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The optional "shutter jack" allows you to trip the shutter with one sensor and fire the flash with another sensor.

The Time Machine can be configured to trip a camera shutter or fire an electronic flash. You can also fire the flash after every shutter click ("force flash") or fire the flash in advance of the shutter ("pre-flash"). Some people have requested the abilty to trigger the shutter with one sensor and fire the flash with another sensor.

A typical application for this is the photography of water drops and splashes. Let's suppose you have a water drip set up and you want to photograph the drop as it hits a surface. You can do this in a dark studio and configure the Time Machine to trigger on the falling drop and fire the flash at the right instant. You could open the shutter manually before the drop falls, or you could have the Time Machine open the shutter and fire the flash with the "force flash" function.

But this may leave the shutter open longer than is absolutely necessary.

We can add a jack for an additional shutter sensor. With this shutter jack, an optical "shutter" sensor can be placed above the optical "flash" sensor. The camera is placed in bulb exposure mode. When the falling drop passes the first sensor, the Time Machine will open the camera shutter. When the drop reaches the second sensor, the Time Machine will begin the countdown (if any) to trip the flash. As soon as the flash has fired, the Time Machine will close the shutter. In this way the shutter is open for the minimum amount of time and closes as soon as the exposure is made.

The optional shutter jack can be added to the Time Machine at a small additional cost, and includes an optical sensors to make use of it. Note that the shutter jack won't work with the microphone or vibration sensors.

 

The optional shutter jack