Adventures in Telephotography

Hello! I haven’t posted in a long time. Let’s not worry about that.

A couple of months ago, I went on a little trip to The Biggest Week in American Birding.

I took along with me this… thing:

It’s my good ‘ole Pixel 4 with The finest monocular Amazon offers for under $10. Surprisingly, it comes with a generic phone mount that happened to fit my device.

My partner is the hardcore birder. I enjoy birding for about 2 hours, and then I need another activity to do. Enter low-quality bird photography!

My camera has a 2x optical zoom, but this is a whole 8x optical zoom, with terrible lens quality! The phone mount is also extremely finicky. The smallest bump will throw the lenses out of alignment with the camera. So the circle around the image (which I’m sure has a name, I don’t know it) is always in a slightly different position between shots.

There’s also a significant amount of blurring at the edges because this monocular is not meant to be used like this! But the brave people at Chinshwehaw decided to send me one of these mounts, so now they have to live with the consequences.

I really like how this lens gives an almost film-like quality to digital photos. I don’t think it’s actually film-like, but lots of people said that it looks like film. I think it looks like consumer-quality optics from the 90s. The way it gives this yellow tinge reminds me of some of my old family photographs.

I have no idea why it is this way, but you can shift the lens up a little and warp the image. Note how below the horizon appears convex.

It also took me a while to realize that I needed to pull focus manually.

Here are a few other interesting ones.

So do I recommend the “2000X24 Monocular Focus Optics Telescope onocular Power Monocular for Adults with Phone AdapterNight Vision Monocular Lightweight Pocket Monoscope with for Adults Kids”?

No. There are almost certainly far better products on the market for this purpose. And even then, the amount of time it takes for the typical phone to take a photo means that this isn’t really useful for bird photography. And even if your phone is, this setup is so finicky that you’ll spend more time messing with it than enjoying being out in nature. I’m a little embarrassed to have this object in my possession. Often when I was using it I would be taking photos over the heads of more professional birders with telephoto lenses longer than my arm.

But also, I absolutely love this little contraption. While taking photos with it I was frequently approached and asked what it was, where I got it, and whether or not it worked. There’s something so unassuming about this little dingus that people who are a little interested in nature photography feel more comfortable asking me about it, rather than the other obvious professionals around. Those people would ask me “Does it work well?” and I would respond “No! It’s pretty bad, check it out!” And we would both delight at these quirky, distorted, out-of-focus images.

There’s something fun about taking the mundane engineering marvel of our phone camera, and intentionally making it just a little bit worse.