What is it?

The device is not a new invention – the idea to put an eyepiece on a photographic lens is old and has been done a couple of times before by different vendors, e.g. Nikon and Minolta.

Basically it justs consists of an eyepiece, a magnification lens, and a prism – the prism turns the upright-down image from a photographic lens back into the correct orientation, and the eyepiece lets you look through the lens just like through a telescope.

The Lens2scope attached to my Sigma 100-300 f/4

Who needs it?

This device is obviously not for photography – it is for watching the action, not making pictures. A situation I find myself in rather more often than not is that I have reached a certain interesting place, but the action is going on really too far to take any photos that are for more than just IDing the birds. Instead of sitting there frustrated, I could switch the camera for the Lens2scope and watch the action instead.

I bought mine in May before my summer vacation, and had planned to use it during several birding trips in Britanny, Western France. My 100-300 mm f/4 Sigma lens would be turned into a 10x-30x magnification spotting scope, or even a 14x-42x using the 1.4x teleconverter.

Use and observations

Sweet and short: The device works as advertised. I found the picture to be clear and surprisingly bright. Lens errors were of no concern, certainly there was a slight chromatic aberration, but much less than with my standard 8×36 Nikon Monarch binoculars. The magnification could clearly be improved by using the 1.4x teleconverter, while adding the 2x converter didn’t seem to improve the situation – I wouldn’t recommend using it.

Focusing is actually quite sensitive, but still very easy with the excellent manual focusing ring of the 100-300. This will be much harder with a lens which cannot be precisely focused manually.

The device is sturdily built albeit a little plasticky, but the advantage is its light weight of just 185 g. More on the quality of the metal bayonet below…

Example – what to expect

As the device is not for photography, I cannot show any pictures of what you can see if you look through the scope. But I can give you an example of where I used it successfully.

Close to Cancale, in Eastern Brittany, Western France, there is a small bird colony of gulls, cormorants, some shags, and common shelduck on the Île des Landes. The island itself as a bird protection area is of course off-limits for humans, but the seabird colony can be watched from the nearby Pointe de Grouin.

The observation distance is actually not that bad, looking at Google maps it’s between 300-400 meters. But photographing the birds? Forget it, too far. With the 8x binoculars? Nice, but nothing really interesting to be seen. Just good enough to identify the birds.

Setting up the scope looking at the Île des Landes

With a dedicated spotting scope – or in this case the Sigma 100-300 mm with 1.4x tele converter and the Lens2scope? Wow! Suddenly you are able to see the gull’s chicks in their nests, and to clearly distinguish the European Shags there from their pretty similar looking relatives, the Cormorants, also present on the island. I enjoyed watching two Shags feed their chick which was hiding behind one of the boulders on top of the island – all you could see from the chick was the beak hungrily opening when one of the parents came back with more fish, and sometimes the near bald head if things weren’t moving quickly enough to its liking .

With my 8x binoculars: Which chick? Which boulder?

The Caveat

So far, so good. Mission accomplished – the device itself has no electrical or moving parts, and the optics are ok. What could go wrong? Well, the bayonet mechanics used to connect the Lens2scope to the lens were so sharp and tight that the use of it damaged my precious Sigma. During the vacation. With no repair service or replacement lens available. Argh.

What had happened was that obviously in one of the many times I exchanged the Lens2scope for the camera, mounting it with the bayonet I was too fast, or too slow, or didn’t hit the right connection spot (red dot to red dot) – and I turned the Lens2scope in the bayonet damaging the first of the electrical lens contacts.

The first pin of the telelens damaged by the Lens2scope

The camera would no longer speak to the lens giving me the infamous fEE error – I knew, the lens was toast. I suspect the Sigma lens to be more susceptible for that damage than an original Nikkor, as the Nikon electrical mounts are little metal balls, while the Sigma has a plastic tongue with an electrical contact, which additionally feels slightly spring loaded, intended to provide active closed contact.

