Way OT: A misty evening in the arctic outback

Hi All. 

A couple of days ago I was out by a beach, 100 km north of the arctic 
circle, trying to get some pictures of the Lapwings (Lat.: Vanellus 
vanellus) which are quite abundant around here. I used a mounted 
spotting telescope with 30x magnification, and used a common digital 
compact camera to photograph through the telescope. I took up position 
on a parking lot just by the beach, at ebb tide. There were some 
shrubbery, some 1 m tall, between me and the beach itself, so I came 
quite close without the birds taking much notice of me. Weather conditions
were perfect, it was cool, no wind, a very slight drizzle of rain from 
a misty cloud cover at some 500 m.

The photographing went well, but suddenly all the birds flew away, 
lapwings, gulls, eiders and all. When I looked up, a huge white-tailed 
eagle (Lat.: Haliaetus albicilla) came gliding in from the fjord, being
harassed by one or two gulls. The eagle was a bit annoyed by the gulls, 
but after circling the beach a couple of times, the eagle decended on 
the beach and sat down just in front of me, some 50-100 m away. We are 
talking about a bird with a wingspan of some 2.2 - 2.5 m, weighing in 
at some 5 kg. And this guy sat shmack bang in my line of sight at 30x
magnification. He basically filled the field of view of my telescope.
Needless to say, I jumped at this chance to take photos of this huge, 
magnificent (although slightly shappy looking, due to the wet weather) 
creature. He sat there for a full 10 minutes, neglecting me and just 
nibbling away on some carcas he found on the beach. He eventually got 
tired of the ever harrassing gulls, and took off, flying into the hills 
across the fjord. 

During these 10 minutes I had taken images until the memory card of my 
camera was filled up, some 50 images of the eagle alone. The rest of the 
time I just watched the bird through the telescope, enjoying a very rare 
moment. These eagles are not all that rare around here (I'm situated in 
the middle of their core habitation area) but I've never viewed them for 
such a long time at such short distance.

After the bird had left, I could do nothing but go home and check the 
images on my laptop. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that of the 50 
images I had taken, 40 were severely underexposed! Plain black! I did
do my best with Adobe Photoshop, and I got some images brightened up 
just enough that one can see that there is an eagle there, but it doesn't 
come even remotely close to the real thing...

So, after a couple of days of severe disillusion, I have decided to 
try and get a better digital camera. My compact camera is of the 
simplest point'n shoot type, with no exposure control whatsoever. 
Who said that good tools are half the work? In this case it would have 
been 99.9% of the results... 

Rune

Rune,
I'd recommend a camera with a little LCD screen on it. That way you can see
what you're getting! You also get to throw away the photos where the
auto-focus hasn't worked. I've got a Sony camera, works great. I got some
fantastic pictures of a couple of Humpback whales out in Monterey bay last
year. The secret for 'animal action' shots is to turn the auto-focus off,
(set it to a fixed focus, normally infinity) so the camera doesn't waste 2-3
seconds between you pressing the button and the picture being taken.
Better luck next time mate!
Cheers, Syms.

"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message
news:f56893ae.0407220835.17308a44@posting.google.com...
> Hi All.
>
> After the bird had left, I could do nothing but go home and check the
> images on my laptop. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that of the 50
> images I had taken, 40 were severely underexposed! Plain black! I did
> do my best with Adobe Photoshop, and I got some images brightened up
> just enough that one can see that there is an eagle there, but it doesn't
> come even remotely close to the real thing...
>
> So, after a couple of days of severe disillusion, I have decided to
> try and get a better digital camera. My compact camera is of the
> simplest point'n shoot type, with no exposure control whatsoever.
> Who said that good tools are half the work? In this case it would have
> been 99.9% of the results...
>
> Rune

"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message
news:f56893ae.0407220835.17308a44@posting.google.com...
> Hi All.
>
> After the bird had left, I could do nothing but go home and check the
> images on my laptop. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that of the 50
> images I had taken, 40 were severely underexposed! Plain black! I did
> do my best with Adobe Photoshop, and I got some images brightened up
> just enough that one can see that there is an eagle there, but it doesn't
> come even remotely close to the real thing...

