CameraTrigger

I've simplified the macro diffuser that I open sourced last year . The MK1 version required printing out a custom lens hood which would only attach to a Canon 100mm macro lens. The MK2 version no longer requires a custom lens hood, it simply clicks on to the hood of whatever macro lens you might have making it far more versatile and easier to print. The tested lenses so far include: Canon 100mm  Canon 180mm Sigma 180mm Sigma 105mm This hood helps reduce harsh shadows you often get when using flash but the main advantage for me is that the head can be positioned depending on how close you get to your subject. This is the typical kind of result I'm getting with this setup now. To build your own version you just need to print the model and supply a few basic parts: M3 x 40mm Hex Head bolt (the shape of the head is hex, NOT the shape of the tool used to tighten it). M3 wingnut. Diffuser material. I use the plastic casing found on some notebooks and it seems t...

While recently browsing cheap tripods on amazon (you can never have too many tripod when doing camera trap type work...) I stumbled on one which included this image: Instantly I was drawn to something that made me suspect this advertisement had been photoshopped! How dishonest! Now, you might spot the giant hand next to the man and assume that is what I am referring to. Not so. Zoom in a bit closer to just the model.  The tripod on the backpack just looks wrong. Note the lighting on the left tripod leg in particular, very different to the fairly diffused light on the model. The colour is also wrong compared to the rest of the image. Pick out areas that you are fairly certain will be black, for example the lens hood. Does it match the black of the tripod? No. It is almost a greeny blue while the tripod appears very black. The tripod is much warmer than the rest of the picture. Can we prove the tripod has been added digitally? There are various techniques to try, such...

Previous experiments on this blog used a breaking laser beam to trigger the camera. While this approach has some advantages there are a few major disadvantages too. The main disadvantage is the requirement to set up and accurately align lasers around the target. In certain situations this isn't an issue, but in many cases it is completely infeasible. The goal for well over a year now has been to design a module that will slip over the eye piece on a DSLR and will only fire when something changes in the field of view. The idea being you set up your camera with whatever lens you want, frame up and focus on the target (an empty perch for example) and as soon as the picture changes, the camera fires. In theory this sounds like a simple problem to solve but in reality I've encountered many headaches that have stopped me building the ultra low latency system I envisaged. Rather than allowing these roadblocks to halt all progress though I've decided to work on a simpler syst...

The abundance of insects over the last couple of months has been a perfect opportunity to experiment with different macro flash setups. Using a standard speedlight as-is isn't really an option, as the light is projected out much further than the front of the lens (which is exactly what you'd normally want a speedlight to do) and is much too harsh. There are therefore two problems that need to be solved; diffusing the light and directing it closer to the front of the lens. There are of course multiple commercial solutions available, such as the Canon MT24-EX or the Sigma EM-140 ring flash, but these are all relatively expensive and unlikely to be an option to anyone wanting to experiment with macro photography. A speedlight however is much less of a barrier to entry. A few different prototypes were made but the design I settled on was a light pipe style design that captures the flash light and funnels it down to the front of the flash. Of course, it would be ideal to hav...

The snow over the last few days has finally encouraged smaller birds back into the garden. Today saw starlings, blue & great tits, dunnocks, robins, black birds and even a goldfinch making visits so a perfect opportunity to try some high speed shots. Of course, wood pigeons were also making regular appearances. The laser setup is gradually becoming simpler through trial and error. The heavy duty tripods have been replaced with metal poles which are simply hammered into the grass. This speeds up setup time but also means less kit to replicate the setup. The aim for today was slightly different to previous tests. The laser wasn't aligned along the perch, it was instead set back about 10cm so that it would be broken by the bird on approach to the perch rather than after it landed. This would mean less shots, but hopefully the action shots that drove this project in the first place. This seemed to work and the results are quite encouraging. More experimentation is required to r...

The laser trigger module is the most useful gadget to come out of the camera trigger project so far. It is a simple board that controls up to two lasers with sensors to detect if the beams have been broken. The electronics involved in detecting a broken beam are very simple so using a microcontroller might at first glance seem to be unnecessary overkill, but using a microcontroller gives a significant amount of flexibility in a small and inexpensive package.

The box of tricks is a simple microcontroller based gadget and its purpose is to provide a way of detecting / recording / modifying or generating a signal. This simple set of requirements allows for a helpful set of features to be provided by single small gadget though. One of the driving factors behind this particular gadget was to allow a delay to be introduced to the signal sent to the camera. As mentioned previously , this opens up new possibilities and allows limitations with setups to be overcome. It also, when combined with the splitter , allows multiple cameras to capture the same event at different times which might increase the chance of getting 'the' shot. The picture above shows the board without a case. The headphone jack in the top left is the input, the jack on the top right is the output and there are buttons in each of the bottom corners. The display is a 3 digit 7-segment display that displays numbers and some letters. Choosing the display was one of the...