So I warn anybody thinking about using the Lens2scope with Sigma lenses – I think this is a dangerous combination. I certainly will never attach it to my 1000€ lens again. The other brands I cannot judge, but after this experience I would recommend at least high caution when mounting and dismounting the adapter – and honestly, out in the field things sometimes have to happen fast, and I want my equipment to be robst and not have to think about fragile connections.

My vendor offered to take mine back, but of course refused to take over the bill for the Sigma repair. The German distributor I asked relayed my question to the manufacturer in Taiwan, but the disappointing answer roughly translates as “be more careful”.

I “survived” my vacation and many photo opportunities by taping the contacts preventing any electrical error to creep up, and instructed the camera I had attached a manual 300 mm lens. This gave me back the aperture priority mode, at least. No autofocus – I re-learned manual focus over a 3 week period, but that is another story…

Share this

No related posts.

This weekend everybody is invited to spend one hour counting (and identifying) birds in the garden or a different place, and report the results back to support scientific long term observations on the biodiversity in our “civilized” environment.

Not much content on Twitter yet, though. So for you here is the result of me counting birds in Munich Alt-Bogenhausen, one of the greener corners of this not-everywhere-so-green city.

I am getting better in identifying birds by their song, therefore my list actually is a little bit longer than last year’s

1. Blackbird – three. Actually they were everywhere, but you ought to only count those you can see at the same time (they might fly behind your back to the next corner and continue singing there… not probable? Who knows…)
2. Great Tit – Two. They confused me without end because I actually saw two juvenile first, already big enough for me to think “hey, this is a different type of swamp tit!”. Embarrassing enough, but you don’t see the little ones that often!
3. Blue Tit – One. Very busy very high up in a tree, no time to loose to collect food for the chicks.
4. Chaffinch – Three, a complete family with a chick being fed by Mom. And I saw a second lonely chick trying to “climb” a huge tree with a trunk diameter of certainly more than two feet without success. I hope it did not fall from the nest. While I watched, it tried again and again to climb that wall that must have seemed like the Eiger Nordwand from its perspective. But probably it helps if you have two wings, even if they were not flight functional they seemed to provide some stability when beaten fast enough. When I passed by the same tree 20 minutes later again, the little one was gone. I like to think he made it
5. Great Spotted Woodpecker – One. They are quite common around here, and I got a good and long look at this individual.
6. Carrion Crow – One. You can’t leave the house without seeing them around here.
7. European Greenfinch – Two. These had eluded me the prior years, but maybe only by now I have learned to look at the highest tree tops to find them.
8. Eurasian Collared Dove – One. Beautifully colored bird.
9. Common Swift – Eight. My current favorite species, I keep watching their aerial maneuvers from my balcony in the evenings
10. Common Chiffchaff – One. At least, I kept hearing one, I didn’t see it.

Oh, and as usual you can see the online results of the bird census over at the LBV. Will be interesting to see the trends in bird population.

To learn more bird-songs, I bought the – German language only, sorry – book Grundkurs Vogelstimmen: Heimische Vögel an ihren Stimmen erkennen, written by Hans-Heiner Bergmann and Uwe Westphal. Not sure on my success with that book, though, I will report in a later post, so stay tuned and subscribe!

Share this

Related posts:

1. Summer bird census
2. Bird Census 2010
3. Bird Census 2009

The result is an overview of the Bavarian bird population, at least of the most commonly seen song birds, giving the nature protecting NGOs like the Landesbund für Vogelschutz in Bayern (LBV) or the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU) the data they need to act protecting the birds.

And for a birder, there is of course no better excuse to spend that hour birding than for a larger cause

I had participated – and reported here – already in 2009 and 2010, and this time I again chose a different place for my birding – a place at the eastern shore of the famous Starnberger See some 40 km south-west of Munich. So in addition to the song birds in the trees near a winter RV park there, I also hoped to add some water fowl.

