High Speed Photography – Let Arduino turn The Lights Off For You

If you’re reading DIYP for a while you probably know that High Speed Photography is not about high shutter speeds. Au contraire. It is about shooting very long exposures in bulb mode, and using a strobe to freeze the action with a split second light.

This means that once you have a setup read to go, you turn off the lights. go back to your setup and pop the balloon / break the glass / shoot the bullet. Kinda messy and uncomfortable. Ask Edward Horsford, the exploding balloons magician.

Photographer Matt Richardson came up with a better to do it. Matt was already Using an Arduino as the triggering device for the strobe. It only made sense to Let the Arduino turn off the lights and open the camera shutter once the setup was ready.

In the video after the jump, Matt explains this concept, and shared the circuit to make this magic happen.

This is the circuit to get the camera and room lights hooked up into the Arduino board.

Lastly, the source code for the project can be found here.