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Wireless Tether Your Camera to an iPad

D-Link DAP 1350 Wireless N Pocket Router (L), New Trent IMP880 battery pack (R) both in front of an Apple iPad

As a photographer and iPad owner it seemed like the obvious route to take was to wirelessly tether my Nikon D300s with my iPad.  No longer would I have to preview my captures on a 3 inch screen located on the back of the camera. No longer would I be physically constrained to my laptop with a 14 foot USB cable.  The iPad could become a really useful part of my professional photography gear.

The Gear

To establish a wireless tethering system required some gear.   The items I used are:

I already had the camera and iPad so I only had to purchase the Eye-Fi card, wireless router and external battery pack.  The external battery pack is optional but in my mind the best system is one that can travel to any location and not have to worry about plugging into a wall for power.

I chose the Eye-Fi Pro X2 because it was the largest card and it could also transfer RAW files.  At the time I didn’t know if I would want to transfer RAW files so I wanted to leave my options open.  Since my Nikon D300s has two card slots I typically shoot with a 4GB CF card and a 16GB SDHC card for backups.  With this option I still change out my CF cards as they fill and the 8GB Eye-Fi card won’t fill up based on how I am now using it.  I’ll explain more about that later.

The D-Link 1350 Wireless N Pocket Router was chosen based the good reviews I read online and I wanted wireless 802.11 n rather than other options that were the older and slower wireless 802.11b/g.  Plus this “pocket” router really could fit in a pocket.

The New Trent external battery pack was something that actually took me a while to find.  The marketplace really doesn’t have many options for small, rechargeable, external battery packs.  Only time will tell how it holds up but based on what I was able to read online and it appears well built so I believe it will do very well.  The battery is lithium and it comes with various other adapters to plug into other electronics devices such as cell phones and iPads.  Size you ask?  It is larger than the D-Link pocket router but still a very small and portable size.

Making It All Work

I charged up the New Trent external battery which appeared to be near full when it arrived so it didn’t take very long to complete charging it full.  While the battery was charging I began configuring the D-Link Wireless N Pocket Router.  This might get a bit technical… I had to configure the router to be a DHCP server so it could hand out an IP address to the iPad and Eye-Fi card.  The best method is to assign a static IP address to each devise so everything can connect quicker because most devises will attempt to use the last IP address they had.  From what I can tell the Eye-Fi card requires a network that can assign IP address so setting up an ad-hock network via a laptop most likely will not work.

The Eye-Fi card needed to first be setup via a computer which was simple.  Install the software then plug in the card and setup the configurations.  I had the advantage of a good understanding of setting up wireless computer networks so I already knew how I was going to configure everything.  The Eye-Fi card can be setup to remember and multiple wireless networks so as you move from the field using the D-Link pocket router to a studio it will automatically switch to using the studio network if it is setup and wirelessly transfer to the studio computer.

The iPad needed a small App that I downloaded from the Apple Store.  The App I used is called ShutterSnitch and is the best way to establish the wireless transfer between the Eye-Fi card and the iPad because it has built in support for working with the Eye-Fi card.  With ShutterSnitch already supporting Eye-Fi cards it made setup really easy and self-explanatory.

With the Eye-Fi card installed in my Nikon D300s DSLR a new camera menu option become available to turn on or off the Eye-Fi wireless transfer.  Prior to using the Eye-Fi card I would use a 4GB CF card and a 16GB SDHC card.  I would shoot in RAW using the CF card as my primary that I would change out as needed and then the 16GB SDHC would be my backup for the entire time.  Now that I was using the Eye-Fi Card and transferring wirelessly I would have to modify my image file formats to make best use of the iPad and wireless transfer.  I kept the CF card as RAW files but changed the Eye-Fi card to receive JPEG format photos from the camera.  The big decision was what size JPEG’s would be big enough for a backup file and still small enough to transfer quickly to the iPad wirelessly.  After trying various JPEG sizes and quality settings I set my Nikon D300s to Medium sized (3216×2136) and Normal quality which would allow for an 8×10 inch print if the JPEG backup was needed.  I found that this JPEG size transferred to the iPad and displayed in less than 15 seconds via ShutterSnitch once it had found the iPad.  Since I am no longer saving RAW files to the SD card slot my size requirements have dramatically decreased.  The 8GB Eye-Fi Pro X2 will have more than enough space for a day of shooting 1,000+ photos and still transferring to the iPad.

This wireless transfer method is “jailbreak free” and you will have no issues with updating software for your iPad which you would if you were to “jailbreak” your iPad.  For more information regarding wireless transfer from your camera to iPad or to read an in depth review about ShutterSnitch check out Rob Galbraith’s site.  He has some good articles about transferring photos to the iPad.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter @asilins

By andrisadmin
Posted in: Photography, Tips
Published: 478 days ago

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