Stephen Ingraham (who?)
the unofficial site for birders and digiscopers using Zeiss equipment.
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The 1st Annual North American Digiscoping Conclave (maybe even International) at the 1st Coast Birding and Nature Festival.
So it happened. Clay Taylor from Swarovski, Jeff Bouton from Leica, Roy Halpin from Pentax, and me from Zeiss...along with Swarovski's special guest Neil Fifer (Hong Kong) and Zeiss' special guest Paul Hackett (UK) held 16 hours of digiscoping workshops, which included a Saturday field trip with us all to Washington Oaks.
Paul Hackett taught us to "chimp" after each field session. Chimping: a bunch of digiscopers standing (or sitting) around with flipping through the day's images on their LCDs, all saying, "look at this one!", "you gotta see this!" (and generally everyone is so busy looking at their own that they never do see each others). Anyway. If you didn't make it this year, check your calendar for next year and put in for vacation early. St. Augustine. 1st Coast Birding and Nature Festival. 2nd Annual North American Digiscoping Conclave! Rather than my usual sample digiscoped birds on this page, we have formed a flickr group at www.flickr.com/groups/1stcoastdigiscoping where we can all post our images. We were working the same birds often so you will have a number of similar shots to compare. It's an interesting study. (Note: The Groups feature on flickr takes some time to fully activate, so as of this moment, only Jeff Bouton's photos and mine appear in the group when viewed by the "public". Neil's photos are at www.flickr.com/photos/7892550@N03/ Paul and the others will post soon. There are also some of my photos and some of Paul Hackett's in the community section here www.zbirding.info/zbirders/photos/1st_coast_digiscoping/default.aspx Eventually they should all appear in the flickr group and I will remove this note!)
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This is my second year at the 1st Coast Birding and Nature Festival. It was so much fun last year, and the festival is so well done, that I suggested we attempt a national digiscoping conference (conclave) in conjunction with the festival this year. Where could be better? You have the St. Augustine Alligator Farm rookery, miles of beaches, the Guana River Estuary Research Center, parks and gardens like Washington Oaks, all within easy distance. You have a well polished festival structure run by folks who know what they are doing, and, more importantly, who care. You have a well established school of nature and wildlife photography staffed by some of the top photographers in post-processing experts in America. And it's Florida in April, high spring, and the herons and egrets are in breeding plumage!
The digiscoping participation was light this year (more leaders on the field trip than participants), but we have great hopes for the future, and it was just a blast having the St. Augustine Digiscoping Brain Trust (StADBT) together...like minds, like spirits...all having fun with a variety of cameras and scopes. The digiscoping conversation around the table at Outback and Applebees probably gave several camera company engineers (and maybe a few scope makers) a restless night. We were sending pretty strong vibes.
