One of the local feral parakeets. Digiscoping wasn’t my main priority when I bought my new camera, but I already owned an adapter to attach my telescope to a camera, and I hardly used it when I got it because of the awkwardness and expense of using film. So I bought a Canon EOS T-mount adapter and had a go.
It’s so much more consistent than holding the camera against the telescope eyepiece, which is what I was doing before, though it’s also much more time-consuming, so I don’t know how much I’ll use it when actually birding.
The camera’s built-in light metering doesn’t seem to work well with it—everything came out overexposed—but anyway there’s no point in using anything except a fairly short exposure when taking bird pictures. So I just set it at 1/100, which was about as long an exposure as I thought I could risk. The pictures tend to come out dark, even in good light, but it’s amazing how much you can rescue them with software.
It was mid-morning when I took this, not, as it might seem, midnight, but with the sun behind the bird, this was how it came out. Not surprisingly, with the camera struggling for light, there’s rather a lot of noise on the picture, but I thought that backlit feather made up for a lot.