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- [JP] Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan. Today on The Slanted Lens,
we're going to review the Nero trigger. 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 Nero trigger, 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 Nero trigger and then whenever something passes between the laser and the
Nero trigger, 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 Mona 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 Nero trigger 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 Nero trigger 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
Nero trigger, 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 Nero trigger.
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
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