Hotshoe mounted Tall Sighter

The Sighter mounts in your camera hotshoe and greatly helps in tracking birds, athletes or vehicles at sports events or other moving subjects and keeping them in the frame when using a zoom lens.

If you try and follow a bird or motorcycle on the track through a zoom and it leaves the frame, you can lose the entire opportunity if you have to zoom wider or take your eye off the viewfinder to find it again.

While following a bird or racecar through the Sighter you can see the larger space it is travelling in, where it is likely to go,  and where it went if it slips outside the frame.  If you are focused at a specific spot and waiting for a key moment or for the subect to come into view, you can see the space outside the frame and the subject before it arrives.  Most of this is extremely diffult to do, sighting only through a zoom lens.

There are two versions of the Sighter, the Original and the Tall.  The difference is whether the sight line is high enough over the lens shade of the zoom.   On a Canon 5D3, the Original is suitable for a 70-200 zoom lens.  If a much larger zoom with a 16 cm diameter lens hood is used, then the Tall should be used.  The Original will not see over the lens hood.

== Using the Tracker ==
The Sighter slips into the hotshoe and allows you to follow the target through the two inner sighting rings while still providing nearly full view of the scene.  The outer rings protect the inner sighting rings.  Horizon cue tips are located in the larger ring, to help level your image with any horizon line.

The two sighting rings will be slightly blurry due to how close they are to your eye, but are still distinct enough to line them up and this becomes fairly easy after practicing with a distant tree top.

The tracker has a spring-loaded friction fit into the standard hotshoe on any camera.  There are two small rings on either side where a cord can be added to attach it to the camera or loop around the lens to avoid losing the tracker, if it slips out during a hike.

A focusing mode that uses several points in the center of the frame is recommended, not just a single center point, to maximize the ability of the camera to detect the subject when you don't have the two sighting rings perfectly aligned.

== Safety features ==
The sighter is inexpensive.  Your camera isn't.  I designed the larger outer rings so they bend down (and on the Extra Tall, also sideways) so any impact will be softened and your camera will have a chance to swing away instead of having a sudden impact break the hotshoe.  The laws of physics still exist though - the maximum force isn't reduced, only the impact is softened and just as with a flash on the hotshoe, avoid hard impacts that may stress the hotshoe.