Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

This is what the final product will look like. Two D300s, mounted as close as possible, sync’d metering, focus, flash, and shutter. Rig cost: Less than 30 dollars! Of course you are going to need two d300s and paired lenses, primes or zooms with a wide rubberband spanning them if you are really hardcore. Keep in mind, the intraoccular is 13.5cm, this is a tad more than double the normal human width, but it’s the best we can do with the d300 [horizontal].

Creating the Camera Bar

This mainly involves you going to the local hardware store with your D300 and looking at the different L-brackets available. It’s really critical that you get the cameras as close as possible, so mounting one upside down is preferable. It may look weird, but heck, it already looks weird; might as well go full retard.

I usually get an extra part for the buttons, because they will need to be somewhere that you can easily reach

Creating the Cabling

Nikon cables with Nikon 10-pin connectors aren’t cheap! The MC-22, MC-23, MC-25, or MC-30 are all over 60 dollars! I bought remote shutter cables at DealExtreme.com. I wanted to make my own switch, and also be able to use my GPS, and change the intraoccular, so the below describes that setup. If you just want to sync two identical cams, the fastest way is to buy a knock-off MC-23, which is the JJ MA-23 or JJ MR-23. I bought two JueYing RS-N1 remote shutters and cut them up. [$6 each]

I only labeled the pins most people would be interested in, for a more in depth pin-out that covers more than AE/AF and shutter (GPS, etc), have a look here. I decided to use molex connectors from RC cars, they make some good ones that are sealed/water-resistant and not too expensive.

So the cables have a pretty short lead. This so that I can connect them as single, double, have an intraoccular as wide or as short as any cable I make.. The next thing is to wire these to a set of AF/AE and shutter buttons.

Black focuses/meters and red is the shutter release. It’s not easy to find buttons that have two press states: half press and full press. If you see above, shutter is the combination of AF/AE, ground, and shutter. This is before the heat shrink is set in place.

Altogether

So that should be it. Here’s my first photo with sync’d metering, focus, flash, and shutter. They can even do bursts at high speed. Next post I will try to look into the software side, and take a look at lens distortion, vignetting, and other issues.