CameraTrigger

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.