digi-scoping my phone

well the idea of using a telescope or binoculars to make a telephoto on a digital camera is so old that the term digiscoping has been around for ages.

Wikipedia:

The origins of the activity called Digiscoping has been attributed to the photographic methods of Laurence Poh, a birdwatcher from the Malaysian Nature Society, who discovered in 1999 almost by accident that the new generation of point and shoot digital cameras could be held up to the eyepiece of a standard spotting scope and achieve surprisingly good results.

So naturally I've tried it on almost every digital camera I've ever had.

I thought I'd put my Nikon binoculars (8x25) onto my Oppo and have a look. So here's the over views:

and then the scoped version

obviously coverage is an issue, but its interesting how well the phone's AF works to bring that into focus.

Let me zoom into that segment a bit ... first 100% on the standard image:

which is as lousy as you'd expect ... then lets crop out the vignetting on the binoculars:

which is pretty darn good really ... but as this still isn't 100% lets look at that:

wow ... not bad given all I did was hold my phone to the back of the eyepiece.

I think I'll be taking my phone and binoculars around more often than my 300mm lens on my big camera for "just in case" stuff.

The binoculars are quite compact too!

Makes me tempted to try one of those optics