A new gadget has been added to my collection this week with the exciting arrival of a Bushnell Trophy Trail cam. It is a combined birthday and Christmas present and I am very excited about what it will enable me to do …..
Any of you who watched the fantastic series ‘Lost land of the tiger’ will be familiar with this great bit of kit… it was used to obtain amazing footage proving that tigers do exist in the Himalayas. It is basically a remote camera system… set it up anywhere…. strapped to a tree, on the edge of field, next to a trail… and the camera is triggered by any movement that is detected by the highly sensitive passive Infra-red (PIR) motion sensor. You can set it up to take photos or video when triggered. Some amazing footage from a camera very similar to mine can be seen by following the link below:
More info about the model I chose is here: http://www.the-binoculars-store.co.uk/night-vision/bushnell-night-vision-trophy-cam-8-megapixel-.htm
I used it for the first time last night and decided to set it up at my fox feeding station. I would then be able to get used to how to set it up and I knew that the foxes would definitely come and trigger it. I set it up to take 2 photos each time it was triggered. You can set it to take 1, 2 or 3 images. You can also set the size of image. I chose the highest, at 8MP. When I collected it this morning, it had taken over 500 images!!! You can also set it to mark each photo with the date, time and temperature, which is interesting as well. I selected a few of the better images….
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I am pretty impressed with the quality of the images. If the foxes are moving quickly, then it is blurred, obviously, but the clarity is pretty impressive. The IR is pretty powerful and blows out the image a bit if they come too close, but I loaded some images into CS2 (photo manipulation program) and was able to recover some of the really bright areas.
Tonight I can going to try the video option. Again, you can choose the size of the video and also how long it will video once it has been triggered. My mind is working overtime thinking of all the different places I can place this fantastic bit of kit…. on all the trails I have found around the fields and garden, on my tawny boxes, on my barn owl boxes….. the list is endless, so watch this space for more news as I begin to use this camera around my patch.
As I am getting so much kit around the garden and local area now, I found that this blog was not very helpful to new visitors and has its limitations. For this reason, I have decided to build a website that will run alongside my blog. This blog will still carry on as a diary of what I am doing, but the website will be more information about the camera systems I have set up and more about specific projects I am involved with. It is not complete yet, but do take a look:
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