A very cool wildlife combination...

[danbroad]

Last time I was over in Florida, I met up with an American couple in one of the National Park hide towers that seemed to have an awesome [and matching, his'n'hers] setup.

They had Sony DSLR's like this:

with a Bigma mounted like this one..

And all controlled by a pistol style hunting grip like this...

With a hotshoe mounted rifle target like this....

... now it seemed a little odd at first, but basically they were following birds in flight using nothing more than the hotshoe scope which they'd calibrated, then just pulling the bushawk's trigger. The Bigma would do the focusing [I assume either prefocused or an AI servo mode] and the IS would help out with the shutter speeds.

I had a go with their setup, and - wow - bearing in mind that we're in good Floridian light - the results were amazing. Certainly a better way of cataloguing distant birds in flight than I have.

Anybody back here in the UK using a Bushawk or similar?

 

[scottduffy]

You should get arrested for having somehting that looks as fierce as that. The 3rd phot down that is.

 

[danbroad]

It's a Bushhawk - a dedicated shoulder mount grip for DSLR's. You pull the trigger release as you would squeeze off a couple of rounds on a rifle. Quite popular over the pond... Effectively they were birding with an image stabilised 500mm, with the easy sighting advantage of a simple gun-type iron sight, so the zoom never had to be pulled back to refind the subject.

Well, over there the Bushawk doesn't look out of place quite so much....

Wouldn't want to walk down Oxford Street on Christmas Eve with one, though....

 

[Claymore]

I have been using a similar set-up for years, mine was a bit cheaper than the Bushhawk made by Kaiser and i converted quite a few to work with digital slrs (if your handy with a Dremel and soldering iron its quite easy to do) I converted aroud 40 over tha last few years but stoped when they changed the design of some wired remote controls and i couldn't fit them into the kaiser's trigger grip. I will put some photo's in my gallery showing the converted Kaiser shoulder pods.
It is amazing how the trigger makes BIF shots much easier and the Bigma does the auto-focusing well! Keep an eye on Ebay for old Kaiser shoulder pods (with wired screw in cable release) they usually sell for around £15.00 and cost a fiver to convert.
Cheers
Brian

 

[D.S.]

I think i'd feel a bit of a tawt walking round with that lol

 

[scottduffy]

I think i'd feel a bit of a tawt walking round with that lol

It wouldn't matter though as no-one would have the bottle to laugh at you.

 

[Canon Bob]

I've got a BushHawk grip like the one in the picture above. It's pretty good for BIF shots with the 300/4 or 400/5.6 but I'm careful where I use it so as not to cause concern.

Bob

 

[danbroad]

I was so impressed back then in Florida that I briefly toyed with the idea of getting one.... before I realised that getting it back through Airport security was likely to lead to some painful interview/rubber glove proceedings....