Today on The Slanted Lens, we’re reviewing the NeroTrigger. This hooks on your camera and gives you the option of triggering your camera with a laser, sound, light, or a DIY mode. There’s also an HD mode.
We set up a little demonstration with a flour-filled balloon being shot by a BB gun. It took a little trial and error, but we got some good shots of our balloon being shot. Now, this isn’t exactly anything new; people have made setups before where they could capture high-speed action. However, the NeroTrigger does make this extremely easy and would be a great device to have in your bag.
Thanks for watching. Keep those cameras roll’n and keep on click’n.
Video Transcription
Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens, we’re going to review the NeroTrigger. This is a great little device. It hooks on your camera, just like a pocket wizard on the hot shoe. It gives you the option of triggering your camera with either a laser, sound, light, or there’s a DIY mode on there as well. It also has an HD mode that I haven’t played with very much, but we use this today. We set up a little BB gun and we put a little bit of flour in some balloons, and then we would shoot the balloons and we would time it with our NeroTrigger, so that when the sound went off, the sound of the gun going off, it would catch the BB going through the balloon. It’s pretty amazing, because you can put a delay on there, delay the time that the flash goes after the sound goes, which made it so that we could time the BB to get it in the balloon. It’s a bit of an exact science in that if you move anything a little bit and it changes everything. When you’re delaying your image by milliseconds, it makes a huge difference. How close the gun is to the balloon, how the balloon’s swaying and which direction, makes quite a bit of difference. So with a little bit of trial and error, we shot a lot of BBs through a lot of balloons and we eventually got some where we got to see the balloon exploding and the flour inside. It has a great trigger method called light, so you can have fireworks that go off, any kind of bright flash will create a trigger for the camera, so that’s a great way to use this as well. I love the laser pointer. The laser points straight back at the NeroTrigger and then whenever something passes between the laser and the NeroTrigger, it triggers the camera. Great for doing animals, cars going by, any kind of triggering method where you’re going to have something speed by, this is a great way to catch it. Now again, you can do that kind of situation where you move it, you can delay it, so that it breaks the laser and triggers the camera slightly later. So I took it out to Mono Lake and did some time lapse with it, it’s really nice because you can do anything from long exposure for stars to short exposures for clouds. They’re not our sponsor, I just think it’s a very interesting product that does a lot of things you can use with firing a camera, so it’s worth having in your bag.
We took this on set, like I say, we had our BB gun, our balloons with some flour in them, we set up a black flag as a background, we put a rim light on each side with flex flashes, so a flex flash on camera right and camera left side. That’s going to rim the balloon from both sides. We then put a small softbox up front, that’s going to light the balloon from the front side. Now we start out trying to fire our NeroTrigger and the strobes, using a pocket wizard, that didn’t work. As we researched, and understood it a little better, you put your camera on bulb and you set the NeroTrigger to only fire once, when it hears a sound, then you fire one time, that gives you your shot, then you close the shutter. So it’s the old method of, in a dark room, you’re going to open the shutter, the sound of the gun going off fires the strobe through the NeroTrigger, then you close the shutter, and then you have your image. You do have to do this in a very dark room, it’s probably very easy to do this at nighttime outside, because you just have darkness and you can work out there and have longer exposures and you don’t have to worry about the shutter being open, but we did in inside and it worked out absolutely fine. So you can take a look at some of that footage on how we put together the popping of the balloons, not that it’s anything amazing, a lot of people have made balloons pop and be able to record, it’s just that the Nero trigger now makes this extremely easy to do. Boy, back when I was in art school, guys were building their own shutters with electronics and all kinds of stuff. This is a simple method so you can replicate these kinds of results and you can shoot balloons, you can do water, all those kinds of things it makes it very easy to do. So that’s NeroTrigger. Don’t try this at home.
This month on The Slanted Lens, we’re giving away two portable speed light kits. This is two small octodomes, two stands, two brackets to be able to set up your speed lights, put it in the octodome, and two of the speed rings to be able to set up your octodomes. It comes in this great carrying case so it all goes together. You can put your speed lights in there and you’re ready to go. So we’re giving away two of these, go to TheSlantedLens.com, make sure you sign up to win a portable speed light kit. We’re also selling this portable speed light kit at TheSlantedLens.com. It’ll be at B&H prices and we’ll throw in free a digital download of our DVD series called “Mastering Strobes.” Great information, $79 value, we’re going to add it to this kit if you buy it from TheSlantedLens.com, so make sure you sign up to win and if you don’t win, make sure you purchase it from TheSlantedLens.com