Haje Jan Kamps

Haje Jan Kamps testing his triggertrap with Nikon D40

Haje Jan Kamps (May 21, 1981) is a Dutch inventor, author, freelance writer, journalist, photographer and editor.

These days he writes for TechCrunch,^[1] but he also founded the popular Photocritic photography blog, wrote a series of books about photography, and for starting the Triggertrap company.

Short bio

Born in Leiderdorp, South Holland to parents Hielke Kamps and Lizeth Rovers, Haje moved to Norway in 1988 when he was seven years old, and to the UK in 2001 when he was nineteen. In England, he studied Journalism at Liverpool John Moores University, and started a stint working in publishing and media.^[2] He now lives in San Francisco, California

Media career

In 1998 when he was sixteen, Kamps discovered that there weren't any decent websites about photography in Norwegian, and decided that he could do better. He, together with Martin Lexow Wirak, started Digitalkamera.no, a major Norwegian technology news and reviews website about digital photography which later evolved into akam.no.^[3][4]

In 2002, while working at Granada Television, on a Coronation Street specials series,^[5] Kamps started a website called Photocritic, which became extremely popular in December 2005, when it was featured on Slashdot,^[6] and subsequently got heavy coverage on Digg^[7] and dozens of other large blogs. It was later awarded the best DIY photography gadget in Lifehacker.^[8]

The Photocritic.org photography blog continues to be popular.,^[9] but was purchased by Sterling Publishing, and is now hosted at Pixiq, where Kamps posts regularly.

In 2007, Kamps wrote a book on macro photography for John Wiley & Sons publishing, entitled Macro Photography Photo Workshop (ISBN 978-0470118764). He has worked at Future Publishing as web editor for Fast Car Magazine and T3 magazine, and then as a senior producer at Five, the British TV channel. At Five, Kamps was the senior producer on the highly successful FiveFWD website.

Kamps still works as a freelance (ghost-)writer and editorial consultant.^[10] He also acts as a guest in different photography competitions.^[11] But in 2011, he created Triggertrap, which now commands most of his time.

Product development

In 2011, Kamps created the Triggertrap universal camera trigger,^[12] a device based on the Arduino rapid prototyping platform. The Triggertrap connects cameras to various sources (light, laser, sound, or any other arbitrary source), and can be used to trigger the camera on a certain event. The Triggertrap project was successfully crowd-funded via the Kickstarter platform in July 2011, raising $77,262 - more than 3 times over its original $25,000 goal.^[13]

In November 2013, the Triggertrap Ada was successfully crowd-funded via Kickstarter, raising £290,386 though the original goal was £50,000.^[14] On 2 March 2015, Triggertrap announced that they had failed to bring the product into production and that only the remaining 20% of the funds from the Kickstarter campaign would be returned to the original backers.^[15][16][17]

Bibliography

Books written

• Macro Photography Photo Workshop (ISBN 978-0470118764 / Published 2007)
• Focus on Photographing People (ISBN 978-0240814698 / Published 2011)^[18]
• Creative EVIL Photography (ISBN 978-1454703488 / Published 2012)
• The Rules of Photography (and when to break them) (ISBN 978-1908150585 / Published 2012)
• Focus on Travel Photography (ISBN 978-0240823911 / Published 2012)
• Shooting Yourself: Self-Portraits with Attitude! (ISBN 978-1781579947 / Published 2013) / Published as Selfies in 2014 with ISBN 978-1440334627
• The Ilex Introduction to Photography (ISBN 978-1781579862 / Published 2013)

Other book credits

• Project editor: Lights, Camera, Capture! by Bob Davis (ISBN 978-0470549537 / Published 2010)
• Technical editor: HDR Photography Workshop by Pete Carr and Robert Correll (ISBN 978-0470549537 / Published 2009)
• Technical editor: Creative Close-ups by Harold Davis (ISBN 978-0470527122 / Published 2009)
• Technical editor: Digital Field Guides: Exposure by Alan Hess (ISBN 978-0470534908 / Published 2009)
• Contributing Photographer: Photos that Inspire by Lynne Eodice (ISBN 978-0470119556 / Published 2007)

References

External links

• Haje's Photocritic photography blog.
• Haje's Medium.com blog