Lomo Mods?

[NathanBell]

I recently bought a couple of Lomography camera's. I bought the FishEye 2 and the Action Sampler.
I have found the fish-eye to be great fun for nights out at the club and out with friends/falily and photographing pets, and I always have it thrown in my bag.
The Action Sampler though is a different story.
Its designed with 4 lenses that fire consequitively 1 after the other by use of a rotating shutter.
For my use (primarily sports, or inside clubs with disco lighing effects) that shutter mechanism rotate's way too fast. It fires all 4 lenses within approx 0.5sec. Does anyone know of a modification or method to slow the rotation of the shutter mechanism down to about 1-2sec?
Maybe putting a battery in with half the voltage?

 

[Akki14]

It's a mechanical shutter so I don't know why a battery would help. If it's controlled by a spring you could try to loosen (or replace) the spring with a slightly longer one to make the shutters go slower but I've not really poked around inside one of those. I only have a cheaper version of the actionsampler called a quadcam which gradually fell apart into pieces and I've not messed around with it since. Actually I seem to recall it making an awful noise like clockwork so it's probably not just a spring but something slightly more complex.

 

[NathanBell]

Yes, mine makes a mechanical noise too.
I had guessed that the battery powered the shutter mechanism aswell as the flash's so chanving voltage may change speed, but if its spring avtivated, there might be some other way of changing it...

I might email Lomo on the off chance that they'll give me some inside info...
I will of course post it up for everyone to use if they do! ha ha.

 

[TracyStorer]

I suspect the sequence speed is also connected to the individual shutter speeds, that is to say, if you slow down the sequence, you'll also have slower individual shutter speeds for each of the four shots. the first camera I saw do this was a Fuji camera in a Hong Kong department store that was for fast action like looking at your golf-swing. (Fuji had several different cameras in different price ranges for Golf enthusiasts....amazing niche market stuff, but obviously, there was money there-this was in the mid '90's)

 

[NathanBell]

I suspect the sequence speed is also connected to the individual shutter speeds

Yeah, I think this too. I maye be able to use a slower film then, although this may eliminate the purpose of having the action sampler in the first place. i.e slowing the shutter speed down may not freeze the action...

 

[TracyStorer]

Exactly......FOUR blurry shots on one frame!