Does your camera have an LCD screen?  Usually a quick glance at that to make
sure the image exposure is approximately right will suffice to prevent this kind
of gross error.

> So, after a couple of days of severe disillusion, I have decided to
> try and get a better digital camera. My compact camera is of the
> simplest point'n shoot type, with no exposure control whatsoever.
> Who said that good tools are half the work? In this case it would have
> been 99.9% of the results...

I wonder what caused the auto-exposure to fail so miserably?  Perhaps shooting
through the scope was part of the problem.  Was the flash going off?  If so,
then the camera was counting on that to brighten the image, and of course it
would do no good at the distance you were at.

"Rune Allnor" <allnor@tele.ntnu.no> wrote in message
news:f56893ae.0407220835.17308a44@posting.google.com...
> Hi All.
>
> A couple of days ago I was out by a beach, 100 km north of the arctic
> circle, trying to get some pictures of the Lapwings (Lat.: Vanellus
> vanellus) which are quite abundant around here. I used a mounted
> spotting telescope with 30x magnification, and used a common digital
> compact camera to photograph through the telescope. I took up position
> on a parking lot just by the beach, at ebb tide. There were some
> shrubbery, some 1 m tall, between me and the beach itself, so I came
> quite close without the birds taking much notice of me. Weather conditions
> were perfect, it was cool, no wind, a very slight drizzle of rain from
> a misty cloud cover at some 500 m.
>
> The photographing went well, but suddenly all the birds flew away,
> lapwings, gulls, eiders and all. When I looked up, a huge white-tailed
> eagle (Lat.: Haliaetus albicilla) came gliding in from the fjord, being
> harassed by one or two gulls. The eagle was a bit annoyed by the gulls,
> but after circling the beach a couple of times, the eagle decended on
> the beach and sat down just in front of me, some 50-100 m away. We are
> talking about a bird with a wingspan of some 2.2 - 2.5 m, weighing in
> at some 5 kg. And this guy sat shmack bang in my line of sight at 30x
> magnification. He basically filled the field of view of my telescope.
> Needless to say, I jumped at this chance to take photos of this huge,
> magnificent (although slightly shappy looking, due to the wet weather)
> creature. He sat there for a full 10 minutes, neglecting me and just
> nibbling away on some carcas he found on the beach. He eventually got
> tired of the ever harrassing gulls, and took off, flying into the hills
> across the fjord.
>
> During these 10 minutes I had taken images until the memory card of my
> camera was filled up, some 50 images of the eagle alone. The rest of the
> time I just watched the bird through the telescope, enjoying a very rare
> moment. These eagles are not all that rare around here (I'm situated in
> the middle of their core habitation area) but I've never viewed them for
> such a long time at such short distance.
>
> After the bird had left, I could do nothing but go home and check the
> images on my laptop. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that of the 50
> images I had taken, 40 were severely underexposed! Plain black! I did

Hi Rune

I'm glad that you took the time outside of your 50 image effort to just
observe the bird through your scope. Wouldn't you agree that the experience
of seeing the bird so close 'live' is infinitely better than the experience
of squeezing that shutter?...sure it's nice to show others what you saw but
just being there in the midst of it all, in my opinion, is the most
satisfying. I need to remind myself of this everytime I head out with my
camera and come back with very average photographs. I also tell myself to
put the camera down for a few minutes and enjoy nature when it's obvious
that my pictures aren't going to be stellar (say the light is really bad).

