Haje describes himself as a technonaut and geek – amongst other things – and he also has boundless energy and enthusiasm. This means that he’s constantly inspired to try crazy photography-inspired experiments (who else would think to build a macro lens from a Pringles can?) and they invariably work (I’ve the Pringles macro thingy in my box of photography tricks). This is why I’m bouncing up and down at the prospect of his newest project: Triggertrap.
Triggertrap? What the hell is a Triggertrap? Ah, good question. It’s a universal camera trigger.
That is, a properly universal camera trigger. Yep, it’ll make your common-or-garden time lapse, you can trigger it with a laser beam or with sound, and it can make non-linear time-lapses, too, to give your animation the illusion of speeding up or slowing down. But it has something else far more groovy going for it. It has an Aux input. You can connect your camera to just about anything you like to trigger your camera’s shutter.
From ringing doorbells to boiling kettles to rising suns, anything can be used to take a photo. This baby is eminently hackable.
Haje’s already been working on the design. Doesn’t it look shiny, with its display, touch-sensitive buttons, and water-resistant-ness?
But in order to make it actually happen, he needs to raise a few fist-fulls of cash, for things like prototypes and to ensure that it really is the affordable gadget that he wants it to be. This is where Kickstarter, and hopefully you, come in.
If you’ve not encountered Kickstarter yet, it’s a crowd-sourced funding platform where anyone with a project that they’re desperate to unleash on the world, but don’t quite have the capital to realise it, can appeal to like-minded dudes to help them out. Here’s how it works:
Kickstarter. Here's how it works.
It’s small-scale, socially-oriented venture-capitalism with a creative bent. Reckon you can help? Here’s the page for Triggertrap on Kickstarter.
And if you want to know more about the project from Haje, he’s even made a video to help explain what it’s all about. It’ll only take two minutes to take a peek, so rock on:
Triggertrap has its own website on the surprisingly-named Triggertrap.com. You can find Triggertrap scattered about other bits of the internerds as well; it’s on Flickr and Facebook, and project updates will be tweeted via @Photocritic.
But dammit, let’s make this universal camera trigger properly universal, yes?