🚀 go-pugleaf

A friend and I have some ideas for photographs using the "painting with
light" technique.  In short, this involves taking a completely dark
room full of interesting objects, opening the shutter, and popping a
flash multiple times from various angles.  The hard part here is not to
catch your own image or shadow in the picture.

Well, I have an idea.  A friend of mine works in a photo lab and grabbed
the guts of a dozen of those throwaway cameras with built-in flash.
So I now have 12 identical little flash circuits, each running on its
own AA battery.

What I'd like to do is position these tiny flashes all around the room,
then fire the first flash manually.  The other flash circuits would detect
this main flash and delay for a preset interval before firing.  That is,
the first flash would fire 1 sec after the main flash, the second would
fire 2 seconds after the main flash, etc.

I'm looking for advice on how to wire these up.  I figure I can
just use an RC circuit on each one to get the desired delay.  The two
main problems are:

     1) detecting the main flash, which may be very faint, depending
        on the placement of each auxilliary unit.  If anyone can think
        of an easier way using sound, say from a cap gun or something,
        I'm open to suggestions.

     2) discharging the flash capacitor (200uF?) without frying
        components left and right.  Are there SCR's that can handle this
        directly, or should I plan on using little relays?


Any help would be appreciated.  Schematics or references to related articles
would be terrific.


Thanks,

Mark Fontana