Cheers
Bhaskar


> do my best with Adobe Photoshop, and I got some images brightened up
> just enough that one can see that there is an eagle there, but it doesn't
> come even remotely close to the real thing...
>
> So, after a couple of days of severe disillusion, I have decided to
> try and get a better digital camera. My compact camera is of the
> simplest point'n shoot type, with no exposure control whatsoever.
> Who said that good tools are half the work? In this case it would have
> been 99.9% of the results...
>
> Rune

Rune Allnor wrote:
> Hi All. 
> 
> A couple of days ago I was out by a beach, 100 km north of the arctic 
> circle, trying to get some pictures of the Lapwings (Lat.: Vanellus 
> vanellus) which are quite abundant around here. I used a mounted 
> spotting telescope with 30x magnification, and used a common digital 
> compact camera to photograph through the telescope. I took up position 
> on a parking lot just by the beach, at ebb tide. There were some 
> shrubbery, some 1 m tall, between me and the beach itself, so I came 
> quite close without the birds taking much notice of me. Weather conditions
> were perfect, it was cool, no wind, a very slight drizzle of rain from 
> a misty cloud cover at some 500 m.
> 
> The photographing went well, but suddenly all the birds flew away, 
> lapwings, gulls, eiders and all. When I looked up, a huge white-tailed 
> eagle (Lat.: Haliaetus albicilla) came gliding in from the fjord, being
> harassed by one or two gulls. The eagle was a bit annoyed by the gulls, 
> but after circling the beach a couple of times, the eagle decended on 
> the beach and sat down just in front of me, some 50-100 m away. We are 
> talking about a bird with a wingspan of some 2.2 - 2.5 m, weighing in 
> at some 5 kg. And this guy sat shmack bang in my line of sight at 30x
> magnification. He basically filled the field of view of my telescope.
> Needless to say, I jumped at this chance to take photos of this huge, 
> magnificent (although slightly shappy looking, due to the wet weather) 
> creature. He sat there for a full 10 minutes, neglecting me and just 
> nibbling away on some carcas he found on the beach. He eventually got 
> tired of the ever harrassing gulls, and took off, flying into the hills 
> across the fjord. 
> 
> During these 10 minutes I had taken images until the memory card of my 
> camera was filled up, some 50 images of the eagle alone. The rest of the 
> time I just watched the bird through the telescope, enjoying a very rare 
> moment. These eagles are not all that rare around here (I'm situated in 
> the middle of their core habitation area) but I've never viewed them for 
> such a long time at such short distance.
> 
> After the bird had left, I could do nothing but go home and check the 
> images on my laptop. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that of the 50 
> images I had taken, 40 were severely underexposed! Plain black! I did
> do my best with Adobe Photoshop, and I got some images brightened up 
> just enough that one can see that there is an eagle there, but it doesn't 
> come even remotely close to the real thing...
> 
> So, after a couple of days of severe disillusion, I have decided to 
> try and get a better digital camera. My compact camera is of the 
> simplest point'n shoot type, with no exposure control whatsoever. 
> Who said that good tools are half the work? In this case it would have 
> been 99.9% of the results... 

I just purchased a Nikon D70 2 weeks ago.  It's expensive but given that 
   I got my last camera, a Nikon FM in 1980, I could justify it to 
myself by the likelihood that my next purchase will be around 2020 ;)



> 
> Rune

Rune Allnor wrote:
> Hi All. 

First of all, my sympathy for all the pictures you didn't get. I must
congratulate you for the few that you did.

Photographing through a telescope is very tricky. The camera's diaphragm
is its entrance pupil. The little circle of light that you see behind
the telescope's eyepiece is its exit pupil. If it is larger than the
camera's entrance pupil, light will be lost. The pupils must be
perfectly aligned if they are the same size. The easy situation is the
unrealistic one of the exit pupil being enough larger than the diaphragm
to allow sloppy alignment. (The auto exposure works then, too. When the
effective aperture is fixed by the telescope, adjusting the camera's
diaphragm is a no-op.)

