Dear Tomatofamily,
The sky was heavily overcast and the light was dull and flat.
The shutter speed was, indeed, very slow for all of the shots, the slowest being 1/4th of a second I think.
The aperture was about one stop bigger than the largest aperture of my camera. I set it so with a view to improving resolution and reducing chromatic aberration. I don't know whether the latter really happens. I take it for grant that it does.
In such a low shutter speed, the only way you can come out of it is to have good stabilization for your equipment. The ways most digiscopers do to achieve stabalization are:
1. to use a heavy and sturdy tripod (mine being a medium-sized classic Gitzo) and a low centre-of-gravity tripod head (mine being a Manfrotto 501) to carry their digiscoping setup;
2. to use a long plate to hold the digiscoping setup so that a good leverage point can be attained, thereby avoiding unnecessary tilting or dropping when manuvering your digiscoping setup on your tripod;
3 to fasten up your digiscoping setup with the long plate so that no part of the former will easily move on its own or during shutter release;
4 to release the camera shutter with a cable or to release it using the self-timer device of your camera if a cable relase is not available;
5 more importantly, to observe the behaviour of the bird you are taking photos for and to make anticipation of its action to enable you to decide when to release the shutter.
Experienced photographers say that sharpness is prime for a shot to be a good one. To obtain pin-point sharpness is difficult in digiscoping. I depend on the flexible focusing spot device in both my P5100 and CP8400 to ensure sharpness for the point I want to focus. My destined sharpness point of a bird is their eyes.
Hope the inforamtion helps.
Pete
[ Last edited by lwingkay at 24/01/2010 22:02 ]
