Digiscoping at Martin Mere

Incognito-Peregrine,
originally uploaded by martinrstone.

I used the opportunity whilst visiting my new granddaughter to pop into the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Site at Martin Mere just outside Southport in Lancashire.

It was bright but the light was soft and it was calm. Great day for catching reflections in the water.

There was a pair of Peregrines relaxing in the sun observing the Whooper swans and othe wildfowl, pretending not to be there. But with my new digiscoping set up I was able to get a shot.

See the Martin Mere set on my Flickr site

I was using an old 60mm Opticron telescope with the DSLR adaptor to connect to my Nikon D60 but it required the camera to be in manual model so that I was forever adjusting the setting trying to get the exposure right.

Recently I upgraded to a Nikon 82mm Fieldscope with the disgiscoping adaptor FSA-L1. This adaptor allows me to use the automatic settings on the camera leaving me to concentrate solely on the focus.

Here is a picture of my new set up

digiscoping-with-nikon

 

Discovering the Joys of Geotagging

 

On a recent holiday I decided to sort out geotagging on my mobile. I have a Vodafone v1615 which is a rebadged HTC TYTN II aka Kaiser. It has a 3 megapixel camera which can, with its embedded GPS, add your location to your photos. To do this I needed to tweak a registry setting. Here is the tweak:

Open any registry editor, then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\HTC\Camera\ and in the folder P9 change “enabled” from 0 to 1. Now new option GPS Photo will appear in the menu.The registry editor I use is the registry add-in to Resco file explorer http://www.resco.com.

I have Yahoo Go loaded on my mobile this enables me to upload photos directly to my Flickr photostream

Flickr will enable you to map your photos so before I uploaded I had to ensure that the setting ‘import EXIF location data’ is set to yes in my Account settings.

To make sure that all the relevant EXIF data was correctly captured by my phone camera I used a freeware bit of software EXIFReader available from this website www.snapfiles.com/get/exifreader.html to view the data after I had transferred the photos to my laptop

I had another added complication in that I was blocked from viewing Flickr on my laptop as t-mobile (my laptop 3G card is t-mobile) rates it as an 18 site. So I had to pay up £2 on my credit card to prove I was over 18! 

I also tried Picassaweb  but couldn’t get it to recognise my EXIF data (hence the use of exifreader). In its manual location adding feature, it does have the advantage of being able to link an album to a location so any photos added to that album will all automatically be assigned the same location.