After looking at various ways to show stock items in a better format for our ecommerce sites we thought it would be good to have 360 rotating images of the items.

Commercial systems to do this cost thousands and as we already have a Manfrotto 300N Panoramic Head for my tripod we decided to use this to make a round table top to use on the panoramic head.

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A DIY optical camera flash or camera trigger using a laser and basic timer circuit.

I have always enjoyed trying to take water drop photos but getting the flash and camera to trigger at the right moment by hand was always very difficult.

After researching commercial (very expensive) and various DIY triggers which activate via a light beam, infrared or sound, I decided to try to make a trigger which would fire a remote flash using a red laser as the light source.

I found a lot of very useful info on www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Triggered-High-Speed-Photography/ regarding timer circuits an I was able to adapt and add modify a circuit posted on the website to use an optical isolator to trigger my external flash unit.

Parts List:

• Stripboard
• 1 x Photodiode
• 1 x Red Laser module 5V (this came from a gun sight but the laser from a laser pen should be ok)
• 1 x 556 timer chip
• 1 x High Voltage optical isolator
• 2 x 1M 22 turn variable resistor
• 2 x 1K 1/4 watt resistor
• 1 x 22K 1.4 watt resistor
• 2 x 120R 1.4 watt resistor
• 3 x 1uF 35V Electrolytic Cap
• 1 x 10uF 35V Electrolytic Cap
• 4 x 100n Ceramic Cap

The prototype circuit board

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