The Narrative Image

What do you call it when you mix a digital camera with a spotting scope? The answer is digiscoping. Taking quality pictures from far away requires expensive lenses, lenses worth thousands of dollars. I can’t afford them. But Mr. P already has a legacy spotting scope and he had heard that there were adapters available to connect it to a digital camera. The question became, would digiscoping be a viable option until such a time as purchasing an $8,000 telephoto lens would be deemed justifiable? And more to the point, would it be fun? Right now, the longest lens I have access to is a third-party 70 - 300 mm, F/4 - 5.6 zoom. When  combined with my camera sensor's crop factor of 1.6, it becomes equivalent to a 112 - 480 mm zoom. But if I could hook my camera up to Mr. P’s spotting scope, I theoretically should be able to achieve a focal length equivalent to 2,700  mm It took some research and eventually some help from Kowa experts Mr. Paul Kardos (Natio...

I helped Mr. and Mrs. P move some furniture to a beach house in Lincoln City .  On the morning we were to load the truck, menacing rain clouds demonstrated their ability to saturate the earth at will with intimidating bursts of precipitation. Not to be nonplussed, Mr. P, who seemingly has the right tool for the right job (no matter how obscure) demonstrated his determination to beat the clouds by pulling a tarp out of his shed that, in its folded state, was just a little bit bigger and heavier than all the furniture we had to move, and unfolded, well... let's just say that standing on opposite ends, we couldn't hear each other over the vast distance unless we used walkie-talkies (and even then we had to gesticulate wildly like near-sighted monkeys).  Once the huge tarp was deployed, the rain clouds moved on to easier prey. In fact, it wouldn't rain again for the duration of the task. A picture of the coast just South of Lincoln City which doesn't really illus...