CameraTrigger

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 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 ...