DIGISCOPING is taking pictures with a digital camera using a telescope as a lens -- in my case, my Nikon Fieldscope 60 ED spotting scope. I found I could hold my digital point-and-shoot camera pinched to the eyepiece with my left hand and fire away. I took most of the digiscopes on this website with an Olympus 550, a long-since obsolete three megapixel camera.
DIGITAL SLR BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY. In Fall 2003, Canon introduced the Digital Rebel (300D), the first digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera to sell for less than $1000. I was hooked. I had done some SLR black-and-white photography back in the Seventies, including my own darkroom work. It was a lot of fun and I still have some of the pictures I took, but it was time-consuming and life was too hectic; I gave it up long before I got into birding. Still, it left me with memories of some basic photographic skills and techniques, and I found I could revive some of these, while working on new ones.
I started with a basic consumer zoom lens (Tamron 70-300), but once I knew I was into SLR photography to stay, I bought a Canon 300mm f/4 IS in January 2004. Soon after that I added the Canon 400 f/5.6.
In February 2005 I upgraded my camera to a Canon 20D, and at the same time added a Canon 500 mm f/4 IS lens, which fully lives up to its great reputation and is my workhorse bird photography lens to this day. Since then, I've successively upgraded my camera to a 30D, and then the 40D when that was stolen. In March 2008 I took the leap to Canon's top of the line series with the ID Mark III, and in January 2010 added the Mark IV. I normally use the Mark III or IV with a 1.4x (rarely, a 2x) extender on a Gitzo 3530 tripod with a Wimberley II head, and a 580EX flash when that is called for. My car makes a good blind, and when I shoot from it I use a beanbag for support. I also own the Canon 400/4 DO lens, excellent for mobility and for flight shots; with a 1.4x extender, it makes a lightweight 560 f/5.6 combo that works well for walkaround birding.
For non-bird photography, I have other Canon lenses: 10-22, 28-135, 35 f2, 50 f/1.8, 85 f/1.8, and 70-200/4 (last one occasionally used for birds).
FORMAT AND PROCESSING. I edited my early digiscopes with the Olympus Camedia 4.0 software. When I first took up SLR photography, I switched to Photoshop Elements, and later I upgraded to Photoshop CS2. I shot in jpeg large fine until March 2005, when I shifted over to RAW, which I convert with Breezebrowser Pro.
THIS SITE. This website was originally built on Geocities with PageBuilder, a web editor that disappeared in 2009 when Yahoo eliminated Geocities, which had become a notorious spamming platform. I established my own domain, tgreybirds.com, with Yahoo, and had the contents of my site transferred here. But I didn't add any new content during most of 2009, while I was floundering around trying to find an HTML editor that I could work with. I finally settled on SeaMonkey Composer in early 2010. The pages added or rebuilt with SeaMonkey since then have a period after their names on the alphabetical index page, and the species name at the top of the page is in bold. They are in relatively clean HTML, while the older pages created by PageBuilder are, so I'm told, quite messy. Thanks to Joe Neto for helping me save the work I'd put into the Geocities site, and to Devon Cattell for suggesting SeaMonkey, a web editor dummy-proof enough for me.