photography on irq5 test

CY-20 Cheap Flash Teardown

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 01:04:00 +0000

Following up on my DIY slave flash project, I thought I’d get something more powerful than that tiny Xenon bulb. I bought the cheapest flash on DX.com - the CY-20. It has a considerably large bulb and as a plus, it has what looks like a tiny window on the front for automatic output control. The main reason for getting this was the 2.5mm jack on the back of the flash that allows it to be externally triggered.

Opening it was easy. Remove the 4 screws that secure the hotshoe mount and go round the casing to release the retaining clips. Surprise surprise, take a look at the sensing window.

DIY Optical Slave Flash

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:13:00 +0000

I found a couple of old disposable cameras in storage that I played around with 15 years ago, shorting the caps to make a loud bang, wiring up the flash trigger to a remote-controlled relay kit I had assembled. I thought I’d do something useful with them.

I decided to turn them into optical slave flashes, since on-camera flashes are not very flexible. I was thinking of a way to detect the camera flash so that the slave could be fired, maybe using an LDR with the ADC to detect an increase in light intensity? It turns out there’s an even easier way to do this - with an infrared sensor. Apparently when flash tubes are fired, they give off infrared which can be detected more reliably than light intensity changes. When I read about this, I tested it out with a simple Arduino sketch and it works as advertised.

Disposable cameras usually have metal contacts that are placed near the shutter mechanism. When the shutter opens, the contacts are closed and if the flash was charged it would fire. To control the flash firing, I replaced the contacts with an SCR.

Lumix LX3 (Lacks a) Remote Shutter Release

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 01:47:00 +0000

It’s sad that my family members always buy stuff that lack features I want (or sometimes sane features - I’ll talk more about this in another post hopefully in a few weeks). Obviously if I had a say in it, I would definitely not have picked it. My sister bought a Panasonic Lumix LX-3 some time ago, but unfortunately, it lacked a remote release feature. The previous camera, bought by my dad, was a Sony DSC-T1, and it too, lacked such a feature.