Dimming the lights

Testing the Bushnell at night.

The Bushnell Trophy is a nicely designed little trail cam.

In fact, it's so little it's actually cute.

Its 32 infra-red LEDs reach out as far as 45' to dimly reveal the skulking monster buck that deer hunters dream of.

Trail cams are designed to have considerable flash range.

Bright IR lighting however is a problem at close range, especially if the trophy you seek to photograph is a 4 to 12 inch small mammal.

I decided to try to dim the IR LEDS for close-up subjects.

I reduced the number of exposed LEDS with black electrician's tape, and walked up to the cam as it snapped pictures.  

Three variants of blocking the LEDS. 

Even with 1/3rd of the LEDs blocked my image was overexposed at a distance of about 8 feet.

The bright central area is apparently designed
for photographing animals in the distance.

I moved the camera to the shed and made an obstacle course for the deer mice that dance and relieve themselves on the work bench every night,.

It's like a moonless night in there, and it smells like a rodent latrine, not that that has anything to do with the subject.

Covering the flash with opaque electrican's and camo tape dimmed the flash so much that the mice looked like shadows in the shadows.

The home-made filter with holes punched for the
ambient light sensor and motion indicator.

Even so, there was an annoying bright spot in the center of the photos.

Next I made a filter to diffuse the light.

I covered a piece of fly screen with translucent white plastic on one side and white closed-cell plastic tissue (the kind used for packaging) on the other side.

This dimmed and diffused the light sufficiently to see what the mice were actually doing -- they were dancing a jig.

The fixed focal length of the plastic lens doesn't give a sharp image by any means, but it's good enough for closeup pictures between 2-3 feet.

If I can figure out how to edit the footage I'll show you some video of the mice in the obstacle course.