Last week I stumbled upon the following video from F-Stoppers about transfering images from your camera to the iPad directly using an Eye-Fi SD card with Wifi.

I’ve noticed the Eye-Fi cards before, but I did not care about wireless transfering the images to my computer. It takes little effort to switch the SDcard from the camera to my computers cardreader and import the photos.
The video above showed a (for me) much more useful feature which is to see the photo taken within 3 seconds on my iPad. This is way better than looking on the camera LCD.

There is an option to directly connect your iPad to the Eye-Fi card which will only work when you are not within reach of a knownWifi network. The Eye-Fi site is not really clear about what happens when you ARE in reach of a known and configured Wifi network (i.e. your own home wireless network). It both works like you expect. Take a photo, wait a couple of seconds and it is shown on the iPad. The direct connection is a little faster then the indirect connection (i.e. when your iPad and Eye-Fi card are connected to a know Wifi network). The benefit of the indirect connection is that you iPad usually already has connection with the network and you have internet access available too.

I don’t use the other functionality of the Eye-Fi card because I have no need for it (yet). I usually first post process my images before posting it to sites like Flickr, so no need to upload them directly from my camera.

 

As an addition to my article about photo workflow on the iPad, I can recommend the camerasync app to automatically copy your photos (JPG and/or RAW) from your iPad to the following external storage providers:

• Dropbox
• MobileMe iDisk
• FTP servers
• Amazon S3
• Flickr
• Box.net

 

I was wondering what kind of benefits I could get from my iPad in combination with my Photography hobby. This is one of the things where I believe the iPad brings me some benefits:

I got an iPad 64GB and a 3rd party camera connection kit (I name it CCK from now on). On Ebay you can get those for less than 10 euro’s (the camera connection kit of course). The CCK allows you to import your JPG and/or RAW files from you SD-Card or using USB cable directly from you camera. For this workflow it is best to set the camera to save a RAW+JPG. Both are imported into the iPad where the JPG is shown in the photo viewer. The JPG is also used to upload the photo to Flickr by i.e. Flickr Studio app. The RAW (and JPG) can be uploaded to Dropbox by using the Dropbox app.

When you shoot in RAW only you will find that during importing the RAW files, a thumbnail JPG is created for you Photo album on the iPad. When using 3rd party apps to send you photo’s to i.e. Flickr, you see that only that tiny thumnail is uploaded. Instead of a high res 12 Megapixel JPG you will find a very small size thumbnail. When shooting in RAW+JPG or JPG only you can send the highres image.

The mindmap below shows the parts connected.

The apps that I have installed are:

- Photosmith – To tag your images and sync with Lightroom !
- Filterstorm - Edit your images
- Snapseed – Quick Tuning
- Colorsplash - Selective color
- Photogene - Edit RAW files
- Flickr Studio – Do all you need with Flickr
- Dropbox - Online Storage

One remark. On the iPad 1 there might be a limit to save your JPG’s at 7.5 megapixel. With the iPad 2 this is 22 megapixel.

A Dropbox account is free and if you use this link, we both get an additional 250 Mb of free storage space. This will give you 2250 Mb instead of 2000 Mb to start with !

Update: Check this post about Camerasync app too!

 

Eric Kim is a passionate street photographer. Daniel Seo made a short movie showing Eric in action.

Street Photography from Daniel Seo on Vimeo.

 

I found this video here. This video shows how a group of people created a huge optical WiFi signal indicator and used it in long exposure photography to create nice pictures. Read the article on Gizmodo for more information.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

 

Randy Halverson has created a nice timelapse video. Shot in RAW format, most shots were 20 seconds exposure F2.8 with 1 second interval between shots, for about 300 frames or so (several hours).

Sub Zero – winter night timelapse from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

 

A nice article on how to photograph interiors:

How to Photograph Interiors – PictureCorrect.

 

LightRoom TreeExporter plugin offers the ability to export a complete folderstructure with contents to a new location with i.e. JPG files while preserving the folder structure.

When you store all your photos in RAW format you might run into the situation that your family members want to view or use the photos without using Lighroom or other RAW capable program.  

Beside my ‘My Pictures’ folder where I store all my RAW photos in a hierarchical folder structure I wanted to create a seperate folder like ‘My JPG Pictures’ where I can store a JPG version of all my RAW photo’s. (this folder is located on a network drive so my family members, but also the Xbox, Mediaplayers, and so on, can access the photos).
The structure of the folders below ‘My JPG Pictures’ should be equal to the folder structure in ‘My Pictures’.

To achieve this in Lightroom you have to create and export each folder (with RAW files) individually which can be a time consuming job. The Lightroom TreeExporter plugin is the solution to do this quickly. You can select a parent folder like ‘My Pictures’ and tell the plugin to export it to ‘My JPG Pictures’. Set the regular export settings like compression, format and so on. It will export all the RAW files to the new location as JPG (when JPG is chosen as export format).

 

With the modern digital camera’s and cheap memory cards, you don’t have to think about the number of photos you take. Just push the shutter button, take 50 photos and the right moment will be captured in one of the 50 pictures. This also makes that you become a little sloppy when taking pictures. Of course you think about the composition and lighting, but hey, you can take many pictures using different settings so you can make it a ‘trial and error’ exercise.

Because of the above issue and because it gives a nostaligic feeling, I decided to buy a second hand SLR using regular film rolls. Those camera’s, which are often still rather advanced pieces of technology, can be bought for 25-50 euro’s on ebay.  The SLR can handle film rolls of up to 36 shots so I should really think about the composition, lighting and focus before I press the shutter. There won’t be a histogram or sample of the photo on a display to check. I have to wait until the roll is developed and printed before I know the results.

Because I already own a Nikon D5000 dSLR,  I looked for a Nikon SLR and found the Nikon F80 (N80 in USA). The camera offers autofocus, lightmetering, and hotshoe for my Nikon SB-26 which I use for Strobist photography. It can also handle the AF-S lenses I have, although most are for DX format sensors while a film SLR is FX format. The image from the lens won’t cover the whole film therefor resulting in a lot of vignetting. I haven’t made a picture yet but the lenses do work.

 

Ever wanted to know how those tiny memory cards like Compact Flash, SD-Cards or USB sticks are made? Lexar has created a video of the production process.