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the unofficial site for birders and digiscopers using Zeiss equipment.

Digiscoping with the Zeiss Diascopes and the Digital Camera Adaptor

Mounting the Scope

If your DCA is still folded, as it came out of the box, grasp the end of the top plate (you will see a tripod screw sticking up out of it) and swing it around to point forward.

If you are using an straight though scope, proceed to the next step. If you are using an angled scope, loose the chrome set screw on the side of the mount and adjust the hinge to it’s 45 degree angled position. (There are only two positions: straight and angled.) Tighten the set screw once in place.

If your tripod has a quick release plate, remove it, mount the DCA on the plate, and the plate back on the tripod, with the tripod screw of the DCA pointing forward. If your tripod has no quick release plate, just mount the DCA on the tripod as you would mount your scope.

Mount the scope on the forward end of the DCA using the tripod screw. Before you tighten it down, make sure the eyepiece is centered over the distance slider on the DCA. Eyeball close is close enough at this point.

Mounting the Camera

Remember the goal is to center the camera lens behind the eyepiece. Though this is going to sound complicated, and the first time it make take you 5 minutes or more, with practice you will be able to do it less than a minute, certainly much less time than it will take you to read and understand the instructions. And remember, you only have to do it when you mount the camera on the DCA and scope. I leave my camera mounted for days at a time when I am actively birding and only take it off the mount when I have to pack the scope for travel.

1) Loosen the set screw on the distance slider arm and slide the camera platform well back, so that your camera fits behind the eyepiece and over the camera platform. Tighten the distance slider enough to hold the camera platform in place.

2) Mount the camera on the camera platform with the tripod screw. Roughly line the camera lens up with the eyepiece, horizontally. Tighten the tripod screw only enough to hold the camera secure.

3) Loosen the set screw on the camera platform. Slide the platform up or down as needed to roughly align the camera lens and eyepiece, vertically. Tighten the set screw enough to hold.

4) At this point you can loosen everything: distance slider, camera platform, and tripod screw, and, with the camera off and the zoom lens retracted, roughly align the camera and eyepiece, by eye and by hand. With all the set screws loose, just hold the camera in one hand and manipulate the DCA with the other. Most cameras have a lip or collar around the lens that you can line up with the eyecup on the eyepiece. This is where the “by hand” comes in. “Feel” around the eyepiece with the fingers of your right hand to check that the camera lens collar is about centered. Once you have rough alignment, hold the camera in position with your left hand and tighten the camera platform and tripod screws enough to hold the camera in place. Then slide the distance slide and camera back, and lock it down loosely.

5) Turn on your camera and its LCD screen. Make sure the camera zoom is set at its widest angle, and the scope is pointed at a light colored wall, or the sky, or distant scenery (and the objective cap off).

Loosen the set screw on the DCA distance slider and slide the camera platform and camera in towards the eyepiece. Be cautious. You don’t want the glass of the camera lens to touch the glass of the eyepiece, but they will have to be fairly close together. Check the range of motion by looking in from the side as the distance slider moves. Once you have determined the range of motion, watch the LCD as you move the distance slider. You should see a circle of light within the LCD. The goal now is to 1) to center that circle of light, and then 2) to eliminate the circle by adjusting the distance slider so that the full LCD is illuminated.

Initially your circle may be nowhere near the center of the LCD. You have three different planes to align. Use the vertical motion of the camera platform, and the horizontal motion of the camera on the platform to get the circle centered. Also pay attention to keeping the lens of the camera parallel to the lenses in the eyepiece. The lenses need to be “square with each other”. It is very easy to get the camera on the camera platform “cockeyed”, so that the lens of the camera is looking into the eyepiece from one side or the other, not head on. If the scope is centered on the distance slider, the back of the camera platform makes a good reference. The camera should be approximately parallel with, or square to, the camera platform. It will take several tries, loosening and locking the camera platform set screw and the tripod screw, before you get the circle of light close to center.

6) Once you do, loosen the set screw on the distance slider and slide the camera in. You should see the circle of light expand, and there should be a point where the edges of the circle disappear and light fills the whole LCD. Moving the camera closer to the eyepiece once the LCD is fully illuminated will bring the circle back.

