Event photo and wireless camera workflow...

[Claude_Ferron]

I often wonder if I should put the time, the money and the energy in the development of a wireless solution that would adapt to my current onsite event photography workflow.

I don't see a lot of advantages to go wireless:
PROS:
- Images could get faster to the server and be process faster.
- Customer could see their pictures a little bit quicker.

CONS:
- Expensive equipment
- At every event you have to setup in the range of your transmitter, otherwise the signal and speed drop. (limited operating range)
- Risk of confusion on what has been transfered an not transfered.
- Long development process to arrive with a working trouble free solution.

In my opinion, if you weight the pros and cons, I would stick with the old CF cards, it is fast and reliable and you can hire little Johnny with his bike for 25$ + some candies to be the runner all day.

What other PROS or CONS do you see?
I'm I not on the right track? Please convince me...

__________________
Claude Ferron, Owner / Photographer
www.subitophototo.net
Viewing System Solution - A proofing solution for event photography
Informations about the solution here (VSS)

[Ken_Shelton]

Originally Posted by Claude_Ferron

I often wonder if I should put the time, the money and the energy in the development of a wireless solution that would adapt to my current onsite event photography workflow.
....

What other PROS or CONS do you see?
I'm I not on the right track? Please convince me...

Claude

I gave event wireless a try for the first time this past Saturday at the Atlantic City Beer Festival. 12,000 people came through the AC Convention Center on Saturday & Sunday over three 4-hour sessions. I had a photographer set up at an intersection of the show floor, about 30ft/10M from my booth. The Canon 1DMIII had an eye.fi card in the SD slot. It is supposed to give 45' of range indoors, 90' outdoors. As we were in an open convention hall, we probably could have gone out further but needed to take the shot then point the subject to me in the booth.

By the time they got to me, 10-15 seconds later, I had the image imported into Lightroom on a laptop and showing on an out-facing LCD to the customer. One click added a logo of the show, two more printed it on a Sony Snap Lab. Total time from image capture to 5x7 print was under 2 minutes.

The eye.fi card worked well most of the time. The first one stopped working for no reason so I changed it for a backup. The second worked for a while and then it crapped out, then it started up after a couple of minutes. Then after another 50 images or so it stopped, & then started up after several minutes. No predictable causes or cures. The first card might have started working on its own like the 2nd if I had given it a chance. Eye.fi is a great idea, its unpredictability scares the hell out of me and its setup & use are cumbersome. Their service line is very responsive though & they have issued updates & promise more improvements.

So, the technology worked for the most part. The business was a disaster! 95% of the attendees were Generation My Space who could care less about prints. They'd walk up to the monitors, oooh & aaah at the image & walk away. 'Buy a print? Why? Will it be online so I can copy it? $10 for a picture, are you crazy? I'll give you $3, $2.'

The few people who did buy prints were generally over 40; there were too few of them. The low point of the experience was the woman who walked up to the monitor, looked at her boyfriend's image, and took a picture of it with her P&S. She looked at her lcd, shrugged, and walked away happy.

Ken

PS: Pardon for cross posting to the wireless thread. I have been involved in a discussion about the eye.fi there for several weeks and the technical stuff is relevant there.

[Will_Mass]

Ken,

You have a PM.

[DougAxford]

My personal experience with both wired & wireless set-ups at on-site events is that if anything can go wrong - it will. Ken's experience is typical. You need multiple backups for everything.

I read an interesting business article on the weekend that Intel is investing multi millions into WiMax because they think wifi is a dead end technology. It simply never ends and we love it!!

[Cory_Klinkenberg]

While the Eyefi SD card is a neat piece of technology it should not really be considered useful in a production environment, it's range and speed, or rather lack there of with any distance make it far less than ideal in a volume situation. (http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/eye-fi/)

Wireless transfer in itself can be a time saver and a useful tool depending on your situation but when you combine in the field tagging on the fly now you have something worthy of some investment. Using a Wi-Pics unit (http://wi-pics.com/index.html) and Picsphere's software (http://www.picsphere.com/) you can shoot, tag and transfer images and have them available for sale on your viewing stations or online with little or no additional human intervention in near real time. There are many workflows that can leverage this pre-tagging ability.

You can pre-populate the various sorting criteria you want before your shooter heads out and then it's simply a matter of using the Wi-Pics unit to scroll through the choices on your hip and shot. As the images come into the software they are automatically sorted by these criteria and availed on you onsite view stations and/ or online if your set-up with an internet connection on site.

On one of the Wi-Pics model you can get a built in bar code scanner and then you could do a few different things with that option you can have pre-printed cards with unique barcodes on them and scan the code, shot the subject and then it would automatically be tagged with whatever information you had assigned to that bar code inside the Picsphere software. This type of situation would have worked well for the set-up Ken was describing. Picsphere's software also allows you to have onsite and online stores updated and synced automatically.

[Paul_Smith]

I thought wiPics had gone belly up - it seemed to disapear in the UK

[Jason_Hoss]

It looks like, well in the US, that Wi-Pics has been picked up and licensed by another company. The technology looks useful but I am skeptical on how long this company will last. This would be a great solution for T&I photography....the barcode reader not the wifi.