How to take wildlife pictures through binoculars

What do you do on a safari within the renowned Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya without having a super fancy zoom lens but still wanting to take mesmerizing shots?

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

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

If you take shots without having making use of the camera's zoom into the binoculars, you'll generate a bold vignetting impact, at 8x magnification, which makes for a fairly cool artistic touch. The following shots all have been taken making use of this method.

A mama cheetah and her two cubs

You actually can use your camera zoom furthermore towards the binocular magnification. The result will look extra like a regular zoomed photo, with out the vignetting impact.

The outcomes don't have the similar high quality as an actual telephoto lens on a DSLR, but for a fraction of expense, I come across the point & shoot + binoculars combo to be fairly effective, with an artistic twist.

Tips:
- Try to align the lens to match the desired vignetting impact: 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 employing a photo-editing program.