mattw.fn_blog()

For the majority of the year, I used the Eye-Fi in my Nikon D50, but in the last month, I’ve upgraded to a D200.

The Eye-Fi does not *officially* work in CF cameras, but all you need to do is get a SD-CF adapter. You need to tear the metal cover off of the adapter, or it will block the antenna. Needle-nose pliers or a butter knife should work fine. It’s just a little glue.

The Eye-Fi can work in a couple of different ways. The card automatically sends JPGs to your local machine, or a variety of online services. in my case, Flickr. It does not transfer RAW, nor does it auto-delete images off of the card.

I’m OK with not having auto-delete. Network and server reliability aside, it’s nice to have your originals under your control. Auto delete might be a nice option for stuff I didn’t care about, but I rarely find myself not caring about the pictures I’m taking.

At first, not having RAW support bothered me, but after using the card for a while and understanding how it all fits in with my workflow, I’m OK with it. I shoot RAW+JPG, and I tend to shoot a lot of pictures. I shoot with manual lenses, so my trash:keeper ratio is pretty high. When I’m shooting I will look through them on-camera and take out the obvious blurry pictures, but when I’ve filled up, I pop my card in a computer to get the originals off. During the shoot, and when powered by the computer, the card transfers pictures in the background.

This changes my workflow in a couple of different ways.

Generally, JPGs are on Flickr by the time my RAW transfer is finished. This pushes the resizing, tagging and adding titles/comments to an interface I like (and as a bonus, a CPU and disk that aren’t mine). I haven’t mastered lightroom, and I have a feeling that I never really will. I will probably end up cutting it out of my workflow entirely once I figure out a better way to grab my RAWs and put them on my RAID. Right now it’s a convoluted process and it’s far from efficient. Because my pictures are already online I can do a quick check and delete of the stuff online, before lightroom finishes importing. This leads to more stuff being posted. I’ve found if a picture is posted online, doesn’t suck too bad and doesn’t need any tweaks, it stays. If it does needs further modification, I can either change it in lightroom and use ‘replace’, or for really quick mods, use Picnik. Prior to the Eye-Fi, I had to transfer all my pictures (go get some coffee or something), go through them all (sometimes spending far too much time trying to make a bad picture good), add to a collection, export that collection, upload those files, then go through and deal with all the Flickr tagging/titling/commenting. If I got distracted at any point during this process, it almost always led to pictures not getting uploaded by the time I did my next flurry of picture taking, and things would either end up in non-chronological order, or more likely, just not online.