Tether To An iPad Wirelessly

As with most photographers in the Bay Area we take a particular interest in new technology that promises to make life easier for us.  There have definitely been a few game changers lately - iPhone and iPad being two of them. But one product in particular, not only stands up to it's promise, it actually blew us away!

The Eye-Fi memory card is a standard looking Secure Digital memory card in a 4GB or 8GB configuration.  You stick it in your digital camera and it works the same as you would expect any SD card to work - storing files and all. The genius of the technology however is the Wi-Fi radio built into the card itself!  What this allows you to do is leverage an existing Wi-Fi network to wirelessly stream the photos from your camera to a desktop, laptop or yes... an iPad.

We ordered an Eye-Fi Connect X2 4GB card recently and wanted to see how useful it would be to shoot images to our iPad in a real-world, professional environment.  Would it be as cool as Lee Morris showed us in his FStoppers YouTube video? Would we be able to use it in the studio as a new proofing tool?  Let's find out!

The good news is the Eye-Fi card definitely performed as advertised and provided us with some nice "cool factor" points. The bad news is that it won't replace tethering to your workstation for professional studio shooting.

We purchased the basic Connect X2 card which gave us 4GB storage capacity and 802.11n wireless transfer speeds.  If you spend a little more you get other nice options like Geo Tagging and Direct Mode capability.  Eye-Fi recently announced that the Direct Mode feature will be available to ALL X2 cards with a firmware update sometime soon.  That'll be nice because what that will allow us to do is create a small 'virtual' network just between the card and the iPad instead of having to rely on an existing Wi-Fi network.

So how did it work?  Well before you can use the card you have to sign up for an Eye-Fi account and configure the card to work with an existing Wi-Fi network.  Apparently the network configurations are stored on the card so the cards have to be configured with the desktop software first.  The configuration was quick and simple enough however it must be done every time you change networks.  This could be a real pain if you plan on using public Wi-Fi networks.  Our recommendation on this is to bring your own wireless network.  We used an Apple Airport Express for this purpose.  You don't need an internet connection, just an active Wi-Fi network.

The partner in crime to this wireless solution is the ShutterSnitch app for iPad.  Neither Eye-Fi or Apple make an application for listening to the Eye-Fi card so that's where 2ndNature software filled the gap with their ShutterSnitch app for iPad and iPhone. It's a $15.99 purchase from the iTunes App Store but it's in version 2.0.2 now so apparently there's enough of a user base that 2ndNature keeps the app updated.  The app is simple in design and does what you expect.  You can create Collections and within the Collection you can view images, thumbnails and zoom in/out on images.  It even adds a few interesting features like alerts if your images don't match customized criteria like shutter speed or ISO.  Kinda neat!

Now here's the rub - It's slow!  We tried various configurations and found that if we shot anything other than Small JPG's it was painfully slow to transfer the images.  The transfers were consistent however and if the transfer lagged for any reason it was good about keeping in sync with what was shot.  Initially we were nervous that that ShutterSnitch was missing images but sure enough, every image shot was transferred eventually.  We used the card in the Canon 1d Mark III which contains a CF slot and SD slot and allows us to save different image sizes to each slot.  We were able to shoot RAW images to the CF slot and Small JPG's to the SD slot which would be transferred to the iPad.  It took 4-6 seconds on average to transfer an image wirelessly.

So is it useful?  That depends on what you need.  It's fun for Art Directors to sit back in a comfy chair and review images at their leisure instead of hovering over your shoulder or the shoulder of your digital tech.  It's useful for lighting assistants or stylists to be able to review their work in almost real-time.  It's great for "chimping" while you setup because a 9" LCD is always better than a 3" LCD. Where this technology really shined for us was while shooting time-lapse images of San Francisco. When it was 40 degrees outside, we could monitor the camera from inside our warm car.

Ultimately this is just another tool in our toolbox and will come out when the tool is right for the job. I think what this technology does best is provide another window into the digital workflow.  It adds a new collaborative tool to the process where, during a shoot, the photographer and other creatives can gather around the screen and discuss in real-time how the shoot is progressing.  For us, anything that helps the creative process in this way is a great thing!

UPDATE: April 20, 2011

The guys at Eye-Fi have made their Connect X2 cards even BETTER!  They've added the "direct mode" feature available to all users of the X2 card via a firmware update.  This now gives us the ability to send photos from the camera to the iPad without an existing WiFi network.  Yes that's right, the card itself can now act as it's own wireless access point.  If there are no "remembered" WiFi networks in range the card will start it's own wireless network which the iPad can connect to and recieve images.  The new firmware update even extends the wireless range and improves the reliability.