From trekking my camera bag (aka backpacking a picture window) around many places with me I collect a variety of interesting images. Many although pretty or unusual, don’t warrant a blogging about them by themselves. Or sometimes when reviewing images taken in the past I come across a picture that I haven’t shown for one reason or another.

Tasty Tuesdays draw from my collection of out takes, snaps on a street, or photo taken long ago and brought up from the bowels of my light room catalogue.
These pictures won’t be posted on my blog (save this first image and blog to get the ball rolling). To follow Tasty Tuesdays follow me on Twitter. *Click*

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EDIT:
Before I get to the second blog post i’ll update with TastyTuesday 2. Shot in July but not previously seen.

For readers who aren’t photographers, or interested in the technical workings on photography this blog post might not be as interesting till the end. This is a tutorial on how to make your own Pocket Wizard to Button trigger Cable.

I have been interested in doing more self portrait photography, specifically in the sports I love. Previous to now i have been using a self timer and guessing, or the intervalometer and racking up my shutter actuation count, neither are precise or good ways to be doing this. I bought some PW-10 cords which connect a pocket wizard to the camera while keeping it ‘awake’ to trigger the camera wirelessly. Click for Flash zebra Nikon-PW pre-trigger cables. I purchased these as there would be much more technical workings, and I’m not a tremendously competent electrician.

I tried shooting some self portraits on my mountain bike with a PW ziptied to the handle bar, however it made triggering with my thumb really awkward while riding, as well as hiding the antenna behind my handlebar getting tons of misfires. The solution was making a button which I could use to trigger the PW more comfortably and consistently.

What you need
Soldering Gun
Electrical Soldering Wire
Electrical tape
MONO Miniphone jack with it’s wire (length specific to your own use)
Push Button Switches
Time: Took me about 30 min, i’ve soldered twice before (faster or slower depending on your skill level)

The cord once finished will be a button, length of cord, and miniphone jack which goes into the ‘camera flash’ port on you PW II. In pocket wizards the electrical pulse required to trigger the flash is supplied by the PW and waiting to be connected, so all we need to be doing is ‘closing the switch’ which lets the electrical pulse finish the circuit and trigger your PW. This is great cause it makes our job easy, we just have to close the switch.

When you go to purchase the stuff you need pay attention to which type of button you get. I bought my supplies from the Source (used to be Radio Shack) many other stores should have the things you need. I bought ‘Momentary Push Button Switches’ which means that when the button is pushed the circuit is only complete for a fraction of a second, and after that (even if the button is still depressed) the circuit will not be complete and the camera will only fire the initial time triggered. This works well if your looking for a single exposure and thats it.
If you are going to be shooting sequences and want for camera to be continually triggering you are going to be looking for a button which connects the circuit connected as long as the button is depressed. Your choice depending on your purposes

Step by Step

1: Cut the Miniphone cable at the length you want (again this is Mono, not stereo). Mine is about a foot and a half long. Then cut back the rubber/plastic around the outside of the cord about an inch revealing the internals of the cord (shown below, shot these pictures doing the ‘turn the lens backwards and shoot’ method which gives you the idea, but they aren’t purdy)

When you open the cable you will see a whole bunch of free wire wrapped around an insulated internal wire. Collect the wire from the outside and twist it into a single wire, then cut away the internal insulation exposing the second wire. It is important to keep the two wires separated from each other, because if they are in contact they will complete the circuit and your PW/camera will be firing continually.

2: Connect one wire to each side respectively. Once each side is on, tack with solder. Again keeping the sides from joining to prevent your PW/camera from continually firing. It is not important which side of the wire is connected to which side of the button, we will be simply completing the circuit so which way the button is oriented is irrelevant.

3: Once the sides are connected and tacked nice and securely use the electrical tape to cover and isolate the exposed metal bits, I made a point of wrapping one of the wires completely before closing everything to ensure it was isolated and couldn’t cause misfires or continuos connections.

And thats it, plug the jack into the ‘camera flash’ port on your PW II (I assume anyone using Multimax can figure out how to use something like this), make sure the PW is set to ‘both’ or ‘camera flash’ and trigger away.

The resulting images are below, taken on a trip to Glacier National Park in the US. Both shot using said button-cable, d300, tripod.

** a little side note i’ve been looking at doing this for a while, however seeing some work a photographer Chad Spector put up of his MTB self portraits got me off my butt to put my plans into action.

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When was your last throwback to elementary level alliteration?

The same day I was shooting the Paskapoo Downhill Rodeo Nathan called me up asking if I wanted to head out and shoot some mountain biking at Moose Mountain just outside of calgary. Obviously as you are reading this I went along to shoot, even though I was bike-less, I just walked the trails instead. All of these images are from a trail called T-W (well actually is called coughthat-whorecough, don’t tell my mother). The trail had been previously destroyed by rain as it was built straight down a creek bed, but now is in much better shape.

The meadow on T-W is one of the more beautiful places i’ve ridden on a downhill MTB trail, but I don’t need to tell you that.

I was trying out a different way of lighting; instead of just a six foot light stand I had one of the riders hold the stand above their head turning it into a 14+ foot stand which provided lighting which i found to be very pleasing and appearing quite a bit less fabricated than light from beside/below him. (yes, i do have another flash which isn’t in the air, but you still get the idea)

During the evening we also met a guy doing the hike-a-bike on Moose Mountain (you can drive right to the top on a forestry service road for all of us lazy city folk. Props to the riders who put out that kind of effort for their rides.