Now that I’ve got an eeepc, I’ve been able to cut down the weight I carry every day without losing much functionality. One thing that I have been missing however, is the ability to configure my Eye-Fi card for random networks that I come across. I’m running the stock Linux, Xandros, and Eye-Fi doesn’t officially support anything other than Windows and OSX. Fortunately, Dave Hansen has released Eye-Fi Config on his EyeFi Linux Hacking blog. It’s a simple command line tool that doesn’t help you with online service configs or local copy, but allows you to search for, add and delete WiFi networks from your linux machine. It’s exactly what I needed. Thanks Dave!
Tag Archive for '/photos'
I’ve been using an Eye-Fi for about a year now. I’ve been on the Beta and on the Gamma, and although I’m not allowed to talk about some things I’ve learned, I can talk a little about how I use it.
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.
A while back, I picked up a Nikon TC-16A teleconverter as part of an ebay auction. It seemed like a nifty little widget. It’s an older piece of hardware (1985), from when Nikon first came out with Autofocus bodies, but still hadn’t caught up with their lens line. It allows you to mount a fully manual lens on an AF body, and get about 5mm of autofocus (get the full rundown at mir). Since I have a lot of Manual lenses at this point, it seemed like it could be pretty useful, if not just a great novelty.
It turns out however, that this widget only works on the cameras from that era, and 2 modern day DSLRs, the D2H and D2X. If you’ve been watching prices on either of those, the minimum buy in for this thing to work is about $1300. So it has sat on the shelf.
Yesterday, everything changed. I was reading the Nikon forums on photo.net, and ran across a link to this page on converting a TC-16A for use on a D200. The step by step instructions made things look not-too-difficult, and it was just sitting on the bookshelf, so I broke out the tools. A couple hours later (lots of time looking for springs on the floor), I had a semi-working TC-16A. It does AF, as advertised, but it doesn’t handle aperture settings. It has a CPU, so you can actually shoot in A on a D50 with a manual lens, but the chip reports the min/max aperture as f/1, and the focal length as 8mm, so EXIF data is pretty messy.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a great hack, and I think it can be a pretty useful addition to the camera bag. It’s small, it allows one handed shooting (with the other holding a light or beer), and for the most part, it works. I even got to test it and my portable strobist kit last night at EN. I think this shot of Frank drinking came out the closest to what I was looking for.
I was cleaning up today and found an abandoned Swiffer pole in the corner. I’ve been following the way of the strobist lately, and thought to myself, wow. what a nice 3 section monopod. The stock bolts wouldn’t fit a hotshoe or light mount (that would be too easy), but a bit of dremel action on a 1/4″ bolt, a hotshoe, and some velcro later, and I’ve got a nifty way to get flash away from my body but still under my control.
I wouldn’t trust anything heavier than a mini flash on this (my carena mini is pictured here), but it is small enough to toss in your lighting bag and forget about. Until you need it.
I took a picture at Caffe Vita the other night, and included it in last week’s Hacknight post. Lo and behold, it is now on the front page of Utata with some nice words by Greg Fallis.
How cool is that?
Technorati Tags: Utata, photography
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| I live in a cool looking city. Here are some pictures that I’ve taken over the past month or so. |
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So, this page replaces a page I built called panoramas gigantus. It’s located here
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