You are looking for the sweet spot: the point where the LCD is most evenly illuminated. With some cameras this may require that the lens of the camera and the eyepiece be almost in contact. With others, such as the Sony W and N series, the camera lens is a generous 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch back from the eyepiece.

With some cameras, when using the Zeiss Vario eyepiece, instead of the circle disappearing altogether, you may see the edge of the circle “harden” into a sharp round disk. If so, adjust distance so that the edge of the circle is as sharply defined as possible, and perfectly centered. To eliminate the dark circle, simply zoom the Vario up to about 30x (23x on the 65mm) and the image will fill the LCD.

As you are adjusting distance, you may discover that the circle of light moves around on the LCD. This means that your camera lens is still not centered on the eyepiece. Loosen the camera platform set screw for vertical adjustment, and the tripod screw for horizontal (remembering to keep the camera and eyepiece lenses parallel, or square with each other) and recenter.

With some cameras, it will not be possible to eliminate the circle of darkness (vignetting) no matter how close you get the camera lens to the eyepiece. Fact of life. Don’t give up. Zoom the camera up to half of its zoom range and try again. Most digital cameras will now give you either a fully illuminated LCD (or the sharp circle if using the Vario). Some cameras will have to be zoomed all the way to the telephoto end of the zoom range to eliminate the vignetting. You can use such a camera for digiscoping, but you will always be shooting at very high magnifications, which will make getting sharp images with no signs of camera motion very difficult.

With other cameras, mostly those with zoom ranges greater than 1-4x, you will not be able to eliminate the vignetting no matter what you do. With 8 mega pixel models it may still be possible to use such cameras, though every image will have to have the shadows cropped out in Photoshop before it is very satisfying. You may still end up with a 5 mp file…certainly adequate for most purposes. Your call. You can buy a digital camera that will work better and give you full frame 6 mp – 7 mp files for $200-$250.

7) At the end of this process you should have a fully illuminated LCD. Set the Quick Stop screw post against the end of the adaptor where the distance slider slides in and out. This will allow you to pull the camera back before swinging it to the side (to avoid hitting the lens on the eyecup of the eyepiece), and then, when you swing the camera back in for image capture, to reposition it quickly at the correct distance form the eyepiece. Focusing the scope should now bring whatever is in front of it into focus on the LCD and you are in business!

8) Almost. You still need to check to see how much of the zoom range of the camera you can use without moving the distance slider on the DCA. As you zoom most digital cameras you will see, if you look, that the length of the zoom…the amount it sticks out from the body…changes. We recommended shopping for a camera with a zoom that is at its longest at the wide-angle setting. The reason for that recommendation is that you can use the full range of such camera zooms without moving the distance slider on the DCA. Some zooms may be longer at their tele setting, but if there was enough room between the camera zoom and the eyepiece to accommodate that extra length, then you will still be able to use the full zoom range without moving the distance slider.

In a worse case situation, one where the camera zoom practically touches the eyepiece lens when at wide-angle, and gets longer as it zooms up toward tele, you will have to loosen the set screw on the distance slider and slide the camera back before you zoom the camera. Doing otherwise will jam the camera zoom into the eyepiece, which may result in damage to both, and will certainly result in the camera shutting down and having to be restarted. We lived with the Sony V1, which behaved this way, for more than a year, but it was certainly a relief to move on to the W series which gives you the full zoom range, without vignetting, and without readjusting the distance slider.

9) As a final note: while the camera platform of the DCA is well designed to fit the bottom plate of most digital cameras, it is impossible to account or bumps, ridges, and other protrusions the camera maker may decide to build into the bottom of the camera around the tripod screw socket. And, while the DCA camera platform is wide enough to support almost any digital, some of the narrowest digitals are not wide enough to cover the tripod screw slot fully, and tend to “fall forward” into the slot when tightened down. If this is the case, or some other protrusion on the bottom of the camera prevents the camera from sitting flat on the camera platform, you will be able to see that the camera lens, while it might appear centered by all other tests, including a fully illuminated LCD, is actually tilted in toward, or away from the eyepiece. Unfortunately, such a misalignment will seriously degrade your images. It may be necessary to build up the camera platform on the DCA to match the contours of the bottom of your camera. We use heavy cloth tape, similar to “duct tape”. A variety of colors is available in most fabric centers and discount fabric departments. Experiment. Use layers and build up the camera platform under trouble spots until the camera sits flat on the platform and square with the eyepiece when the tripod screw is tightened enough to prevent random movement.

