DIY: Quartz camera trigger timer for time lapse photography

Time lapse photography lets you capture and speed up the slow movement which you normally wouldn't notice.

Take movement of clouds for instance.
With your ordinary DSLR you can set a long exposure which would be sufficient to capture a short period of time just before sunrise or after the sunset.

Here's an animation I took a few weeks ago:



But what happens when you want to make a time lapse animation in mid-day?
— With plenty of light your camera will start taking multiple frames per second, which you don't need.

Obviously I didn't want to pay for an off the shelf product. I started a search for a timer. I think one of the solutions on the net was to use a graphic calculator and rig it up to your trigger.. too complex, and the calculator is way too big and expensive.

So what's the most common timer you can get your hands on?
— Quartz clocks, easy. They have a 1 second timer inside, which is wired to an electro-magnet, which moves the mechanism. They are cheap too, and you've probably got one.

To make it work, you need to extract the complete circuit board, including the battery connections and the electromagnetic coil (tube with a lot of wire wrapped around it).

Image from here http://www.mridout.force9.co.uk/ecw/quartzmodern.htm

Now think twice before doing the following, as it can potentially damage your camera:
You need to disconnect the coil and wire it up to your camera trigger. It might be a good idea to add a diode to the circuit to consume some of the power fed to the camera.

There are plenty of instructions how to make the camera trigger cables on the net.


When I was making mine, I added a power jack from an old bt modem, so I could connect things to the trigger cable. It worked neatly with the Quartz timer.