Digiscoping - There are many of us who love Nature, hunters or not. But, I would like to make a subdivision between those who love nature (and who dedicate themselves to picnics, trips to the sea, walks in the park) and those who are really in love with Nature, and for it are willing to make real madness. Here, it is to the latter category that the following is dedicated. Back from two days in the company of Richard Camusso, father of digiscoping in Italy, I bring with me some considerations about one photographic technique of which, until today, I had only heard about. I can say without delay that digiscoping is the estuary into which the waters of two rivers that seemed to never meet, the point of contact of two worlds born one in opposition to the other: that of hunters and that of " everything-except-hunters ”(let's call them anti-hunts, naturalists, animal rights activists and so on). In short: naturalistic photography in general and digiscoping in particular, have worked the miracle of making people find elbow to elbow, under the same plant, in the same fog, who for experiences, feelings and mentality would have been destined only to more or less clashes. minutes. And instead there they are, excellently equipped, one with the clothes that accompany him in the strenuous hunting stalks, the other with accessories of more clearly sporty extraction, sitting and hidden, their eyes fixed in their binoculars, looking for the same animal. , the same precious scene. Both moved by a common feeling: love for Nature. Both there for the same purpose: knowledge.
Il digiscoping documents the impossible contact between the human world, with its limits, its gross eyesight, the senses numbed by the thousand stimuli of civilization, and the world of the wild, whose eyes perceive imperceptible movements of small flaps of skin, whose sense of smell warns of ambiguous presences hundreds of meters away, whose ears quiver with every broken twig. The digiscoping, using long focal lengths and terrestrial telescopes, he has precisely this possibility: to bring the world closer to man without him intruding, at a distance. The distances from which animals can be observed and documented, thanks to modern technologies, seem sidereal, but it is above all an aspect that amazes those who approach this world: the detail.
This photographic technique it allows to see (and, thanks to the documentation, to show) details of the eyes, of the hairs, of the colors of the animals that could not even be imagined. The hunter is accustomed to careful observation of wild animals since the evaluation of the head is perhaps the most important part of the selection hunting action: behavior, movements, somatic characteristics, secondary sexual characteristics, are all elements to be carefully evaluated and observed. In binoculars, however, the animal always remains separated, in a world that is beyond the lens, almost flat, and the column of air that fills the hundreds of meters that separate it from us seems a physical barrier, and in some ways psychological. . The same animal in the "long" acquires a roundness, a new consistency, it seems to be able to appreciate the consistency of the coat, the steam emanating from the moist nostrils, the smell of the grass it is chewing.
Digiscoping renders carnal contact that was previously only visual. This experience brings with it a whole cascade of emotions and knowledge that are worth more than a thousand manuals read and memorized! The details that can be grasped with the "long" are of innumerable usefulness: the study of ethology, of wild populations, censuses ... the applications are not only purely hunting in nature, although this type of resource has been invoked and applied precisely in that area.
Certainly the mastery of a hunter in moving in the natural environment is unattainable for those who do not frequent the woods with the same diligence and constancy, and it is easy to notice hindrance and uncertainty in the movements of "non-hunters". What upsets, however, is that light, that thirst for victory, that eagerness in the search for the wild, which unites both with the same intensity. And then we understand that we are really all the same, although in some the instinct of a predator is more pronounced and in someone else the animal flesh is disliked. We are all sensitive to the same call, we vibrate the same way when Mother Nature calls. We seek the way to return to the origins, overcoming the damage that the (so-called) civilization has done to the detriment of our senses. Technology helps us to bring what is far from our eyes but is very, very close to our heart.
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