And here is the result:

1. Three Great Tits. At least. Probably ten, but you’re tasked to count only those that you can clearly see concurrently, because the danger of counting the same individuum more than once is just too high. And these as usual gave me a hard time telling them apart.
2. One Blue Tit. I kept having one in my binoculars over and over again, and again I am sure there were more.
3. One Long-tailed Tit. Why it was only one I do not know, as they usually come in the dozen, but I was enchanted as I absolutely adore these cuties! Of course, I failed to take a decent photograph (again) – they just never sit still.
4. A stranger I mistook for an Eurasian Blackcap at first sight – though of course all the Blackcaps have by now found a nice warm place in the southern sun. But I took some photos of my riddle bird (the one shown above is probably the best of these), and of course it is a Marsh Tit (its song made it clear, from the looks it could have been a Willow Tit as well).
5. Nuthatch. One. I always love seeing these colorful birds.
6. Treecreeper, short-toed I guess from the habitat. One.
7. Chaffinch. One, on the ground between the RVs picking up food that fell down from a bird house there.
8. Carrion Crow. One. It did not seem to enjoy as the other birds did today’s beautiful plus 13° C seemingly announcing spring, but in reality being only Foehn wind turning winter briefly into something, well, muddy, given the amount of snow melting on the meadows.
9. Two Mute Swans, being fed by the strollers at the lake side.
10. Six Mallard Ducks, trying to get some of the food as well.
11. One Blackbird.
12. One Cormorant, flying high above.
13. A flock of sixteen or so Black-headed Gulls.
14. A riddle Gull that swam lonely far out on the lake, as my photos ended up being not sharp enough I could not distinguish between Caspian Gull and Herring Gull. The excellent birding field guide for southern Germany, “Vögel Beobachten in Süddeutschland” by Moning and Wagner mentions both of these being very likely at that spot, so I don’t dare to guess – this bird will go by unreported to the LBV.

Later added (after the official 60 minute counting time was over):

1. A large flock of Canada Goose. In one sub-flock I counted 13 Canada Goose, and they had a:
2. Single little Barnacle Goose hiding between them, also flying with them as the Canada Goose took off as one.

All in a very typical result of the most common birds around here, and no big suprises today. But a Long-Tailed Tit

Share this

Related posts:

1. Summer Bird Census 2011 – #stg11
2. Bird Census 2009
3. Bird Census 2010
4. Summer bird census

ISO 1000, f/6.3, 1/3200 s, at 300 mm. Exposure compensation +0 (bad idea at that moment – I would have needed at least a +1 here with the bird covering only a fraction of the original image, and the sky was cloudy white and bright. So I needed to add one EV during raw conversion, at the cost of even more noise. This photo is not printable in any decent quality.)

Know your gear, and know what it can do. You might be positively surprised. When trying something as daring as to catch an eagle during a high speed dive towards his trainer standing just 20 meters away from where you are, don’t expect miracles though – during his dive, I took 11 shots, and only 3 are in focus. Luckily, the last 2 are, with the eagle already having a decent size in the frame.

Some capabilities of your gear will be less often challenged, but still you should know that it will work when being out in the field. A great way to test and train for those birds in flight (the jargon calls this “BIF”) situations are the raptor flying displays of zoos, game reserves, or falconries. Make sure to visit those near your home, and visit them multiple times! The program of the show will vary not too much, and you will learn to anticipate what will happen and be ready for the moment. Don’t be disappointed when you don’t have any images to show after the first time you went there, think even of going there first without a camera!

This by the way was an obviously “imported” eagle showing off during the Glanzlichter nature photography days in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich this year. The bird was launched by the falconer from the platform of the 75 m high bell tower of the monastery Fürstenfeld, and was called by a second falconer standing in the yard close to my position – the eagle did not take any detour, but knew his yummy award was waiting for him – he just pulled the wings and dropped like a stone with a (fierce) beak.

Share this

No related posts.

This Mandarin duck photo I really like is from Xmas 2007. It was then and there when the first time I finally had the feeling that things were coming together in my bird photography: I had the sun in my back, had thought of putting the tripod very low (using an angle view finder), and even managed to get at least one kind-of-sharp image from the dynamic autofocus system. I liked the water color from the reflection of the vegetation behind the little pond, because it matches the duck’s own colors.

