The only downfall of his solution, was that it is for Ubuntu. I am a Mac user, and I am sure that using Darwin Ports and some trickery, I could get his solution to work on my Mac, but for the average user, that is a bit too hard, which led me to believe there must be an easier way for “normal” Mac users.

After some research, I found that there is a framework (CoreAudio) that could be used in a native Cocoa App but it still would require a bit of development to get it to listen to the microphone and trigger an event when a certain decibel level or sound wave length is reached.

So I scoured the internet a bit more, and via some blog posts, I found a shareware program called Audiocorder. Essentially, it has the recording requirement built in and when using the required VOX mode, if the microphone picks up any noise that is longer than your defined trigger length, it will record that sound to the application’s containing folder.

Using the Open Source Icarus Camera Control for Mac, I was able to connect my camera to my Mac and control the camera from my Mac. There are other software options that are available, including Adobe’s Lightroom, which has tethered shooting, but for the purpose of this test, Icarus works.

Unlike the Audiotrigger python script in Paul’s example, Audiocorder doesn’t allow for a shell script, or Applescript to be run when the trigger conditions are met, so I proceeded to try other options.

I eventually wrote a small Applescript based on some of the examples I had found online and was able to get my camera to shoot via Icarus using Audiocorder.

Now as you can see there is a slight delay between the trigger and the shot being taken, and that is due to the fact that the actual sound trigger is not triggering the capture. The Applescript monitors the Audiocorder folder, and the moment a new file is written, it then triggers the capture.

I am going to research this a bit more and try see if I can hook into the Audicorder app to see if it triggers any processes that I can tap into to speed it up. This obviously won’t work for high-speed captures, like popping balloons and the like, but its a step in the right direction.

This is still not a simple solution, but without actually developing a full blown Cocoa app I can’t see a simple solution. That said, Icarus is Open Source and the source code is provided on download, so the tethering is sorted. I can imagine, and I will look into this a bit later when I have some free time, but forking the development and adding an audio trigger capture mode is definitely a possibility.

As a photographer, the beauty and simplicity of the portrait never fails to amaze me. The depth, story and emotion, that something so evidently “simple” portrays, makes it one of my favourite genre’s of photography.

I have a few favourites, who I consider to be brilliant portrait photographers, but every now and then you come across something, or someone, that has managed to not only capture all of the above, but combined it with another passion that I share. The core of what makes me proud to be South African – our diversity.

Portrait of a Nation, is a personal project of Cape Town Photographer, Andrew Brauteseth and through his project he is trying to promote that very core using the simplicity of the portrait.

I have had an account with Virb for almost 4 years now, but never really used it how it was intended, but the new features appealed to me, plus I really love the simplicity of their theming engine.

I use Flickr for hosting most of my photos and the seamless integration between Virb and Flickr was a big win for me. That one feature overcomes the lack of some features and plugins, which WordPress, my standard CMS of choice is well known for, but so far I haven’t come across any bottlenecks. So thanks Virb.

While redesigning this, I have also relocated the domain, to a more prominent .com domain. There is no reason for it, other than personal preference.

Keep your eye’s peeled for some more up to date blogging and shooting this year.

Happy 2011.