CameraTrigger

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.

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 ...