Haje Jan Kamps is a Dutch inventor, author, freelance writer, journalist, photographer and editor. These days he writes for TechCrunch, but he also founded the popular Photocritic photography blog, wrote a series of books about photography, and for starting the Triggertrap company.
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. In 2002, while working at Granada Television, on a Coronation Street specials series, Kamps started a website called Photocritic, which became extremely popular in December 2005, when it was featured on Slashdot, and subsequently got heavy coverage on Digg and dozens of other large blogs. It was later awarded the best DIY photography gadget in Lifehacker. The Photocritic.org photography blog continues to be popular., 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. 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 writer and editorial consultant. He also acts as a guest in different photography competitions. But in 2011, he created Triggertrap, which now commands most of his time.
Product development
In 2011, Kamps created the Triggertrap universal camera trigger, a device based on the Arduinorapid prototyping platform. The Triggertrap connects cameras to various sources, 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. In November 2013, the Triggertrap Ada was successfully crowd-funded via Kickstarter, raising £290,386 though the original goal was £50,000. 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.
