Sunday brought sunny skies and strong wind over Belvide.

Although the sun was shining over the water, the windy conditions at Belvide made digiscoping extremely difficult. The gusts created to much shaking of the scope, so I gave up and decided to take shelter in the Gazebo hide and have a play with my Canon EOS 400d slr.

There is a feeder situated just in front of the hide so I took a few shots with my EOS 75-300mm lens and teleplus 2x converter. It can't produce the telescoping power of my digiscoping set-up, but the feeding Blue Tits and Great Tits were close enough for me to capture some good detail.

I took advantage of the Canon Eos 400D's low noise capabilities event at ISO 800 to achieve fast shutter speeds and capture the birds darting about in the trees.

Woke up to bright skies this Sunday morning.

Making the most of the sunny skies today, my friend Jeff and I headed off down to Belvide Reservoir to take some pics.

The skies always threatened rain, but it stayed dry and the sun occasionally popped out between the clouds.

Jeff, a keen photographer, uses a Sony H9 and wanted to try out his new teleconverter. When combined with the 15x zoom lens of the camera, Jeff was able to get some great close ups of the feeding birds from the hide. With fast shutter speeds of up to 2000/1 he captured a Greenfinch in flight, and a cracking shot of a Great Spotted Woodpecker.

Highlight of the day was the sighting of a Long-Eared Owl roosting on the south east bay. Unfortunately it was hidden by branches so I wasn't able to get a shot, but I'm going to try again this week.

No digiscoping now for three weeks, I'm starting to get withdrawal symptoms!

There seems to be no let up with this bad weather, every weekend has been a washout, leaving no opportunities for digiscoping.

Hopefully, according to the weather man - we may have some sun in August, but in the meantime, I've been testing the Ricoh GX100 digital camera with my Olivon T90 ED scope in my back garden every time the sun shines through the clouds.

I'm always on the lookout for a decent, new digital camera to digiscope with and I think I've found it with the Ricoh GX100. Its clip-on lens adapter fits the Olivon T90 adapter perfectly, the camera and scope seem to gell together very well. Combining the high quality ED glass of the T90 scope and the 10 megapixel camera with lots of manual features - the results are excellent.

I'm currently using my spare time to produce a detailed section with-in this website dedicated to digiscoing with the Ricoh GX100 and Olivon T90 setup, so check back soon for a full write up.

Check out the pictures opposite, all taken with the Ricoh and Olivon combination.