urban hijinks: d.i.y. spy camera

As if we don’t have enough ongoing series around here, I’m throwing ‘urban hijinks’ into the mix. In short, a collection of tips and tricks for having fun (sometimes on the borderline of the law) with your downtown living. I’m hoping this series will generate a lot of emails with your own suggestions. UM readers are a mischievous bunch. Thank God.

Enjoying my, er, ‘accidental vacation’ this last week and a half, I’ve found myself pouring through a lot of unmarked DVDs and the like. One set of old digital photos in particular caught my attention for their sheer brilliance.

A former friend of mine used to live at 17th and Champa, in the Boston Lofts building. Anyone familiar with downtown Denver knows what a pimp location this is, especially for people watching. This innovative gent came up with a simple way to take the art of people watching to the next level.

Tools required:

Digital Camera

Binoculars

Technique:

Simplicity itself. Somewhere along the way, digital camera optics and (even quite cheap) binocular optics became so good, combining them for spytastic fun was made possible.

Get your binocs focused, more or less, on the area you wish you photograph; hold the digital camera lens up to one of the eye pieces, and then adjust the final focus using the camera.

Simplicity, and boobies, itself.