Sensor for camera trap--no luck with PING/PIR/X-Band

Hello,

I do field work in a remote part of Alaska with lots of bears, and I'm trying to build a camera trap to get some high quality images of them. I picked up 3 parallax sensors, a PIR, x-band, and ping. It's been smooth sailing getting these sensors to trigger my camera via the Uno, but none of them seem well suited for my application. I want something analogous to a trip wire, so that when an animal enters the focus plane of the camera, the shutter is triggered. The PIR and x-band seem to trigger randomly and their cone of detection is very broad. I have two flashes firing externally with the shutter, and I worry these false triggers will scare bears off before they get in the plane of focus. I was excited about the Ping, but I've had the opposite problem. I used the code on this site and played with the timing parameters, but I just can't get the sensor to reliably detect objects beyond ~3 ft- occasionally the farther test subjects register in the distance measures, but usually the sensor just keeps spitting out 144".

I could really use some advice. Is this normal behavior for the Ping? Is there a way to focus the PIR and x-band to produce a narrow beam?

Is there another cheap sensor option our there? I would love to have a laser beam that fired the trigger when interrupted, but all the setups I've seen so far don't look like they'd work for in the field.

Thanks a lot for any advice.

Jonny

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