Looking at it today, I know it lacks critical sharpness. I tried to print it large (A2), and noticed the eye is slightly soft,  as the autofocus targeted slightly behind the duck’s head. Got to try it again…

Share this

No related posts.

I am somewhat “disappointed” by the results, but of course in a small town garden you could  – without winter feeding – not expect to see an as varying bird population as in a large city park with it’s large and old tree groves. Anyway, I’m always willing to help science, and if it helps to protect the environment even better:

1. Blackbird – two. Loud and very, very present in the garden and those around. They really love the roof ridges, what would they do without have they done before those were everywhere for them to sing from?
2. Great tit – just one, in a quick fly-by.
3. Blue tit – also one. Had really already given up hope for her to appear, but towards the end of the 60 minute count period she did
4. Rook – one, enjoying the blossoming apple tree vantage point.
5. Magpie (Elster) – two.
6. House Martin (Mehlschwalbe) – two, soaring high above.
7. House sparrow – one. She was actually working right on the street extracting nesting material from some plant remains in the middle of the road – bravely just shortly interrupting her work for every car running over the plant, and in the end successfully retrieving the prize.

I have reported the results on the LBV website who organized the census together with the NABU, visit them to see the online updated results of the census!

Share this

Related posts:

1. Summer Bird Census 2011 – #stg11
2. Bird Census 2010
3. Bird Census 2009

Briefly, how it works: Volunteers count for one hour all birds they observe in a certain area (garden, park, …) on a specified day (January 6) and report their observations. Only the number of birds that are concurrently visible are counted, to avoid counting the same bird more than once. Which can easily happen, and it can get really hard to figure out the real number of them… Today I officially counted three Great Tits, but I am very sure it were at least 10 . It’s just you couldn’t see all of them at the same time…

As a location for my count, I for a change did not walk along the Isar river as usual, but chose a small but beautiful old park very close to my home, the Bürgermeistergarten of Munich’s district Bogenhausen. You can find more information and some photos here in the web, or even in the – didn’t know it exists – Munich Wiki.

Here is my result for today:

1. Blackbird – two. A couple obviously, looking quite frozen at today’s high temperatures of -4° C.
2. Great Spotted Woodpecker – one. High up in the old trees of the park. I heard him wood-pecking only once.
3. Blue Tit – one. It especially liked one particular tree in the park.
4. Great Tit – three. At least. They won being the most common winter bird in Bavaria in the last two years, so let’s see if they can make a hattrick! At the time of writing, the sparrows are leading though…
5. Nut hatch – one. He was added to the list at the very end of the one hour observation period. No idea where he hid (and why )
6. Carrion Crow – Two. In flight, I saw some more, but as I am always unsure if they are not Rooks after all, I decided to only count the two on the ground I could have a closer look at.
7. Feral Pigeons (City Doves) – Five. Beautiful birds, if you look close enough!
8. Brambling – Two. This made my day! The first bramblings (German Bergfink) I have seen, and I was really confused at the first sight (and they were at the very very top of the largest tree). But on the second sighting I could get a looong look through my binoculars, and could study the bird good enough that my subsequent lookup in the bird book at home made it a 100% identification. Ah, birding excitement!

Today, again I didn’t take a camera with me because I wanted to do a good job counting just like last year– did I miss a photo opportunity? I don’t think so, as we like last year had a grey overcast sky and the light was very dim. I might have been able to get an ID shot of the Brambling, but by now I am experienced enough to memorize the bird’s feather colors for identification at home

Share this

Related posts:

1. Bird Census 2009
2. Summer Bird Census 2011 – #stg11
3. Summer bird census

Here is a photo of the little cascade emitting mist, slightly desaturated processing.