The illustration shows the two layers of tape that were necessary for the N1 to sit flat and square with the eyepiece.

Once you have the scope mounted on the DCA, the DCA mounted on the tripod, and your camera mounted on the camera platform, you are about ready to go. We leave the DCA and camera mounted on the scope and tripod whenever we are using the scope in the field: field trips, personal birding, or when we actually go out with the primary intention of capturing images. As we mentioned before, it only comes off our field rig when we pack for travel, and then goes right back on when we get to our destination.

Cable Release Bracket: we are about ready to move on to actually using the DCA in the field. However, we highly recommend that if your camera does not have a wired or infrared remote shutter release available, you purchase or make a mounting bracket for a standard mechanical cable release. Even if your camera came with an infrared remote, unless you can turn off the shutter delay, you may want to consider a mechanical release.

Why? Most obviously, you are capturing images at magnifications that are so high that any camera or scope motion will seriously degrade the image. And, there is simply no way to press the shutter release button on the camera without inducing motions in the rig. The image will look slightly “out of focus”, soft, slightly blurred. It may be so subtle that only the finest details are affected, or it may be glaringly obvious. Either way, you will not be satisfied with the images. Secondly, you may well get beyond the stage where any sharply focused, well exposed image seems like a miracle, to the place where you want to capture particular behaviors or poses of the bird. You can get a sharp image by using the self-timer on your camera so that the rig has time to “settle down” before the shutter opens, but there is no way to predict what the bird will be doing at the moment of exposure (or whether the bird will still even be in the frame). You can use “burst mode” (available on most consumer level compact digitals) to take a sequence of images in a few seconds, hoping that one will be sharp and the bird will be doing something interesting or striking an interesting pose. If you capture enough images that way, you will get some that are satisfying. However, if you are the kind of person who waits for the telling moment…who wants to capture the bird as you see it right this second…then there is no substitute for an instantaneous wired, infrared, or mechanical shutter release. Since both wired and instantaneous infrared remotes are becoming very rare (they were never plentiful), the mechanical release is becoming the only option.

We have included photos of two different release brackets. One was made from common materials available at home improvement stores (aluminum bar stock, epoxy), and the other is a commercially available product. You can order the commercial one from eagleeyeuk.com. It is listed as the Generic Cable Release Bracket under “New Products.” In both cases you need to go to a photo shop to buy the standard mechanical cable release. They come in different lengths. For the home made bracket, just drill a hole roughly the right size for the cable release and epoxy it in (being careful not to get glue in the works.) If ordering the GCRB from EagleEye, you might as well order the cable release at the same time. We have found that only about 1 in 3 cable releases sold in the US actually fit the hole in the GCRB.

In both cases you can see that we have mounted the cable release bracket, not to the tripod screw where at least the GCRB was intended to mount, but to a machine screw which fits nicely in the tripod screw slot of the camera platform and has a head low enough to fit right under the camera if necessary. The screw protrudes far enough below the camera platform so that we can mount our cable release brackets under the platform, held on with a wing-nut. If using the GCRB, it is necessary to remove the standard tripod screw that comes with it. Slide the screw all the way to the big end of its arm and screw it out. Mount as shown in the illustrations.

Remember, a mechanical release still transmits some motion to the camera. Learn to be gentle. Slow and smooth is better than a quick jab…even though you will often be tempted by a unique and fleeting behavior or pose.

Just to keep things in perspective, remember, with practice, the whole procedure outlined above will take less than 5 minutes, and you will likely get it down under a minute. Even on the worst of days, that still leaves lots of time for digiscoping.

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