Camera Extension Light Controller
Challenges.
Doing photoshoots can be challenging even for professional photographers. They have to take pictures at the right moment. Sometimes trying to get the right moment is very difficult. They need to give instructions to the model, make them stay still, and also adjust the environment to capture the right moment. Adjusting the environment meanwhile trying to focus to their camera can be burdensome.
Photographers love their cameras. While doing the photoshoots, they just want to focus on their cameras. But at the same time, they also have to make an adjustment for their surroundings. Controlling the light and trying to focus on their cameras is an obstacle. Below is the empathy mapping to figure out the main problem that photographers have.
Goal.
How might we help photographers to control light sources while doing photoshoots.
Solutions.
Interaction
The photographer can change color lights and the brightness of the studio lights. They can change the color lights using buttons. Each button indicates different color that indicate the light colors. For the brightness, they can change it with a knob-like controller. Since every camera has main dial which looks and works like a potentiometer, I decided to make a knob-like controller looked like the main dial. That way, the users are already familiar with how it would work because they have a mental model of using camera.
This extension is very handy and simple enough to make the user not to think when they use it. Using this extension, users only have to focus on their camera, without thinking of external object to adjust their surroundings.
Design
There would be 3 buttons to control color lights, each color will be controlled by one button. Also, there would be a main dial-like controller to control the brightness. This addons/extension then can be attached directly to the camera.
Technology
I used Arduino MKR1000 as a microcontroller. It’s very small and powerful to connect the microcontroller to the lights using wireless connection. To connect to the lights, I used DMX DM-512 protocol.
The Takeaways.
Design thinking is very important to make a product that can be very useful. Starting from a user research to find out the real problem and putting myself in user’s shoes is very helpful to create empathy to design the solution. To make a product that people love, I also had to carefully consider how user would interact with the product. For this camera extension, I didn’t want people to focus on it. Meanwhile, I want them to more focus on their cameras. That way, the interaction had to be simple and the features had to be easy to remember. As for the design, it had to be ergonomic enough to make user felt comfortable to use it.
Photographers love their cameras. When they are doing photoshoots, they also tend to focus on their cameras. On the other side, it’s such a burdensome to control studio lights when they are doing photoshoots. This camera extension is made to make them easier to control studio lights for photoshoots. It’s handy and can be attached directly to the camera.
Role
Development
Interaction Designer
Arduino, Prototyping
Project Type
Individual
Timeline
2/28/2018 - 3/7/2018
Link