My first encounter was a tree creeper, and this time I could map him to some pixels – and now inspecting his image imprint, I am still unsure about him being Certhia familiaris or Certhia brachydactyla, the short toed version that seems to be more probable. Inspecting the photo closely, I can’t find his toe to be short in any sense of the word, but still more hints point at the short-toed brachydactyla than the Eurasian Treecreeper (German Waldbaumläufer) familiaris.

Later up on the bank I did encounter the little Goldcrests again I had first experienced the day before the bird census, and I was lucky enough they got down in the large trees to maybe 2 to 3 meter height, scanning the tree’s little twigs and branches for anything left for breakfast.

Now, my book states the Goldcrest is the smallest bird of Europe, but certainly it is not the slowest. These critters move fast enough to make even Spielberg’s velociraptor blush, and they tend not to stay still long enough for the autofocus to catch up, nor were they employing any – at least for me – predictable movement pattern.

Frantically, I snapped, constantly hoping to get the autofocus on the spot before the next jump of the little one. Outcome? Well, I declare my Sigma 100-300/f4 as winner, even if it came at a price: I pressed the shutter 37 times. Of these 37 images, 4 do not contain a goldcrest at all. Grunt. Of the remaining 33, 3 have a goldcrest colored blur, and 28 goldcrests out of focus.

This left me 2 keepers, and the tree creeper!

[svgallery name="goldcrest"]

Technical data: Nikon D300 with Sigma 100-300/f4 at 240mm, aperture priority mode in matrix mode set to f6.3, ISO 640, resulting in 1/250s shutter speed. And yes, no image stabilizer available. Yikes. The relatively long expose of 1/250s could have screwed me, but it seems the “1/focal length” rule still applies – the bad images are not bad because of my excitedly shaking hands, but because the focus is at the wrong position. I am very sure the relatively heavy weight (compared to what I used before) of my rig helps here – the D300 weighs 800 grams, the lense about 1.5 kg which results in a steady 2.3 kg total weight including battery.

The whole episode lasted 5 minutes from the first photo to the last, and I really like the result. Those are quite substantial crops though, so no thought about printing here.

Share this

No related posts.

Now, I have never participated in a bird census before and this sounded like a lot of fun, so I did a trial run yesterday (to do away this nervousness ), and did this morning my one hour count, already reported back to the Munich division of the LBV. They allow for doing this online now – smart move, avoids having to enter all the data manually by them…

The rules are actually simple: Take one hour, and count the birds you see. The only trick is to count per species only the birds you can see concurrently, in the same moment, so you don’t count the same individual twice (or more, given the speed the little critters dash around).

So here is my final count after this mornings nice but cold walk along the Isar river.

1. Blackbird – one. They actually don’t stay close to the river, but are found in the gardens next to it.
2. Great Spotted Woodpecker – one. There are plenty of them, I think, but you seldom see more than one at the same time (well, maybe it’s always the same )
3. Nuthatch – one.
4. Goldcrest – one. This I indentified only by it’s song – but that was rather easy as I had seen two of them (and heard) on my trial run yesterday at the same spot. Today I couldn’t see it, small as they are.
5. Grey Wagtail – one. I didn’t knew these were around in winter as well, but I had a very long and good look on this one, so I am sure it wasn’t a White Wagtail.
6. Short-toed Treecreepers – two. Actually I didn’t manage to measure it’s toe, but given the likeliness and the type of the habitat I vote for the short-toed version today.
7. Great Tits – Five. At least. And they were around everywhere. This bird also “won” the bird census last year, and I am sure it will win again. Amazing adaptability to our civilization.
8. Rooks – Two. Yesterday, there were at least one hundred flying south-west. I am sure it’s the cold that brings them down from the East. We had one of the coldest nights of the year yesterday, down to -12° centigrade. That’s about 10° F.
9. Wren – Two. I read those did leave Bavaria in the winter, back some 10 years ago. Now some of them stay. But why is it called “Winter Wren” then ?
10. Marsh Tits – Two. Well, that was a very quick encounter, and of course it could have been Willow Tits (or, given the dim light, Coal Tits). But reading the descriptions in my Svensson again, I vote for Marsh Tit having the highest likelihood.

