Laser insect photography rig

Posted Jun 16th 2008 8:30AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: digital cameras hacks, daily

[Marc] sent in this awesome insect photography rig. The camera is manually pre-focused and set for a 30 second exposure at ISO100. The aluminum cylinder in front of the lens is an external shutter mounted with a custom turned lens adapter. It's used because the built in shutter is too slow for insect capture. The camera/shutter is triggered by a pair of lasers with photo detectors. When both beams are broken, the insect should be in front of the lens. A Garmin GPS provides position information that's tagged on the image by the Nikon D200. A large photo of the rig is here, while a more detailed writeup on building it is here.

Update: It looks like we covered a previous version of this rig, but the old links are down and we didn't have a shot of the setup. Oh, and I forgot to mention [Marc] new control box for running this rig.

Reader Comments

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1. This is one of our most respected members on our photography forum. You really should check out his site and the results he gets with this rig. It's simply awesome.

Dave

Posted at 9:23AM on Jun 16th 2008 by Dave Van den Eynde

2. Is this not the exact same thing as in this post
http://www.hackaday.com/2005/08/19/macro-photography-rig/
just with a newer camera?

Posted at 9:26AM on Jun 16th 2008 by Blind

3. It is the exact same post as
http://www.hackaday.com/2005/08/19/macro-photography-rig/

They just moved the site from skynet to pbase. Really guys, I can accept that you seem to want to turn into engadget or gizmodo and the like, but why the hell are you repeating your own posts? Especially since in the past you would past on posting a hack just because it appeared on Make or a similar sight and wasn't relatively new and original (or at least, wasn't with great enough merit to show twice). This camera rig is indeed a great set up, but you've done it before. How did no one catch that before this post went up?

Posted at 9:32AM on Jun 16th 2008 by Blind

4. The rig has definitely improved from the original set up http://web.archive.org/web/20070205153207/users.skynet.be/fotoopa/img2005/hs_113.jpg

Posted at 10:56AM on Jun 16th 2008 by Eliot

5. i try to avoid laser insects if i can

Posted at 1:41PM on Jun 16th 2008 by will d.

6. eliot, apologies if i came across overly bitter (I was) but I'm still sorting out the current changes to the site, and like I said, in the past, I've seen tips turned down because they had already appeared on another aggregate site, so seeing Hack-A-Day duplicate itself without writing it from an "update" approach from the start is disheartening.

Posted at 4:24PM on Jun 16th 2008 by Blind

7. It appears the sample images on the writeup page are broken; you can find them here: http://www.pbase.com/fotoopa

Posted at 10:26PM on Jun 20th 2008 by Cyanflux

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