A Bird Photo Booth for Your Backyard

Chances are, your yard has a secret life you don’t know about. Your plants move too slowly for you to see how they move and grow. And wildlife probably won’t come around when you’re out there watching.

Fortunately, there are ways to see what’s going on, thanks to special cameras that let you see what you normally can’t.

The Bird Photo Booth is a weatherproof housing for a camera you already own so you can take amazing, close-up pictures and videos of birds in your own backyard.


Bird Photo Booth - $149.99 » Specifically, it can hold either an iPhone or a GoPro camera (it comes with foam inserts for holding the camera in just the right place). The camera peeks out through the Bird Photo Booth’s macro lens. You need to use either iPhone or GoPro apps or equipment to take remote photographs. Some iPhone apps enable you to remotely view through an iPad what the phone sees, then snap the pictures or record videos from the iPad. The newest GoPro, called the Hero3, has an iOS app remote, which connects to the camera via Wi-Fi.

The Bird Photo Booth website lists a wide range of options for how to capture photos and videos and interact with the birds. Some of these involve watching through the camera live, even from inside the house. Others take advantage of motion detection — when there’s movement out there in front of the camera, it starts taking pictures or video.

The site even suggests using Apple’s FaceTime apps — you actually have a videoconference with birds, meaning that you can see and hear them and they can see and hear you! The Bird Photo Booth kit comes with a stainless steel perch and an attachable feeding bowl.


OutbackCam - $149.99 » The Swann OutbackCam camera is a waterproof, ruggedized camera that takes pictures or videos when motion is detected in your backyard. So when a raccoon, an owl, a deer, a bear or even the neighbor’s cat comes stomping through your yard, you’ll automatically capture a picture or video of it if it gets into the camera’s field of view.

Powered by four AA batteries, the OutbackCam holds a 2-gigabyte SD card and has the ability to take 2-megapixel pictures or 30-frame-per-second video in darkness, thanks to an infrared feature. The picture and video file names indicate the time and date and even moon phase when the images were captured.

Just set it and forget it. Later you can come back, grab the SD card, insert it into your PC and watch your own private Discovery Channel.


GardenWatchCam - $139.95 » The Brinno GardenWatchCam can capture a video of the life of your plants — in plant time. That means time-lapse photography spanning months — the complete life cycle of your flowers or garden plants. It has seven settings for how frequently pictures are captured, such as one picture every one, five or 30 minutes or one, four or 24 hours — or a user-determined rate. At the end of the season, the GardenWatchCam will create a 1280x1024 AVI file on its 2-gigabyte flash drive, which you can watch on any computer.

The GardenWatchCam won’t take pictures in low light or in darkness. A light sensor turns the camera off at night. It runs on 4 AA batteries, which power the camera for up to six months, according to the manufacturer.

More: Gardening for birds and butterflies

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