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My wife has expressed interest in going out birding. We went to see the sandhill cranes at Jasper-Pulaski 2 seasons ago (so pre-covid obviously since it can get pretty crowded there) and had a good time. The only problem is that she has a (fairly mild) case of cerebral palsy. She can walk around just fine and goes running so it's a rather light case. But her coordination is a bit lacking and her movement can be a little jerky some times. She's had a bit of difficulty using the binoculars we have the times we've used them. We went out to see the comet last year as well as the jupiter/saturn conjunction. She had trouble seeing either of those, but I've read that astronomical objects can be more difficult to see, plus our binoculars are ~$50 10x binoculars (the bushnell all-purpose 10x) so maybe that made things worse. How useful would something like a monopod or a tripod be? For looking at things not too far up I figure it could work pretty well, but I don't know how often we'd have to look straight up to see birds. My current plan is to get a pair pentax papilio 6.5x for her. Kind of low powered and moderately inexpensive, but the hope would be that the low power would make her shakiness be less noticeable than a more powerful pair. Plus they're very light, which might help since she's a bit petite. Then I can get a monopod and a quick release mount since it's got a nice mounting point on the bottom of the body. Worst case I can end up using them for their really close focus (half a meter) since I'm interested in looking at plants.
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Feb 17, 2021 03:18
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 13:54 |
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Kenshin posted:Get a lightweight tripod, not a monopod, that way once it's set her coordination doesn't even matter. I don't know anything about pods, so maybe just going all in would be good. It's probably location dependent, we're in the Chicago area so there are several prairie/plains type places around, plus like lake shores and stuff. I could see setting up a tripod at one of those areas working since we could see more without having to go around as much. But in my mind in a forest-y area it might be less useful (but maybe a monopod wouldn't help much there anyway). Like for something like the sandhill cranes a tripod is clearly just better. I don't have much of a sense of how ambulatory we need to be to see birds. BetterLekNextTime posted:Those Pentax have a very narrow field of view (the second number in the 6.5x21). Lightweight is good, but it will probably help if the field of view is 35 or 40 (or more) so that even if there’s some shake the bird will stay in the frame. I don’t fully know the challenges your wife is facing but I’m wondering if something a little bigger might be easier to use. Yeah the small objective lens was a bit of a concern. They claim to have an ok field of view despite that (they say 7.5 degrees, or ~390 ft @ 1000 yards), but it may be that near the edges it doesn't look as nice. Plus it'll be darker than a bigger pair. Haven't looked through them so I couldn't say. Image stabilization ones would be nice but they're a bit more than we're looking to spend at this point. They're definitely an attractive upgrade if we end up enjoying it though. But roughly I was going to get a ~$150 pair for myself, plus something similar for her. Not including a tripod or whatever else I end up getting.
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Feb 17, 2021 05:04
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I tried it out when I was in a little prairie in a park on Sunday. We saw a sparrow that was sitting on a flower and singing. It seemed to think it was a song sparrow, but it seemed a bit more gray than the pictures of song sparrows it showed so  I can't tell any of them apart yet anyway. It does give you the sonogram of the recording and saves it to the app, which is nice.The park also had a lot of tree swallows in the prairie, there was like a dozen flying around the grass/flowers and picking off all the bugs.
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Jun 30, 2021 03:17
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