Freehand Digiscoping Tutorial

American pipit photo with Kowa scope and iPhone 6

Birders have lots of reasons to want a photo of birds they see. First is it's fun, but also these days if you find a bird outside of its usual range, at an unusual time of year, or really anything out of the ordinary it is expected that a photo be provided to document the sighting. Rare birds committees give a photo, even a poor quality photo, much more weight than a written description and sketch when deciding whether to accept the sighting. If you don't carry a long lens camera, often using your smart phone and spotting scope is the best way to get the photo you desire.

Black phoebe. Uncommon in Western Washington so I took a quick digiscope photo for documentaion. Backlit but adequate to confirm the ID>

For a few years I've been working at improving my ability to get a photograph of usable quality using my iPhone and my spotting scope. I have a nice scope, a Kowa 85 mm and an ordinary iPhone 6. I've used my phone with several other scopes, and have used other phones and with minor differences the same principles apply. Here are a few steps to consider to make getting a good enough digiscope photo to document your rare bird sighting or to use to work on identification when it is hard to tell in the field and photo study is needed.

1. Try to get the spotting scope focus as perfect as is possible. A poor focus view will always give a photo of the poor focus view you have in the scope.
2. Most scopes/phone combinations have the eye relief of being set for non-glasses users. If your scope has an eye cup leave it out, as though you are looking without glasses on for optimal viewing. This will usually allow you to place the phone's camera lens right up to the eyepiece of the scope, allowing for a much steadier hold. If the eye cup is down, most cameras will need to be held about ¼ inch from the scope lens, making holding steady very difficult.
3. Once you position the phone camera so that you can see the bird you want to photograph, zoom on the phone camera enough so that the black outer rim goes away. Otherwise you'll have a black photo with a photo circle in the middle. The camera will adjust for light and focus much better after you get rid of the black 'frame."

1. Once you have the bird at the desired magnification on the phone tap the phone screen on the bird to tell your phone's camera what part of the picture is to be in focus. Ideally this will be in the center of the picture and the phone will detect the bird and focus automatically, but often I find focus is much better after I tap the bird to aim the focus.
2. Take several photos, and likely one or more will be OK. This is a jiggly hand-held camera process so some will be motion blurred or just poor photos, but with practice you'll find you get acceptable photos many times.

A very distant Snowy egret, this is the best of lots of tries and is good enough to document the uncommon Washington State sighting.

1. Practice when the photo is not important. It can take a while to develop the process and dexterity to go through this quickly, and the time to learn is not when your life Ross's gull is in the scope. Better to practice on a distant Mallard or Canada goose a few times first.

Sometimes when the light is good, the birds not too far away, a digiscope photo can be good enough enjoy looking at. This photo of Sandhill cranes in the near ground and Snow geese in the background in the Vancouver lowlands of Clark County, WA came out pretty good I think.

This said about hand held phones and digiscoping, many digiscopers use a phone attachment to hold their phone onto their scope. This is a great idea if it works for you, but I also use my phone to record eBird checklists, to look at my bird ID apps, to make phone calls and text, and these are all hard to do with the digiscope attachment in place, and I've found carrying the attachment and putting it on before taking a digiscope photo is just too tedious for me. I prefer to go it hand held.

Good birding and good digiscoping. Leave comments to add suggestions, or with your ideas for better success.