Photography & Video

The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for creating and editing digital photos and videos, as well as how to make your own still and video cameras.

“Photo grandpa” builds mother of all homebrew laser triggers

“Photo grandpa” builds mother of all homebrew laser triggers

A reader who saw Marc’s recent post about an Arduino-controlled laser photo trigger wrote in to tell us about the amazing work of Belgian photographer fotoopa (which, we hear, as “foto opa,” means something like “photo grandad” in Dutch). That’s him in the picture above, and that’s his awesome homebrew laser-triggered camera set up that he uses to capture amazing pictures of insects in flight and splashing drops of colored water. I’m generally skeptical of film purists, but fotoopa makes the compelling point that no digital camera has the shutter speed necessary to do this kind of imagery. He claims the Compur #1 shutter used in his 2008 setup has a speed of less than 5 milliseconds. Technical details about his 2009 setup are available here. [Thanks, Wilco Schillemans!]