Tethered Shoot with iPad
When doing a photoshoot you almost never want to judge your photos on the LCD at the back of camera. But most often you do not want to carry a computer with you, just to display the images you took.
The solution
There is a simple and rather inexpensive solution to this problem: The iPad in combination with an Eye-Fi SD-card. The Eye-Fi card creates a wireless network that the iPad is connected to. Using the app “ShutterSnitch” you can get the card to transmit your photos directly to your tablet. If you need more information, you may want to watch the quick explanation by fstoppers.com.
... but there is a problem.
But that really isn‘t a solution for those among us that use (professional) DSLR cameras with compact flash cards. Of course you can use an SD-to-CF adapter, but there is a lot of people who are reporting this combination as not working properly.
Option two is a camera grip with an integrated wireless file transmitter - in case you are using Canon cameras you will have to spend about 700 Euro. But even if you want to spend that amout of money, it is rather inprobable that you will be able to connect your camera to the iPad on that way.
The idea
So as a Canon photographer with a CF card camera you can try the adapter with eye-fi combination, but spending 100 Euro on something that would work very unreliable and possibly lose my photographs is no solution for me at all.
To make it clear: I do not have a working solution at the moment, so the following things are just a concept at the moment.
Raspberry Pi is a project that is building a fully-functional computer with the size of a cigarette pack for a very low price, which is $35 (~26 Euro). This little thing inspired me, and I can‘t wait to get my hands on such a device. My plan is basically to connect the Raspberry Pi to my Canon camera via USB and attach it on some way to the DSLR.
Technical stuff
I would write a piece of software that would realize the tethering (gPhoto should help a lot) and transmit the .jpg files to „ShutterSnitch“ on the iPad while keeping all the RAW files on the compact flash card. On that way the compressed pictures would quickly be transmitted to the tablet while saving your pictures onto your card, so they can‘t get lost during wireless transmission.
To realize that project I will need a Raspberry Pi (Version B would be better because of the bigger RAM), a two port USB hub, a short USB cable, a USB wi-fi dongle, four AA batteries and a case for all that stuff (maybe an old camera grip).
The cost for the hardware (excluding the case) would be around 50 Euro, which seems pretty reasonable for a device that transports your files with up to 150 Mbps to the tablet.
Got interessted?
I certainly know that this idea is somewhat nerdy, but nevertheless I believe it could really help a lot of us. Raspberry Pi should be available soon, so if you want to get more information - stay tuned!
