Equipment for Phonescoping

Serious optics: the spotting scope

If you're phone scoping, you're going to be using a tiny pinhole camera on your phone. So you need some serious optics to zoom in close to your subject and funnel as much light as possible onto that miniature camera sensor. That's where your spotting scope comes in. If you're a reasonably serious birder you've probably already got one - and that's one of the real advantages of phonescoping - it simply re-purposes most of the kit you already own. Almost any scope will be functional, but a modern spotting scope with a decent eyepiece will do the best job. Older scopes tend to have small eyepieces that don't match well with a phone camera. Light gathering is the name of the game, so having a good sized objective lens will also help considerably. For many years I used a Swarovski ATX95 which did a good job. More recently I heard about the amazing scopes produced by Kowa. I was very close to buying one, when a chance conversation led me to become an ambassador for the company. My first experiences with Kowa kit I now have access to have blown me away, and you can read more about that in a blog post "Downsizing your phonescoping with a travel scope. What's the catch?".

A solid foundation - the tripod

Shooting video with a large zoom requires stability, so a tripod is essential. It's worth investing in a carbon fibre tripod to minimise flex in the legs and vibration of the phonescope - although in high winds you'll always struggle to get a steady shot. Choice of tripod head is also worth some thought. A purpose designed video head that smoothes out panning movements with a fluid damping mechanism is essential for anything other than a fixed shot. I use the Manfrotto MVH500AH. If you're in danger of becoming a phonescope junkie - I certainly am - you might just end up carrying your phonescope kit with you whenever you're out birding. Weight matters, and so does transporting your scope and tripod around. Many birders have less than favourable views of scopac type carriers - although I'm not sure how carrying your scope on your shoulder makes a geeky birder "cool". But for me, with a middle aged body ravaged by years of village cricket injuries, a scopac is essential. I can spend a whole day out birding with my scope on my back while barely noticing its there.

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Your phone is your camera

In a phonescoping setup, your phone is of course also your camera. Phone camera technology is still advancing at pace, so upgrading invariably delivers a substantial increase in performance and it's worth working with an up to date phone if possible. Obviously the downside is the cost and the eWaste. Lots of companies reconditioned models, which is a great way to do things on a budge and with the environment in mind. Study the specs carefully before buying - phones often deliver different quality and resolutions at different frame rates. As you get into your phone scoping you'll want better and better slow motion performance. Samsung and Apple seem to constantly vie for the best cameras on the market, and the latest are certainly comparable to decent compact cameras. I haven't seen much difference between them, but personally prefer Apple's phones. As of 2024 I've upgraded to the iPhone15 Pro. Each combination of phone and scope will deliver different results (I'll say more about this below), and some combinations work better than others.

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Relatively recent phones tend to feature more than one lens, usually including a basic telephoto (or at least not as wide) lens. My old iPhoneX had a x2 lens which worked well. My latest iPhone 15 has a x3 telephoto lens (as well as a "typical" x1 lens and a wide angle lens. Without using a telephoto lens, most phonescoping setups will result in vignetting - the appearance of a black circle around the image. Pinch zooming (effectively cropping the resulting image) just saps your image quality. With a telephoto lens there's no vignetting and I can shoot video with the scope on any zoom setting. A problem with this approach is that the telephoto lens on the very latest phones are getting bigger and bigger in their magnification. The iPhone16 is x5 which I suspect is possibly too much for optimum phonescoping.

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A new possibility for tackling the vignetting problem is emerging. Kowa Optics have brought out wide angle eyepieces for some of their scopes. This allows you to use the standard x1 lens on your phone without getting any vignetting. The advantage of this is that the x1 lens is always higher spec than the telephoto lens so will give better results.

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If you're using a phone with two cameras, standard operation will automatically combine images from both camara lenses. This means sometimes you see an image, and sometimes it goes ocmpletely black. You'll need to download a specialist camera app so that you can force to the phone to use only one of the camera lenses at a time (see below).

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Bringing it all together - the phonescope adapter