Now, I’ve had Triggertrap mobile on my iPhone for a long time, and for those of you who haven’t seen this, it allows you to use your  iPhone’s sensors (sound, vibration, motion, magnetic field (!), etc ) to. trigger either the on-board camera or a bigger one, via a connecting cable from the phone’s headphone socket to the camera sync port.  It’s great – works well now after a dodgy start and is useful for so many things from timing long exposures automatically (Nikon like most camera manufacturers seem to believe we won’t shoot beyond the times in scope for the exposure meter, which gives out at 30 seconds) to getting proper brackets (more than 1 stop apart).

See here for details:  https://triggertrap.com/products/triggertrap-mobile/

Now, triggering the camera when a loud bang is made (say from breaking glass, a gun, balloon popping etc) is all well and good, but there’s an age or two that passes between the camera getting the signal and the mechanical gubbins (that quite frankly is a hang-over from film) such as mirrors and shutters lumbering into action to take the shot.  So for most of this, all of that has to happen before the sound occurs in a dark room, so the shutter is open and waiting for light – which you then provide from a flash.  To do this, Triggertrap must trigger the flash, not the camera.  You open the shutter on bulb mode, pop the balloon:  the light flashes, and you close the shutter.

So Triggertrap recently announced their “new” product:  the Triggertrap flash adaptor, and talk about it as if they just developed it.  “Great!” thought I and went to order one for £23.  Out of stock said they.  So then I started looking at the pictures of the adaptor, and found you can buy them for £4.29 inc postage new on eBay.

That got me thinking some more, so I ordered a bunch of other random cables for the sockets in play here (3.5mm jack on the flash shoe adaptor, 2.5mm jack on the Triggertrap “dongle” that connects to your phone and the archaic PC-Sync screw in sockets commonly found on flashguns and cameras ).

You see, my Sb-900’s have a sync port, so they don’t need that flash adaptor anyway, so I connected one SB-900 to the Triggertrap dongle with a PC-Sync-to-2.5mm jack cable and set the app for noise triggering.  Now, wired for sound I can click my fingers and the light fires.  Brilliant.  But I use a lot of lights (essential if you need to keep the flash duration low)- how do I connect more?  I connected the phone to my cheap radio trigger and put one Sb-900 on one for the receivers.  It works brilliantly.  I can now fire as many flashes as I have receiver hot-shoes (6 in my case – each receiver has 2 hot-shoes).

So not only has the flash adaptor Triggertrap talk about like it’s a new thing and infer is of their own making; been around for ages, it’s available via eBay for £4 from a variety of shops in HongKong and Shanghai, and is not needed anyway.

You may be glad to hear though that there is some value in the dongle that connects your phone to the camera or flash/trigger:  I opened one of mine and it does indeed contain 2 opto-couplers in a single package and examining the connections on the small board its mounted on confirms there is no electrical connection between the 2, so you cannot harm your iPhone or the radio trigger:  they are isolated.