How to tether your camera to an iPad

When the iPad was announced I immediately thought “wow, cool! – I can shoot tethered and use that amazing screen for clients to see pictures”.  Then we found out that there is no firewire, no USB and all inputs are heavily controlled.  But there is Wi-Fi.  And where there’s Wi-Fi there’s a way….

With a couple of limitations it IS possible to take a picture on a compact digital camera or DSLR and have it “instantly” appear on an iPad without any cables or button pressing.  I have a complete system working and really, you should see the grin on clients’ faces when the picture pops up in front of them on that amazing screen.  You’ll need a couple of bits and pieces to get going.

1. A camera that shoots jpegs.  This is one of the current limitations and means I can’t tether my Hasselblad yet.  Even better if the camera can shoot raw + jpeg together because you want the jpeg to be as small as possible.  I shoot using a D3 with full res raw files going to slot 1 and minimum size jpegs going to slot 2.
2. An Eye-Fi card.  I use the Eye-Fi Connect X2 4GB Wireless SDHC Memory Card
3. If your camera uses compact flash then you’ll need an SDHC to compact flash adapter.  BE CAREFUL as not all of them work with Eye-Fi cards.  I found one on eBay that works with my Nikon – it’s this one.  That’s a little more expensive than most but the seller has tested it with Eye-Fi cards.
4. A copy of Shutter Snitch from the app store.
5. A computer.  PC or Mac – you’ll need it to get the Eye-Fi working.
6. A working Wi-Fi network.  This one’s pretty annoying.  iPads and Eye-Fi won’t support peer to peer networks at the moment so you’ll need a wireless router.  I got my system working with my wireless broadband at home then reconfigured it to work with an old ADSL router with WiFi that I can take to client shoots.  However, the best solution is a MiFi battery operated router.  I have the system working perfectly on a MiFi from 3.  And no, you don’t need an internet connection – so once you’ve bought your MiFi there’s no need to pay 3 any mor money.
7. An iPad…..  Actually I think this solution would work with multiple iPads – you could beam the same picture simultaneously to several pads which would be very cool for a demo or instruction class.  If anybody wants to lend me half a dozen iPads I’ll be happy to check this out….

On page 2 we’ll put all of this together.

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1. You must have a nice camera…