DIY photog creates laser trigger for remote DSLR snapping
By Darren Murph 
posted February 8th 2010 4:39PM
posted February 8th 2010 4:39PM
[Thanks, Simon]
posted February 8th 2010 4:39PM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
hmm,
take pictures of anyone who enters your room. that's about the only thing I can think of quickly for this.
@pballinuyasha Commercial (more specifically, food) photographers use laser triggers to capture images of flying fluids and other foods. Like two beer mugs coming together to force the beer up and out of the tops of the mugs. Either the moving mugs or the beer itself will break the laser and trigger the shutter.
@TPJ '
yeah but this is a home made system so I was thinking home uses
@pballinuyasha Homemade doesn't mean home use only. Lots of amateur or student photographers like to use triggers like this.
that would be pretty awesome if the trigger started a timer. obviously the applications are endless, but really cool.
@theRise Most DIY applications do this. My solution takes input from a sensor (any sensor that produces 0-5V depending on the conditions, i.e. light, sound), checks for a threshold value (say around 3V is the voltage level a hand-clap produces) and then delays a number of milliseconds before taking the shot.
This way you can take pictures of water droplets (say) and get the timing dead on for different stages of the splash. The main problem is dealing with shutter lag. For something like a balloon popping, it will have popped in oh.. 100 microseconds easily. Even a D3 has a few milliseconds lag so the only realistic way to take pictures of very fast stuff is to leave the shutter open and trigger a flash instead.
The next model i'm working on will be able to trigger either cameras or flashes (via PC cables) to make this easier.
@Whiternoise The problem here is getting the frozen action, not the shutter lag...
If you shoot at 1/1000 you will maybe still have some streaking meaning that you need:
1- CRAZY BRIGHT LIGHTS
or
1-DARK ROOM
2-BULB MODE
3-FLASH GUN
The flash gun method is the best because the bulb means the camera is constantly taking the picture but because it's all dark you can get the flash to freeze the frame since Flashes are WAY faster than most shutters.
So all you need is something to trigger the flash which is where this laser could be used to trigger it instead of the shutter ;)
Is there anything you can't do with an arduino?
Hey, I recognize that from circuits lab!
This is pretty old stuff tbh,
Both myself and another interweb user developed similar projects for an Instructables competition (both were featured on hackaday too). Mine was a sort of all-out camera controller (for SLRs), his was a very simple but very effective laser trigger that worked on canon compacts.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-your-own-cheap-multi-function-wireless-ca/
and
http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Triggered-High-Speed-Photography/
Breadboard ftw!
@Bandigolo
Happiness is a fresh breadboard!
This is nothing new. There have been kits to make this on the internet for years and years. http://www.hiviz.com/kits/products.htm
so now i just need a tutorial for a custom nitroglycerin thingy....:D