Those were the birds officially listed on the survey’s check list. In addition, I could report

1. Little Grebe – Two.
2. Common Goldeneyes – Four.
3. Coots – 32! Gosh, this was the largest coot invasion I had seen so far on the river. They usually like to stay on the Kleinhesseloher Lake in the English Garden, but it seems as the water level in the Isar is as low as I have ever seen, they can find food now also in the very fast running river.

I didn’t report (because they didn’t ask for) the all too common (are they?)

1. Mute Swans – 6.
2. Mallards – 8.

Yesterday, but not today, I did see

1. Blue Tits – 2.
2. Mandarin Ducks – 16. This flock probably was more downriver today, but I didn’t get that far as my time was limited to the one hour.
3. Moorhen – 1. This was a first for me at least on the Isar river. It was quietly picking it’s way on the opposite shore, and seen by me only by coincidence as I counted the Mandarins – and arrived add an odd number, which is odd, because the always come in pairs So one of the female Mandarins actually was the Moorhen, as I found to my excitement recounting the ducks.
4. White-Throated Dipper – 1. Cool! This was the first Dipper I saw on the Isar within the city boundaries. The only one I had seen before was way downstream outside of the city. Back then, I actually was able to make a nice photo of him. Is this a success of the renaturation of the river as propagated by the Isar Alliance? Maybe, probably.


Now, today I didn’t take a camera with me because I wanted to do a good job counting – did I miss a photo opportunity? I don’t think so, as we had a grey overcast sky and the light was very dim. I have tried making photos on days like this before, but the pictures do lack color in the first place, in addition to having either a very high ISO (making the lack of color not better…) or blurred images due to long shutter speeds. I certainly didn’t miss a keeper today.

Share this

Related posts:

1. Bird Census 2010
2. Summer Bird Census 2011 – #stg11
3. Summer bird census

The weather had a good and a bad side: It was much much warmer than the past days, but it was still dripping rain and also some strong winds were blowing. So I left my camera at home and just took the binoculars, assuming I wouldn’t miss much of a photo opportunity.

We did not see the brown owl (wasn’t home, probably sipping some hot chocolate in a place where it was warm and dry), and couldn’t find any dippers at the little creek near the Lodenfrey Werke. The strong rain in the Alps over night had also caused the rivers and smaller creeks to have high water for the first time in some weeks, and we could see much wood floating by. So the dippers probably had decided to meet with brown owl for a change and a chocolate.

In line with that, none of the waxwings troops that currently stalk Germany were found. They are here because the snow grouses in their home, the artic regions, were forced to eat the berries in the trees instead those down on the ground, because those had already been eaten by too many mice this year. So the waxwings figured there would be none of their berries for themselves, and fled the scene. At least this is what I remember of the story…

In summary, it was as expected not too exciting and not much new – The highlight was the mating display of several male goldeneyes on the Isar river (not far from my home), in the rain. Well, those water birds did not seem to notice that, but instead were very busy with themselves

But thanks again to Manfred Siering, who always (no matter how boring the situation could be in that moment) has interesting biological background information ready and is able to make any excursion worth your time. Even without any birds at sight, I am pretty sure.

ID List:

1. Carrion Crow / Rabenkrähe
2. Common Blackbird / Amsel
3. Mute Swan / Höckerschwan
4. Greylag Goose / Graugans
5. Mallard / Stockente
6. Common Pochard / Tafelente
7. Tufted Duck / Reiherente
8. Eurasian Coot / Blässralle
9. Great Tit / Kohlmeise
10. Eurasian Blue Tit / Blaumeise
11. Common Chaffinch / Buchfink
12. Little Grebe / Zwergtaucher
13. Wren / Zaunkönig
14. Common Goldeneye / Schellente

We did hear, but could not get visual confirmation for

1. Long-tailed Tit / Schwanzmeise

Share this

No related posts.