For some time now, I’ve been looking for a better way to capture incredible lightning photos other than pushing the shutter button over and over hoping to catch a bolt. The image on the left was a 15-second exposure that luckily captured two lightning bolts in the same frame. The third bolt was added from a second frame a few minutes later.
Some commercial lightning triggers are available, if you’re willing to part with a few hundred dollars, which I was not, for an experimental endeavor. So I started researching home brew solutions that would allow me to tinker while also saving a bunch of money. Enter: Arduino – a powerful open source prototyping platform utilizing ATmega programmable microcontrollers.
At this point I would like to thank Maurice Ribble for his incredible work on the original iteration of this shutter trigger, which over the last few years he has developed into a full blown automatic triggering solution using any number of inputs including light, laser, sound, or motion, now known as Camera Axe.
That all said, I didn’t need high speed flash/camera triggers for photographing things blowing up (although it sounds like a lot of fun), or the tons of features and options of the Camera Axe. However, I did want a solution versatile enough to modify or add on to later, if I wanted. So I bought an Arduino UNO board with an ATmega328, dusted off my old breadboard, and started experimenting with a few components. In the end, I ended up with a circuit based on Maurice’s original design, but incorporating some of the tweaks from his newer circuits, and an optimized version of code. Details below show how you can make your own. Note that mine is based on inputs for my Canon 40D (now using the Canon 5D Mark III).
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