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Topic: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park (Read 1128 times) |
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Neil
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Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« on: Oct 6th, 2005, 8:11pm » |
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It's good to see kingfishers wherever you go these days. This one is back in Hong Kong Park on a daily basis.Neil.
6th,October,2005
Hong Kong Park,
Hong Kong,China,
Olympus 7070wz plus Swarovski ATS80HD scope and 20-60x eyepiece
http://www.pbase.com/neilfif11/image/50347204.jpg
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| « Last Edit: Nov 16th, 2005, 4:27pm by BBS Moderators » |
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KK Hui
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #1 on: Oct 6th, 2005, 8:38pm » |
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A wonderful shot, Neil!
With lovely setting too. Perhaps just a little over exposed ...
KK Hui FRPS
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Anguslau
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #2 on: Oct 7th, 2005, 8:15am » |
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Excellent shot!!  Love the diffuse light, details and great settings. Beautiful!  You have proved that digiscoping can produce outstanding results too.
I have tried digiscoping using my Canon long lens and the Powershot S1 IS. Unfortunately I got very serious vignetting except for a very narrow band of the zoom range.  The effective focal length end up was not much different from using a DSLR.  I guess the S1 IS was not suitable for digiscoping. Do you have vignetting problems with your DC? What is the effective focal length of your current setup? 
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Neil
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #3 on: Oct 7th, 2005, 6:26pm » |
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The Canon Powershot series are not very suitable for digiscoping due to the lens design. The Canon A95 has been very successful.
I upgraded to the Olympus about 3 months ago and have been very happy with. Vignetting disappears at about 3/4 on the zoom (4x zoom) but I usually use it at full zoom (2.2x magnification in 35mm terms ). I usually set the scope zoom to 20x but the quality at 30x is good. So the range in 35mm terms is approx. 2000mm to 4000mm. I do have a lower magnification eyepiece of 12.5x as well for egrets/herons etc. Hope this helps,Neil.
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Andrew
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #4 on: Oct 7th, 2005, 8:08pm » |
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Neil, so how far were you from the kingfisher to take this shot? 4000mm must give a vast range!
Andrew
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Neil
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #5 on: Oct 7th, 2005, 8:37pm » |
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Andrew,
I followed him around the main pond photographing him from the Central side and he was on the other side. He ended up in the reeds on the right hand side and I was about 10 meters away. The magnification would have been equivalent to about 2400mm (20x on the eyepiece). This is a 25% crop on the right hand side. I did a closeup at 30x as well but I lost the feet . Neil.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 8th, 2005, 7:13am by Neil » |
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KK Hui
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #6 on: Oct 8th, 2005, 8:41am » |
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Interesting discussion on digiscoping, Neil!
Am I right to say the the 20x eyepiece would be the optimal in terms of photo resolution for digiscoping? Would you still recommend to go for a 20-60x zoom eyepiece then if my sole purpose is for taking pictures?  
Thanks!
KK Hui FRPS
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Andrew
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #7 on: Oct 8th, 2005, 9:30am » |
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It is interesting and digiscoping is coming on leaps and bounds. Compared with the gear we D-SLR folks lug around with us it must be a doddle. My concerns would be that it is probably less flexible - i.e. it is excellent for portraits but less straightforward to capture fast moving incidents or flight shots. Nevertheless with my advancing years (nearly 50 now  ) I am very tempted to have a go. I am about to switch from an aluminium to a graphite tripod and from a full wimberley head to a sidekick to try to reduce the weight I cart around. The range of 2000-4000mm is amazing and even with his TCs stacked I don't think KK gets to that sort of focal length. Incidentally KK, do you put an extension tube between the TCs when stacking as my 1.4 and 2x can't directly stack together and the extension tube loses you the ability to focus at infinity I believe. This is probably way OT now and should probably switch to another forum if anybody wants to pursue it. I find it fascinating.
Andrew
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KK Hui
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #8 on: Oct 8th, 2005, 9:52am » |
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on Oct 8th, 2005, 9:30am, Andrew wrote:| ... The range of 2000-4000mm is amazing and even with his TCs stacked I don't think KK gets to that sort of focal length. Incidentally KK, do you put an extension tube between the TCs when stacking as my 1.4 and 2x can't directly stack together and the extension tube loses you the ability to focus at infinity I believe. This is probably way OT now and should probably switch to another forum if anybody wants to pursue it. I find it fascinating. ... |
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Andrew,
The long reach is indeed very tempting and with the advant of P&S digital camera you do get good image quality. DigiScoping is however not for everybody especially for someone doing action shots like myself.
Equipment weight is a problem we all bird photographers using DSLR setup have to face especially when we get older and I start to feel that too ... 
On the stacked thing, with a Mk II EF 2x you don't need an extension ring for spacing. Just set up in the order of Super Telephoto EF Lens->EF2x II->EF1.4x (I or II)->EOS Camera. For precise focusing I'd go with manual and IS activated.
KK Hui FRPS
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Anguslau
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #9 on: Oct 8th, 2005, 11:55am » |
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Very interesting discussions!
Though I think this is a bit off topic, I want to share my perspective here hoping that this may be useful to some. Astronomy is my other main area of interest other than photography, so I always had that in mind when buying "big" glasses and aim at killing two birds with one stone. If I carry a long glass with me while travelling, I would like to be able to use it both as a camera lens and a telescope. So I custom made an adapter for my EF lenses to allow the use of a standard 1.25" eyepiece.
Now once I have this setup, an interesting extension is to use this "telescope" to do digiscoping. For example, using the DCL-4337 eyepiece (a 40mm eyepiece), my 300mm lens will turn into a 7.5x (300/40=7.5) scope. With stacked converters, it can become a 21x scope. This eyepiece has 43mm threads on its end. So most DCs can fit securely onto the eyepiece with an appropriate step-up/step-down ring. If I can zoom the DC to 200mm (35mm effective) for digiscoping, this will give me an effective focal length of 4200mm. Should be enough for frame-filling shots of shorebirds from the hides around the ponds in MPNR. With this outfit, I can take flight shots using the DSLR and still shots using the DC when the birds are too far away! If I have the 600/4 with me in stead of the 300/2.8 lens, I can even take head and shoulder portraits with effective focal lenghs up to 8000mm!
Unfortunately my Powershot S1 IS can only work at around 50mm without serious vignetting (as mentioned above). So can't really achieve the above with my current equipment. And I think I have already spent too much money playing around with these ideas.  But this should be feasible with an appropriate DC and may be of interest to some. Image quality is not too bad from my testings so far. And I can even use autofocus on my DC to achieve very accurate focusing!
BTW, Andrew, I think you probably have the older versions of the teleconverters which have problem stacking. The new version (II) can stack without an extension tube as mentioned by kk.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 8th, 2005, 12:01pm by Anguslau » |
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Andrew
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BTW, AndrewRe: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #10 on: Oct 8th, 2005, 2:06pm » |
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BTW, Andrew, I think you probably have the older versions of the teleconverters which have problem stacking. The new version (II) can stack without an extension tube as mentioned by kk.
I am sure this is correct. I have had my TCs for 8 years so maybe I need to upgrade. It seems photography is a never ending temptation to spend money. I have lost count of the number of tripod heads I have at home in the UK, mostly used a few times and then stored as the old one was better anyway
One thing I learned in Kenya using my newish 1DmkII was that using the kit day in day out for 10/11 days gives you a comfort with it that you don't get using it every other weekend for a few hours.
There is no substitute for time in the field and my end of trip shots were noticeably better than the first lot.
Good debate. Thanks
Andrew
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Bob Thompson
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #11 on: Oct 9th, 2005, 5:12am » |
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KK,
It looks as though you are considering "digiscoping" for the boardwalk hides, with all the mud silting up, the birds are just too far away for standard telelens
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KK Hui
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #12 on: Oct 9th, 2005, 8:16am » |
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on Oct 9th, 2005, 5:12am, Bob Thompson wrote:| ... It looks as though you are considering "digiscoping" for the boardwalk hides, with all the mud silting up, the birds are just too far away for standard telelens |
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Bob,
MPNR has become a 'love/hate' place for me shooting shorebirds and as you say the mud silting in recent years plus the change of feeding pattern doesn't help either. Shorebirds used to stay with the coming in tide up to the last minute of reaching the hides as I recall.
Shooting in a reserve such as MPNR means that one has to observe certain rules making it impossible to do low angle closeup bird photography. Having said that I still think that we're extremely lucky to have MPNR in a small and busy city like Hong Kong.
Yes, I do sometime dream of digitscoping wonders but giving up action/flight shots is just too hard for me to do. I end up staying put with my heavy super telephotos and DSLR up to now ...
KK Hui FRPS
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Neil
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #13 on: Oct 9th, 2005, 8:00pm » |
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I have several eyepieces which I have picked up over the years to use with various cameras (I've been through the CP990,CP4500 (3),Kyocera SL400R and now the Olympus 7070wz). From a 12x Scopetronix Maxview S to a Swarovski 77x. The best eyepiece I have is the Swarovski 30 x but I currently don't have an adapter to use it with the Olympus. The Televue 25mm Plossl is very similar quality to the Swarvski. With digicams getting up to 3 frames/sec ,with RAW and 7-9 megapixels the quality is getting much better on static or slow moving subjects (like waders).
I have tested the 30x eyepiece in the Nikon 300/f4 ED lens and the quality is good. With an optical viewfinder like the Olympus, you can sight straight down the scope and with a wader moving horizontally across the frame you can fire the camera like an SLR , letting the camera do the AF. Obviously this is no good for flight shots. I'm going to be upgrading my D100 soon to get the flight shots I'm missing now but I won't give up the digiscoping as it's necessary at Mai Po.Neil.
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Bob Thompson
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Re: Common Kingfisher in Hong Kong Park
« Reply #14 on: Oct 9th, 2005, 8:15pm » |
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Could the webmaster move this thread to a new subject titled Digiscope as it contains a lot of valuable information for those starting out in digiscope.
Neil, thanks for all you valuable insight and tips
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