Remote Camera Control

MikeMcNamee talks to Ron Thomas ARPS and looks at the Phottix Hero

This feature is intended to cover a number of topics which are linked in not too obvious ways. The common thread is remote controlling a camera, which historically has been the province of nature photographers and master spies working for the KGB! Things change, however, and the prompt for this piece was the arrival of a new remote control called Hero and made by Phottix.

Casting about for a source of expertise we soon found ourselves on the way to visit Society member, Ron Thomas.

Now visiting Ron is a little bit like stepping into Doc's laboratory from Back To The Future. Everything in sight seems to be wired up to something and the surroundings of the house are festooned in miniature cameras. The neighbours, however, need have no fears of covert surveillance, unless they go poking around in the undergrowth and, unless they have either four legs, or wings they are unlikely to be captured on a watching camera.

There are many circumstances in which the ability to trigger a camera without being in physical contact with it are important. At the most simple level you may wish to prevent any undue vibrations from your presence, or touch, on the camera. Further along you may have grounds not to be near the camera for reasons of safety, discretion or so as not to disturb the subject. Cameras have the advantage that they do not (normally!) smell of humans so you can put your set-up down outside a badger set and Mr Brock will take very little notice of it. In another scenario you may wish to share your camera space with a Gaboon Viper but not get close and personal. You may also wish to install a camera in a location that is out of bounds due to other hazards or simply a lack of space, such as a small-entrance manhole.

Traditional long-wire or radio-linked triggers have served their purpose well and have proven reliable under adverse conditions. One of the more famous tales is when a fuel-laden Boeing 720 Jumbo jet was crashed by radio control into a specially prepared runway to test a new fire-safe fuel. The press were invited and all but one used sound-triggered camera devices. These were all set off by the low pass of the safety helicopter, just before the main act! The only press-person to record the incident was the photographer who took the trouble to drag a wire across the airfield and trigger his camera manually.

All of this prior technology suffered from an inability to see what the camera was looking at. This has changed with the arrival of Live Picture, initially on consumer products but now on prosumer and professional digital SLRs. Phottix is one of the first products to take advantage of this technology – now you can remotely see what the camera sees and trigger the shutter as well, all from a distance of up to 100 metres. The system even works in the absence of Live Picture as there is a small camera built into the unit which can look through your viewfinder.

Live View is available on the following cameras (please double check before purchase though!)

Nikon D3x; D3; D700; D300; D90; D5000.
Canon 1Ds MKIII; 1D Mk III; 5D Mk III; 50D; 40D; 20D; 450D.

Seeing how your editor is presently on garden leave from MI6, we trotted round to Ron's with the Hero to avail ourselves of his wellschooled garden birds and also to look at his own bespoke equipment. With a professional background in electronics, soldering gizmos, wires and plugs holds no fears for Ron and he already has a number of remote control devices undergoing development. Using a Maxwell remote Pan-Tilt and a ZigView he is able to sit in the comfort of his conservatory, move his camera around, focus and shoot, all from a £12 garage door remote control – nature photographers are fabled for their ingenuity!

As it turned out, the ability to change the viewpoint was quite critical. We were working with baited perches but the birds knew this full well and spent time on every perch but the one we were focused on with the Hero (which was not moveable). We were rewarded with robins, juvenile robins, wrens, long-tailed tits, blue tits, great tits and magpies dancing on every perch but the one we wanted. The images shown here were all taken after your editor had left the scene – is that telling us something?

The verdict on the Hero for this test at least was that it did the job adequately but it was not possible to have a clear idea of how good the focus of the shot was. We chose to manually focus but really needed a little more control over just where the birds perched. For example a short branch mounted perfectly parallel to the camera back, with the chosen focal plane a bird's breast depth forward of the branch, would help in controlling the bird's position. The bait could then be placed out of shot so that the incoming birds waited their turn on the branch. Providing the bait was closer to, and lower than, the camera, and out of sight, you should also get the opportunity to shoot birds launching themselves off the perch. All this activity is better controlled by the human hand on the camera but as we have said, that might not always be possible for a variety of reasons.

Weddings

The Hero has great potential for the wedding photographer. If access to the altar were limited by the clergy, setting up a remote camera and operating it from the main part of the church is an attractive proposition and should cause no disturbance, providing flash were not used (but the camera is on a tripod anyway). Ron Thomas has already done this for the images shown (above right), shooting simultaneously from the choir loft and the front of the church to comply with the bride's wish to have her train photographed as she made her entrance. The camera would probably need to be set to a manual focus, although the autofocus would work and is not as critical as, say, bird photography or macro.

Other things to do with remote cameras in nature

Sometimes nature photographs are the result of months of planning. This can involve staking out a location when the presence of a species is suspected, but not confirmed. Here field craft is more important than camera craft – knowing what owl pellets and fox spraints look like may be vital to tracking the presence of either (or both!). Sometimes extensive preparatory work is required before you commit time and energy to really staking a place out with a continued presence for night after night or long walks into a location, day after day. Often simple, relatively inexpensive cameras are left on-location, set up to detect motion and start recording at that time only. Only after confirmation of the presence of a species will the naturalist attempt to obtain a quality photograph using remote controlled DSLRs and the like. As with all natural history photography the well-being of the species is paramount and any activity you engage in should be assessed for its impact on the species or even on some other species whose presence you are unaware of. It is impossible to over-labour this point, photographers and overlykeen nature watchers are often the source of distress to wild-life and their behaving badly reflects on everybody.

For the shot below and right, Ron initially used the video detection so that he could get on with other things while keeping half an eye on the about-to-emerge Painted Ladies. This proved to be frustrating; they exit their pupal case in about 30 seconds and one was missed while Ron answered the front door bell! Despite the close surveillance, only one of the 10 pupae was actually recorded performing this magical change.

Unexpected results are sometimes obtained with diligent field-work. Ron set up a camera in his garden to determine whether foxes were visiting. No foxes arrived but the low camera angle provided a slowmo of a snail family setting off from the undergrowth in an unerring, 10-yard straight-line for the fox's bait! Meantime the fox was a no-show!

Badgers have fascinated the general public for hundreds of years, the subject of both legend and children's stories. With nocturnal habits and a keen sense of smell they are only observed by the diligent naturalist. Infrared illumination and detectors have become an inexpensive assistant in the quest, a result of the technologies' use in home security and an upsurge in production to meet that demand. A combination of infrared to detect the mammal, followed by a flash exposure creates an image that was always very difficult to achieve in the days of film. The hedgehog is less disturbed by the presence of humans but is mainly nocturnal as it goes about grubbing up worms from the undergrowth.