How to get wildlife pictures through field glasses

What do you do on a safari inside the well-known Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya with out a super fancy zoom lens but still wanting to take mesmerizing shots?

Answer: point and shoot camera + binoculars (ok plus a small photo-editing).

I've a Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS with a 3x optical zoom which does an ok job as well as a 12x digital zoom that's by no means satisfying to me. As I was seeking in the stunning Maasai Mara wildlife via my compact and affordable Olympus Roamer 8 x 21 DPC 1 binoculars, I had an idea: what if I could use the binoculars as my zoom lens? It turns out that the PowerShot lens fits perfectly into one of the Olympus Roamer eye-cups cups – voilà!

In the event you take shots without having working with the camera's zoom into the binoculars, you'll generate a bold vignetting effect, at 8x magnification, which makes for a fairly cool artistic touch. The following shots all have been taken working with this method.

A mama cheetah and her two cubs

You really can use your camera zoom furthermore towards the binocular magnification. The result will appear additional like a common zoomed photo, without the vignetting impact.

The results don't have the very same good quality as an actual telephoto lens on a DSLR, but for a fraction of price, I discover the point & shoot + binoculars combo to be fairly effective, with an artistic twist.

Tips:
- Try to align the lens to match the desired vignetting effect: either fuzzy and off-centered or well-defined and centered
- Focus the binoculars first and then get the camera to focus on the subject. If the binoculars are not in focus to begin with, you'll get a blurry or in the very least, fuzzy picture.
- Your picture may look a bit washed out, but that's something easily fixed having a bit of added contrast and saturation utilizing a photo-editing program.