This follows yesterday’s post.
One of the problems about digiscoping is that the depth of field at the extreme magnifications it gives you tends to be very shallow and so, given that you use manual focusing on the scope for each picture (all camera automation in that regard is lost) it can be tricky to get really sharp images every time. I discovered that the Sony NEX-7 camera when used in manual mode has, hidden within its complicated menus, a feature called “focus peaking”, apparently the only camera on the market to do so, so a bit of serendipity there. Focus peaking, when switched on, puts a red (or yellow or white) line around features that are really in focus making the whole decision making part of the process a piece of cake.
All this experimenting and learning tricks is being done in the garden with a large mug of tea to hand so here are a couple of pictures of a common garden bird – my European readers will be impressed. male and female Northern Cardinals. For the technically minded these were taken with an equivalent camera lens of about 1200mm.
Northern Cardinal – male
Northern Cardinal – male
Northern Cardinal – female
Northern Cardinal – female