I don't know the diameter of your telescope's objective lens (its
entrance pupil), but 70 to 90 mm seems likely. To have an easy number,
I'll assume 70. A telescope's exit pupil has a diameter that is its
entrance pupil divided by the magnification. 70 mm/35 is two mm, which
is passed comfortably by the eye. Assuming that your camera lens has a
focal length of 12 mm (I have no way to really know) a 2 mm entrance
pupil amounts to a relative aperture of f/6. If your camera tried to
open up to f/3, tough.

I have a color NTSC camera (and a B/W RS-170) with screw-in lenses that
I can use without lens in focal planes of my telescope and microscope.
My 35-mm camera can be used the same way. You can be sure that if I had
a digital camera with interchangeable lenses, my telescope would become
one of those lenses. (I can use it in two modes: 1250 and 788 mm focal
lengths.) If you plan to take many such pictures, or if you must be sure
of the ones you do take, I suggest a similar setup for you. (I machined
some of my connectors. I would be pleased to do that for you.)

Jerry
-- 
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
�����������������������������������������������������������������������

Bhaskar,
You hit the nail bang on the head. The brain and its memory is the best
photo album of all!
Cheers, Syms.

"Bhaskar Thiagarajan" <bhaskart@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:2maavfFl5ifbU1@uni-berlin.de...
>
> Hi Rune
>
> I'm glad that you took the time outside of your 50 image effort to just
> observe the bird through your scope. Wouldn't you agree that the
experience
> of seeing the bird so close 'live' is infinitely better than the
experience
> of squeezing that shutter?...sure it's nice to show others what you saw
but
> just being there in the midst of it all, in my opinion, is the most
> satisfying. I need to remind myself of this everytime I head out with my
> camera and come back with very average photographs. I also tell myself to
> put the camera down for a few minutes and enjoy nature when it's obvious
> that my pictures aren't going to be stellar (say the light is really bad).
>
> Cheers
> Bhaskar

allnor@tele.ntnu.no (Rune Allnor) wrote:

>Hi All. 
>
>The photographing went well, but suddenly all the birds flew away, 
>lapwings, gulls, eiders and all. When I looked up, a huge white-tailed 
>eagle (Lat.: Haliaetus albicilla) came gliding in from the fjord, being
>harassed by one or two gulls. The eagle was a bit annoyed by the gulls, 
>but after circling the beach a couple of times, the eagle decended on 
>the beach and sat down just in front of me, some 50-100 m away. We are 
>talking about a bird with a wingspan of some 2.2 - 2.5 m, weighing in 
>at some 5 kg. And this guy sat shmack bang in my line of sight at 30x

We have a few eagles in the northern part of my state.  Definetly
beautiful birds.  I recall driving the back roads once, and came
around the corner and one was on the road, eating scraps of road kill.
I never really had an idea of how big they were, until seeing it
sitting on the road like that, at close range.  

Robert

www.gldsp.com

( modify address for return email )

www.numbersusa.com
www.americanpatrol.com

Jerry Avins <jya@ieee.org> wrote in message news:<4100290f$0$5644$61fed72c@news.rcn.com>...
> Rune Allnor wrote:
> > Hi All. 
> 
> First of all, my sympathy for all the pictures you didn't get. I must
> congratulate you for the few that you did.
> 
> Photographing through a telescope is very tricky. The camera's diaphragm
> is its entrance pupil. The little circle of light that you see behind
> the telescope's eyepiece is its exit pupil. If it is larger than the
> camera's entrance pupil, light will be lost. The pupils must be
> perfectly aligned if they are the same size. The easy situation is the
> unrealistic one of the exit pupil being enough larger than the diaphragm
> to allow sloppy alignment. (The auto exposure works then, too. When the
> effective aperture is fixed by the telescope, adjusting the camera's
> diaphragm is a no-op.)