The test today was shooting at ground level. The aim here is to catch ground feeding birds but also to simplify the whole setup. A couple of metal poles were hammered into the grass instead of using multiple tripods. Since the birds are walking around they are moving relatively slowly, so the exposure becomes easier to manage too. Here is a shot of the basic setup. The camera in this test is a Canon 6d with a 100mm 2.8 lens.

One key moment that sparked life into this camera trigger project was sitting in the well known  kingfisher hide  waiting for a kingfisher to dive. The observation was that my odds of getting a shot at the right moment would be increased if I was using my second camera body at the same time. For diving kingfisher shots the focus is preset so operating two cameras at the same time shouldn't be a problem as only the shutter needs to be activated. A diving kingfisher, taken in August 2015

Many of my Camera Trigger project experiments were made significantly easier after picking up a 3D printer. The one I opted for was a FlashForge Finder, mainly because of its ease of setup, the dropping price and a recommendation from a colleague who already had one. Overall, I've been quite happy with it but the recurring corner warping was an issue that detracted from an otherwise good product. The ideal solution would be to replace the bed with a heated one, and some people have apparently done that successfully, but for such a sleek bit of kit it seems a bit of a kludge. There are numerous DIY kits that would be better suited to that kind of hacking. A reply in this reddit post states the answer to the warping issue in capitals, so it must be correct ;-) MAKE SURE YOUR BED IS COMPLETELY FLAT AND LEVEL. biggest improvement for me right there. OK, sounds good. Now to figure out how to do that.

In previous posts I mentioned how the engineering side of the camera trigger project was working well but the image quality was still lacking. The poor image quality is mostly down to poor lighting so this is what I've started looking at improving. I've previously experimented with a range of the cheapest LED floodlights I could find on ebay, and some actually appear to have potential, just not for this current application. I ended up taking a gamble on these "spotlights" from Amazon .  They aren't spotlights, they have more of a strip effect but they are certainly bright. The lights run on 12 volts so they would be suitable for hooking up to a portable power supply if taken out into the field. For testing locally though, they were hooked up to an old ATX power supply which easily has sufficient power for 4 lights should the need arise.

The extremely mild November continues and it seems that not very many birds are visiting the garden. This isn't a major issue right now as the testing still continues but it would be nice to see more of the expected species making an appearance. The latest set of tests were focused on physical laser stability over several hours. The original setup using lightweight tripods showed that there were issues with the laser being knocked out of alignment. It looks like this was probably due to the pigeon using the handle as a convenient perch but I've not got any footage to prove it. This weekend the flimsy tripod was replaced with a  Bosch Laser Level Tripod  and the alignment issues disappeared. Another change to the setup was replacing the Sony tripod as a perch with a mossy log. The mossy log is only very slightly more convincing than the Sony tripod, but again, this is still in the technical testing phase and realistic settings will hopefully not be far off.

The hardware for the laser setup is relatively simple. A basic PCB (printed circuit board) was developed for the various components plug in to. Prior to the PCB there were several prototyping stages, going from a breadboard to a slightly more permanent soldered strip board but these were too frustrating to work with. In the past I've created PCBs using both etching and milling but for this project the time seemed right to try some of the cheap PCB manufacturers based in China. A bare PCB and a fully populated one.

Today was the first attempt at setting up the laser and camera combination outside and leaving it to run by itself for a few hours. The setup is very simple and can be seen below: The three tripods at the top of the image are, from left to right, the laser, an elevated seed holder and the sensor. The tripod in the bottom left corner is a Canon 7D with a carrier bag covering it in case of unexpected showers. The lens is a Canon EFS 17-55mm, so not a typical bird photography lens, but a suitable lens to use for the test.

The Camera Trigger project started several years ago with my goal simply being to take 'better' wildlife photographs. This vague goal is open to many interpretations however and it didn't take long for the ideas list to become so large and complex that the whole project stalled pretty much before it started. Fast forward a few years and the project has now matured to the point of being usable and the real work of  taking photographs can finally begin. The goal of taking 'better' wildlife photographs will mean different things to different photographers. For me, a particular goal at the time was to capture woodland birds in flight but there are many issues to overcome, including: Sharp in-flight images require very short exposure times Short exposure times require a lot of light The focus point has to be exact One solution is to use a break beam type system to trigger the camera with a high-speed sync flash. There are a few commercially available options ...