tried it for myself. That’s why I found this video (below) by South West Optics so interesting. In it, Russell and Rob talk digiscoping and, more specifically, why many photographers choose to digiscope with Micro Four Thirds cameras.
Being the complete novice in this niche area of photography that I am, I would have assumed that you’d mount the camera directly to the spotting scope (which you can do). So I was surprised to learn that Rob recommends an alternative method, attaching a pancake lens first and using an adapter to attach the digiscope to this camera and lens combination.
This makes a lot of sense. You see, an MFT camera has a 2x crop factor; add that to a 2,000mm+ spotting scope and you’re working with focal lengths so big, they even put the Nikon P1100 to shame. As Rob put it: “That’s a lot of telephoto power to control, it’s a small sensor (...) the control of noise is not quite as good as a full-frame camera. It’s a challenge to use body-only”.
Some digiscopers get around this by popping a pancake lens on the camera and attaching this combination to the digiscope to reduce the focal length. The example Rob uses is a digiscope with a 25x eyepiece on a 20mm prime. Taking into consideration the 2x crop factor, this would be 25 x 50mm, producing an equivalent focal length of 1000mm.
And he makes the great point that the presence of the lens will help to reduce chromatic aberration, while also allowing for faster shutter speeds and thus, lower ISO settings. But that just scratches the surface of this informative video, so make sure you grab yourself a coffee and enjoy learning about this cost-effective form of long-range photography.
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If you're not into digiscoping, I’d buy this monster $1000 camera if I were a wildlife enthusiast first and a photographer second. Looking for something else to watch? Check out the first episode of Adorama’s new docuseries. Plus, if a bear tipped my $3,000 camera into a lake, I know exactly what I’d buy to replace it…
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