Photographing or filming through your rifle scope is a bit of a challenge. You can try and freehand your camera or smartphone but with small eye boxes and eye relief of most scopes, this makes it very hard to capture a good image. It is almost like threading a needle that is 4-5 inches away. Nexus Outdoors has a camera mount that makes this much easier.

Filming What You See

As I mentioned above, photographing and videoing what you see in your rifle scope is a bit of a challenge. There are digiscoping adapters for binoculars, spotting scopes and telescopes. However, those don’t work with traditional rifle scopes due to eye relief. Binoculars and spotting scopes do not have any eye relief which means you can put your smartphone camera lens right up against the eyepiece to photograph or film through it. So how do you film through a rifle scope without trying to hover your smartphone in free space? Nexus Outdoors camera mount.

The Nexus Outdoors mount is a giant bracket that holds your camera in place so you can film through your scope. The mount grabs onto your top Picatinny rail and is low profile enough to fit under a scope. It does not have any recoil lugs so be warned that the mount may shift under heavy recoil.

The mounting bracket is like a giant T-shaped block and there is a matching block that slides up and down the bracket. There are thumb screws on each side and 4 threaded holes on either side of the bracket. This allows you a lot of room for adjustment to get the height of the Nexus Outdoors camera mount into position.

To adjust how close your camera lens is to the eyepiece of your scope, the camera arm is rather long and has a series of holes that line up with the sliding block. The arm is held in place with corresponding threaded holes and screws.

The rear end of the arm is a 90º platform with a slot that fits 1/4-20 tripod screws. Here is where you can mount a camera of your choosing. I went with a metal smartphone holder to hold my iPhone 7 Plus in place.

The Nexus Outdoors camera mount allows you to adjust up, down, forward and backward positions for the camera lens. Due to the offset nature of smartphones, you may need to rotate your camera one way or the other to better position the camera lens.

You might also need to flip the mount bracket to the other side of your gun. The bracket hangs down quite a bit and the sliding block could block certain parts of your rifle. It could interfere with your ejection port or bolt handle for a bolt gun. Certain scope mounts might cause interference as well. Take a look at the photo below. The latch for the QD scope mount sticks out rearward, thereby limiting how much rail the Nexus Outdoors camera mount can attach to.

I used this setup to take pictures through the VUDU 1-8×24 LPVO. Seen below.

Due to some scope designs, you will notice that you may have to adjust how close the camera is to the scope’s eyepiece as the magnification of the scope increases. I noticed eye relief diminishes as I increase magnification which results in needing to move my camera closer.

Apple Watch Remote Viewing

While not entirely practical, you can use the Nexus Outdoors camera mount to remote view if you use an iPhone or similar smartphone. For Apple Watch users, you just use your watch to control the camera of your iPhone. Since the Apple Watch will live view what your camera can see, you can aim your scope while looking at your watch.

Nexus Outdoors Camera Mount Final Thoughts

I like the Nexus Outdoors camera mount because setting it up is rather easy. Height and distance from the eyepiece are independently controlled so it is easy to dial in the mount to get my iPhone in position.  I exclusively use the mount to film through my scopes. Of course, you can reverse the mount and have your camera mounted offset and filming back at the shooter for some gun selfies. I feel that this is overkill since there are already plenty of mounts to attach a GoPro to your gun and have them film back at the shooter. Filming through a rifle scope on the other hand is not that easy or common. I have the Skoped Vision by Phone Scope but it is more convoluted to film with my iPhone.

There are drawbacks to the Nexus Outdoors camera mount. You have to aim by looking at your smartphone merely a couple inches from your face. If you use an actual camera, then you will have a difficult time getting behind your gun.

Now comes the bad news. It seems the Nexus Mount is discontinued. The last post on their Instagram account is dated May 27, 2019 and their website seems to be dead.