With its distinctive split-body swivel design and small lens, Nikon’s Coolpix 4500 compact camera became an unplanned successs in the emerging market for digiscoping equipment soon after the Millennium.
90 : Nikon Coolpix 4500
2002
With its distinctive split-body swivel design and small lens, Nikon’s Coolpix 4500 compact camera became an unplanned successs in the emerging market for digiscoping equipment soon after the Millennium.
Combining a digital compact camera with a telescope to take images of birds, or more concisely ‘digiscoping’, began to take off at the turn of the millennium, after the late Laurence Poh developed the technique and took to posting the results on his blog. The method in essence uses the telescope as a surrogate zoom or telephoto lens for the camera, resulting in far greater magnification than the largest prime telephoto lenses.
Using a camera with an optic had been around long before this, though more obscurely. In 1962, for example, Swarovksi Optik launched the 8x30 and 10x30 Habicht Monoculars, using a half porro-prism device which screwed onto the lens of many typical pocket cameras of the time. The same company’s AT80 HD telescope, released in 1991, came with an adapter that could be fitted in place of the eyepiece to allow the attachment of a film camera, producing an equivalent focal length of about 1100mm, though with a slow aperture.
But it was the consumer availability of digital compact cameras that helped popularise the technique, which was long known by astronomers with their fixed telescopes and long exposures. Most birders already had spotting scopes, so the addition of nothing more than an inexpensive compact camera and a cheap adapter to achieve telephoto photography made perfect sense – and in this respect, digiscoping was birder-led practice rather than manufacturer-designed technology.
Of the wave of new compact cameras that followed the advent of digital photography, one stood out above the rest. The Nikon Coolpix 4500 was introduced in May 2002, and for some time after was the digiscoper’s camera of choice. A swivel-lens model, it featured a then sizeable 4 MP sensor, had a 4x optical zoom lens and many manual controls; the 1.5 inch rear LCD now appears tiny by today’s standards. Crucially, though, the Coolpix 4500 could be easily fitted to the eyepiece of a telescope by utilising the camera’s lens thread to attach a purpose-machined adapter. Not infrequently, imaginative birders intent on their own solutions instead contrived ingenious home-made couplings from washers, bottle tops, rubber bands, melamine chopping boards and pieces of scrap wood and metal.
It was actually the 4500’s predecessors that first caught Laurence Poh’s eye. In February 1999 he started taking photos with the Nikon Coolpix 950 and 990 and a Leica APO-Televid 77mm spotting scope, and quickly began blogging his results using a free Angelfire website. Tracking the development of his technique on his website until his death in September 2004 is effectively to keep abreast of all relevant developments. The attempt to obtain sharper images led to the use of a cable release in conjunction with a custom-manufactured brass mount, with the scope on a base plate to avoid the whole assembly tipping off-balance. Most universal adapters have simply refined these self-built solutions.
Poh found the Coolpix 4500 to be incompatible with his set-up, but the model became popular due to its small lens which minimised vignetting (that is, the blurring or darkening of the edges of an image, a frequent artefact of shooting though a telescope), the split-body swivel design enabling the screen to be viewed from different angles, improved resolution and affordability.
Digiscoping has since increased in popularity worldwide, and as well as third-party adapters most major optics manufacturers have produced adapters for their own equipment. These range from the expensively engineered Swarovski DCB II swing design to Kowa’s simple but remarkably effective plastic iPhone adapter.
Some birders have moved on to DSLR photography (see pages 168–169) and others have embraced the improving format of digital bridge cameras, but it seems likely that digiscoping, with its simple yet effective combination of telescope and compact camera, will have a place for some time to come.