CameraTrigger

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.