When I looked at my images in the whole folder with Photoshop, it is 
quite clear that those images that went black, were those where I had 
zoomed in with the camera. I am quite certain the reason why things went 
bad is exactly what you suggest here, that with the zoom there was not 
enough light getting through to the CCD. 

> I don't know the diameter of your telescope's objective lens (its
> entrance pupil), but 70 to 90 mm seems likely. To have an easy number,
> I'll assume 70. A telescope's exit pupil has a diameter that is its
> entrance pupil divided by the magnification. 70 mm/35 is two mm, which
> is passed comfortably by the eye. Assuming that your camera lens has a
> focal length of 12 mm (I have no way to really know) a 2 mm entrance
> pupil amounts to a relative aperture of f/6. If your camera tried to
> open up to f/3, tough.

This was a 80 mm objective aperture. I don't know much about the camera, 
I wanted something quick'n easy, not too expensive, since I tend to be 
be using this set-up in rain and fog.

> I have a color NTSC camera (and a B/W RS-170) with screw-in lenses that
> I can use without lens in focal planes of my telescope and microscope.
> My 35-mm camera can be used the same way. You can be sure that if I had
> a digital camera with interchangeable lenses, my telescope would become
> one of those lenses. (I can use it in two modes: 1250 and 788 mm focal
> lengths.) If you plan to take many such pictures, or if you must be sure
> of the ones you do take, I suggest a similar setup for you. (I machined
> some of my connectors. 

This is, in fact, the crux of the matter. There just aren't many digital 
cameras around with lens threads or interchangable lenses. Stan mentioned
the D70, but that's a huge, heavy camera. Over here, it sells for 
NOK 13.000, the equivalent of $2000. The ideal camera for me would be 
one with filter threads, no external moving parts when zooming, an 
electronic viewfinder and a remote operation mode. The Nikon 4500 checks 
out on all but the electronic viewfinder. As for compact digital cameras, 
there aren't many that have filter threads. I know there are adapters 
available, that is fitted to the eyepiece and where the camera is 
fixed by filter its threads.

As for alignment, yes, it's cruical. The machine shop is next-door to 
my office at the university, and one of the guys there was so kind to 
machine me a nylon alignment plug. It was a disc where he turned out 
a "cup" that fits over the eyepiece, and where he drilled out a co-axial 
hole where the lens of the camera fits in. I still have to hold the 
camera by hand when shooting, and the main problem right now is to 
hold the camera still when I press the button. For documentation 
purposes, the images get good enough. 

> I would be pleased to do that for you.)

Thank you very much for the offer. As of right now, I can manage with 
the kit I have. I hope I can get hold on a Nikon 4500 in the not too 
distant future, and if so, there are adapters available to fix the camera 
on the eyepiece.
 
> Jerry

Rune

"Symon" <symon_brewer@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<2ma97gFkom2dU1@uni-berlin.de>...
> Rune,
> I'd recommend a camera with a little LCD screen on it. That way you can see
> what you're getting! You also get to throw away the photos where the
> auto-focus hasn't worked. I've got a Sony camera, works great. 

I know, my camera has one of those. The problem is that the LCD is nowhere 
near clear enough to evaluate how the image is going to be. The ideal 
camera would have some sort of high-quality electronic viewfinder.
Another part of the problem is that I mount my tripod very high. When I 
stand beside the mounted telescope, the eyepiece is at the height of my 
cheek bone, just below my eyes. The eyepiece is angled at 45 degrees, 
so when using the camera, the LCD is above the height of my eyes and 
tilted 45 degrees. It's not easy to see exactly what's going on. 

> I got some
> fantastic pictures of a couple of Humpback whales out in Monterey bay last
> year. The secret for 'animal action' shots is to turn the auto-focus off,
> (set it to a fixed focus, normally infinity) so the camera doesn't waste 2-3
> seconds between you pressing the button and the picture being taken.

Tnaks for the tip. I'll check if I can do that with this camera.

> Better luck next time mate!
> Cheers, Syms.

Rune