In January, the Great Blue Herons of Viera Wetlands in Florida are building nests in the tops of palm trees, paying attention to the placement of each stick. They are fun to watch. Such big birds with such interesting plumage, and they get themselves into some interesting forms while they build.

This is a digiscoped shot…taken with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x zoom eyepiece on a ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. The Sony is my first large sensor Point and Shoot, and the first large sensor camera I have used for digiscoping. (Large is relative here. The Sony, like the Nikon 1 series, has a 1 inch sensor. The 1 inch sensor has three time the surface area of the common Point and Shoot sensors, but is still only 1/8th the surface area of a full frame 35mm size sensor. Still, the difference in depth of field is dramatic. The very short focal length lenses on true Point and Shoots generally give digiscoped images a unique look. The bird fills the frame, speaking of great magnification, but the depth of field is well beyond what you would expect at that image scale. You loose some of that by going to the larger 1 inch sensor and its correspondingly longer focal length zoom. I am still getting used to it. You can see here that keeping the bird’s head in sharp focus meant letting the tail go soft.

Camera as above. Program. About 2400mm equivalent field of view. 1/500th @ ISO 125. f13 effective. Manual focus.

Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.