Better pictures with RDS!

[aaron_]

I guess some know the problem: above 200-250mm focal length, the field of view gets very small making framing extremly difficult (at least for me )
Prefocussing to capture "the" moment is the same story since you don't see the cars approaching (or a ramp approaching the car, depends on what you do)
Things get even more complicated when you own a compact camera with a choppy, laggy electronic viewfinder - no way you'd ever get the action shot you wanted with such a setup! (again, at least for me lol)

So I used a red dot sight and mounted it on the hotshoe of my Panasonic FZ-30.



Those things are normally used for hunting and sports shooting where quick aiming and tracking is essential.



A colimated red dot is projected on the surface - it doesn't appear on the targed but seems stick on your target when you view it through the screen, no matter from which angle you look through the glass.



Of course, the sight must be calibrated so that the red dot and the camera's center autofocus sensor point at the same location. That's where the thumb screws on the sight are good for.

How does it handle? VERY Good! It seems to be the best ~50 Euros (including shipping from the states) one can invest in a compact camera.
No limited field of view, no choppy framerate from the EVF, no freezing up during hispeed focus mode...

Of course, you see a different image than the camera sees, so "guessing" the proper focal length to properly frame the action can be a bit tricky at first, but I got the hang for it during the first session (see the piranha panning shot)
And of course you can always be a bit conservative about zooming in since cropping isn't an issue with todays megapixel counts.