The weather recently hasn’t been too conducive to much wildlife photography recently so I’ve been spending a bit of weekend time planning some future projects and also hacking around with gear to help this.  One gear tinkering project has been to wireless enable an infrared beam trigger so that I can remove wires and better trigger, camera and flashguns.  That now works and I’ll aim to give details another time (when I’ve photographed the setup).  

However, today I managed to land a ‘mashup’ that I’ve been trying to do for sometime.  That is, to be out in the field, photographing and then in near real time up load these and then display the photos at another location as a slideshow.  On this occasion, it wasn’t really about wildlife but a sport event.  I’m also a bit of a canoeist and kayaker.  My club runs a couple of ‘marathon’ races a year.  Today was our winter event run along a 16 mile stretch of canal. So, not exactly a compact area and the canal runs both through country and towns so web connectivity is rarely ideal.  In the past, we have provided real time monitoring of about 100 boats of this time trial shown both in time rankings and on maps along the route.  Today, we added near real time photo streaming.  Below, is an explanation of how.  

First is connectivity.  The race HQ has no wifi built in but a wireless dongle (4g but 3g is doable) now sorts that and provides overall web connectivity.  The canal along it’s course has had pretty poor coverage.  But the networks have been upgrading gradually.  This year, I felt we had enough 3g and 4g coverage to make it practical to get a link along most points where you can get to for the best photo spots.  

Second is the camera uplink.  DLSRs are pretty rubbish on this front.  My Nikon D7200 now does have wifi but, in practice, it’s still limited.  It seems to be just an ad-hoc link and it’s relatively slow at 54mb/s.  So this is how I got things working.  My iPhone is set up to link to the camera by ad-hoc wifi.  I use the ShutterSnitch app to automatically load photos from the phone (or, if I’ve not got a wifi connection at that instant I can connect a few minutes later and pull them off the camera’s card).  Because of wifi or, more importantly, phone data speeds I’m only transferring JPEG (Nikon’s Small size and Normal quality).  This is ok for immediate transmission and display.  File sizes are 2 to 2.5Mb.  I do shoot RAW + JPEG and keep a full RAW copy on the camera’s other SD card.  I can then select photos direct from ShutterSnitch a few mins later and directly upload these to our FTP site (other options are Dropbox or direct to social sites).  We then pull these off the FTP site and integrate these into a projected slideshow in the club room up to 10 miles away.  The photos are integrated into a rolling feed of results and map displays showing positions.  That end is done by fellow club member who is a bit capable with things webbish.  However, we could have just run a slide show from Dropbox with an OS X app I found called  Scanning Slideshow (normal slide-show software just doesn’t work).  Job done and it was well received by spectators.  

A few other things.  1) This time we didn’t do an immediate upload to Facebook (did this immediately post event - here).  No reason other than trying to keep things simple and minimise bandwidth on upload.  Next year I think we will.  2) The ad-hoc connection is a minor pain.  To upload to the phone network, I had to close the wifi down, the upload over 3g/4g then works.  It would be a bit easier in the field to have a normal infrastructure network which allows both to work at once.  But it seems the Nikon wifi adaptor can’t do this (beggars belief this one).  So next year I may go back to a EyeFi card (which has been able to do this for some years but needed extra setup and testing time).  3) The upload over 3g/4g worked absolutely fine over the phone network and didn’t totally kill my bandwidth allowance.  4) I chose to select photos to upload.  I didn’t want to just dump everything without quality scrutiny.  A good assistant would help here so the photographer can photograph and the assistant edit.  But it wasn’t too difficult alone.  5) I mentioned the Scanning Slideshow app.  This is needed because normal slideshow software loads images from a directory only when the slideshow is started.  Adding additional images to the directory while the show is already running will not appear in the show.  

Finally, it does make you think that DSLRs need to be better connected.  We should have much faster wifi (ideally ‘ac’ class to match todays phones and other devices).  Connectivity and upload through a phone should be seamless - select on the camera and straight through and uploaded to preselected destinations with no further action. Finally, you would think the full pro cameras (maybe the Nikon D5 next year) would have SIM card and data transmission capability.  

This was an interesting technical challenge that worked pretty well.  I’m not entirely sure how I’d apply this for wildlife photography as I don’t normally need such immediacy.  I’m sure news guys have been doing this sort of thing for ages (must drive them mad given the limitations I found) but it was my first attempt at getting info from a rural location to show in, at times, under a minute.