Leica APO Televid 77 Expanded Digiscoping Kit

B&H has a lineup of "Expanded Digiscoping Kits", which have all you'll need to begin the addictive hobby of digiscoping except for the digital camera.  The APO Televid 77 Expanded Digiscoping Kit includes the remarkably bright APO Televid 77 spotting scope with 45° angled viewing, an eyepiece that's fabulous for digiscoping, an adapter to facilitate placement of your digital point and shoot camera near the eyepiece and the Bogen 055MF3 carbon fiber tripod with 501 fluid head-an incredibly strong tripod that can easily direct the scope with pinpoint accuracy at even the highest of magnifications.  The APO Televid 77 Expanded Digiscoping Kit is an ultrapremium kit, at each facet of its creation, and is meant more for someone whom primarily observes and photographs birds from stationary positions as opposed to a serious hiker.

B&H is only offering 45° angled scopes in these packages for two key reasons-angled scopes allow you to simultaneously share the viewing experience upon the camera's screen as it happens, and they allow a much lighter, shorter and less expensive tripod to be used.  Because of the effective focal lengths easily achieved in digiscoping, often surpassing the pulling power of even the longest of telephoto lenses from SLR cameras, it is impractical to have your tripod's center column raised.

The APO Televid 77 Expanded Digiscoping Kit includes a great mounting bracket and tripod.  The large objective lens of the APO Televid 77 allows plenty of light to be drawn in to the scope, permitting photography in more conditions.  But even more importantly, the APO Televid 77 has glass elements which eliminate chromatic aberration.  While chromatic aberration (a blurred fringing of colors upon the edge of a subject) may not be too distracting visually, in digiscoping it matters much more.  This is because you can isolate such a small view of the scope by zooming the digital camera's lens, and when doing so you put a premium upon good optics.

It is simply impossible to describe in these paragraphs every digital camera that can be used with the APO Televid 77 Expanded Digiscoping Kit, because so many digital cameras exist.  The short answer is that many, many cameras work with the system.  The #6926 Universal Mounting Bracket has a supreme range of movements and will accommodate most any camera with excellent rigidity.

Digiscoping requires practice and good technique to achieve results, but in time those results can be remarkable!  You must take great care to not induce sharpness-robbing vibrations:  wherever possible use an electronic release or remote control to fire the shutter, and if your camera does not allow this then practice firing the shutter while causing the least possible vibrations.  If your camera offers a manual focus mode, choose the manual focus and set the focus to infinity.  If your camera offers a manual exposure mode, choose the maximum aperture of the lens (to facilitate the fastest possible shutter speed) and experiment with the shutter speed until exposures are good.  Increasing the ISO of the camera will also assist in increasing the shutter speed.