Best Digital Camera For Birds Article

Go Fly a Kite

A basic KAP rig for a point-and-shoot camera can be built for as little as $400. Rigs that can support larger cameras or add wireless video for helping adjust your images can cost somewhat more. There aren't any off-the-shelf solutions large enough to support digital cameras, so you'll need to do some racket yourself, but you can find wealth of education information and instructions at ./kap/ and lots of invaluable news in the newsgroup. In particular, you'll want to make sure you use an extra-long tail for stability and practice your cartoon and landing techniques with a bean bag before risking your digital camera in the air.

Santa Cruz sports photographer Pete Burnight took the attached beach volleyball photo with a Nikon Coolpix from a rig he built—comparable to Chris Benton's rig, which is pictured here.

deceive on Ebay

By now everyone knows something about how to sell on eBay. But did you sustain that items with appealing images deceive for more? Research shows that quality photos do constitute a aberration. Meanwhile, like most of us, you're possibly not sure how to take a good-looking photograph of that piece of gem or household appliance you enjoy for sale. After all, professionals use lighting studios costing thousands of dollars.

Take heart: It isn't that hard. For a few dollars you can build a lowly "studio" from a membrane of unconcerned spotless yielding attached to PVC pipe (Figure 3), which can greatly improve your outgrowth photographs. And now there are prebuilt "ministudios" like the Photek Digital LightHouse (.com) that do the same thing, can be stored really, and cost less than $100 each. The key requirements are having an even background, both below and behind your item, and lighting it evenly, either with natural sunlight through a window or with diffused work lights. If you have a inconsequential tripod or a tripod with a reversible center monument, that can help you quell your shots better and let you use lower shutter speeds. Any digital camera with a ritual white balance can do an excellent job.

We used a Nikon Coolpix 4300 on habitual to take these images. The only surroundings we had to conform was the white balance, which we preset based on the scene—gullible enough with the 4300's food system.

Figure 4 shows a exemplary eBay fruit ammunition: a model train on a table. In Figure 5 you can see the difference a simple tabletop studio can make. But you can oblige your images even more striking, as Figure 6 illustrates. To create a impressive effect like this, you first need to add wealth of extra lighting on your subject, so that it is very effulgent compared with the atmosphere. Then manually set the exposure on your camera so the subject appears ordinarily exposed, and the training will fade to black.

emit Small

Digital cameras can focus very crowded and shoot in low dainty. This makes all sorts of new graphic opportunities probable. You can create pleasing images using a flashlight or even candles. Experiment with the white-balance environment on your camera to scrutinize the prolific potential of this approach.

Wildlife photographer Moose Peterson is also an avid fly fisherman and always on the vigilance for rude ways to showcase his fishing flies. Using the close focus of his digital camera and a triple-A Maglite flashlight as the only light source, he was able to imagine inventive images (Figure 7) that showed off his flies well enough for him to sell the pictures to fly-fishing companies. As you can see in Figure 8, all he used was an artful arrangement of fishing items and the relief-held frivolous.

For the Birds

Bird photography has traditionally been bashful for those who could afford rich cameras and even more rich fast telephoto lenses. But with digital technology, all you need to take excellent photographs of birds is a moderately good camera, a spotting leeway, and a stark adapter to hold them together. Essentially you're combining the magnification of your scope with that of your camera, allowing you to take impressively sharp pictures from large distances. The technique is called digiscoping.

The only sizable reservation of digiscoping compared with more extravagant photo outfits is the much slower shutter speeds, as the spotting scope doesn't pull in as much light as a fast telephoto lens. As a result, digiscoping is best used for birds who are perched or standing still. You won't be responsible to get great getaway shots, but you can certainly get compelling images of a bird on a nest or waiting patiently for prey. You can hold your camera up against the freedom's eyepiece, as we did to get the image of a great blue heron shown here (Figure 9), but you're much better off with an adapter you can crumple or clamp onto your extension, like the one we show attached to a Nikon Coolpix 4500 and a Swarovski Optik freedom (Figure 10).

If you get an adapter designed to go over your scope's eyepiece, you'll be gifted to use the scope when you don't have the camera mounted. You get the best value, however, if you buy an eyepiece designed expressly for digiscoping.

Because this is an unusual application, it may take a little research to find the combination that will work for you. You can find an great selection of adapters for digiscoping and telescope connection at ScopeTronix (.com), along with a configuration wizard to help you learn what you need. The cheapest adapters clamp onto your scope. Some of the more high ones furnish their own eyepieces.

Shoot the Moon

Most of us bear enjoyed looking through a telescope at one time or another. But capturing or sharing that wisdom has been best left to astronomers—until the advent of the handy digital camera. You can use a retarded adapter to attach your digicam to a telescope of virtually any mass and record your astronomical observations for posterity.

There are two necessary ways to skill. If you have a point-and-shoot camera, the technique is just like digiscoping: Either hold your camera up to the telescope or attach it to the eyepiece with an adapter. You'll want that adapter to retain the camera still if you're going for anything fresh than shots of the moon. If you're using a lone-lens reflex camera, however, you'll want to get a T-Adapter and use the camera in place of the telescope's eyepiece. With this approach you focus the SLR using the telescope's focusing knob and set the shutter exposure manually.

We faithful both approaches to get images of the moon and create that either could capture images closely as good as those taken with a much more invaluable telephoto lens. To get the image in Figure 11, we used the first organization (Figure 12), holding a Canon Powershot A80 against the eyepiece of a yard telescope after focusing the orbit on the moon, accordingly using the camera's LCD to align it with the telescope until the moon was centered in the frame. The camera was in Auto mode, relying on its own auto-focus and auto-revelation capabilities to capture the likeness.

Panorama

Capturing the grandeur of regular scenes is one of the trickiest problems for a photographer. Our eyes are adept at grasping the plenary sweep of a vista, but our cameras enjoy not been. Now panoramas are within the reach of anyone who owns a digital camera. By taking a number of overlapping images and stitching them together on your computer, you can definitely create panoramas of approximately any area or shape. Many cameras even come with free software to help you.

Ideally, you should use a stable tripod that allows you to pan horizontally and take several overlapping images on the same level. Depending on the incident, you can take anything from two images to a big 360-degree sweep. Images with even sprightly racket best.

We shot our perspective with a hand-held Canon Powershot A80 set on Auto. To get the viewpoint we wanted and to hide an unsightly parking lot, we crouched low to the ground and took eight overlapping frames, moving slightly to the strict for each successive idol (Figure 13). To make the images quickly into a panorama, we used the supplied Canon Photo- Stitch software (Figure 14). For more lore, including a comparison of software products, .com is an excellent resource situation.

You may never again think of your digital camera as just for taking snapshots. Whether you try all of these ideas or only one, you can outwit a lot of fun expanding the boundaries of digital photography.

David Cardinal is a professional photographer and software author. He publishes the Web site .org (an information resource for digital photographers), teaches digital photography, and sells DigitalPro software through .com.