About the Camera Axe
The Camera Axe is an electronic triggering device which can be used to trigger either the camera shutter or external flash or both. Yesterday I experimented with the latter and below you can see some of the results.
The Camera Axe I own is an older version, I’ve had it a couple of years and it’s basically been gathering dust as I take care of other higher priority projects. However this weekend I made time to experiment with it to see what I could do.
Setup:
I built a photo interruptor based on the breakout board from SparkFun, this was hooked up to the camera axe on the sensor 2 input (sensor 1 wasn’t triggering correctly for some reason, will investigate another day). On Camera/Flash port one I had a shutter release cable plugged into my Nikon D700 and on port two I had a flash hot-shoe trigger connected to an SB-600 in manual mode. A second strobe (SB-800) was triggered in SU-4 mode, that is the light from the SB-600 triggered the SB-800.
I created a frame (sorry no photos) to hold colored cards, one directly behind the water tray and another to camera left. One speed light was camera right, firing across the water at the colored card , the second speed light was below the card on camera left firing at the background. The image on the right conveys better what I am trying to say.
I had the water reservoir (old maple syrup container) up high with a tube and small valve to regulate flow. The end of the tube was aimed between the legs of the photo interruptor so the camera axe could detect the water drops.
After some trial and error (ok, all error) at getting the timings set in the camera axe, I decided to do it the correct way and work out how long a drop of water takes to fall… First I took the distance between the photo interruptor and the surface of the water. I then headed over to Wolfram Alpha to calculate the timings.
The distance I had was 39.5 cm, and according to Wolfram Alpha the drop of water would take 280ms to splashdown, so I had my starting point. I also knew that my Nikon, fast though it is, has a shutter lag of approximately 40ms.
I set Camera Axe to trigger the flash at exactly 280ms, and the camera to trigger 40 ms earlier at 240ms, then adjusted to capture the plume of water rising.
Some Images:
