I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d write a little bit more about my decision to run Debian through VirtualBox on a Windows machine.
So, here we are.
This post is more of a ramble than anything else. There’s no real substance here (and feel free to agree or disagree with that), I’m just jotting down some thoughts and providing a little background for other posts I plan to make.
My current WiFi situation on Location works for me at the moment.
As I shoot, a couple of seconds after hitting the shutter, the images come up on my iPad screen. I can immediately see which images have hit their focus and are nice and sharp without unwanted motion blur.
I can get a better overall view of the scene on the iPad so I don’t have to spend hours fixing something in Photoshop that I missed on the tiny LCD on the back of the camera. I can just see it and fix on set before taking another shot.
As I’m planning to turn the CubieTruck into a portable backup storage device for use on location, I thought “What if I could transmit via WiFi to the Cubie (or Raspberry Pi) instead of the iPad?”
I’ve had a few people message me on Facebook asking exactly how my network is setup, now that I’ve added the TP-Link TL-WR702N into the mix.
It looks a bit of a mess, and this isn’t the kind of imagery I’m typically used to making in Photoshop, but this is the basic setup.
I’ve set it up this way so that when I need to take certain things out on location, I don’t have to reconfigure everything to log into a different network.
I’ve talked about some of the pros & cons of the Eye-Fi card before, but on location these days, it’s something I find difficult to live without.
It’s a luxury, not a necessity, but it does allow me to speed up productivity and waste less time on a location shoot wondering whether the image I just shot is adequately sharp, if I’ve hit the correct point of focus (the camera LCD is just too unreliable – especially when you need to manually focus), or just to see the overall composition on a larger screen.
So, I’m now officially a Trucker. A CubieTrucker, that is.
It arrived yesterday, sadly about half an hour before I had to go out, so I pretty much just had chance to put the case together (almost), and didn’t really get to play with it properly at all.
But, it’s beautiful, look at it!
This is a bit of a mini follow up to my recent post on AirPlay (I’ll be doing a longer one once I’ve got everything running the way I hope it will – Edit: never mind, scroll down to the bottom).
After discovering Reflector, and having a good play with it, I started to wonder if there were any Linux AirPlay clients out there.
It took some digging, but it turns out, there are! Well, there’s at least one. rPlay.
There was one location at which I shot at quite a lot during 2013 (at least 20 times over the amazing few weeks of summer we had last year). It’s fairly close to Lancaster (about 10 miles out), and it looks absolutely gorgeous, but only up until about noon.
During the morning, shooting upriver, the sun creates a beautiful backlight on the water and your subject. Pop a flash from the front, and…
During any given photo shoot, I usually have a few pieces of equipment with me that have WiFi capabilities, and it’s nice when I can get them all talking to each other and serving a useful purpose.
There’s the Nikon WT-3 grip for the D200 (which is a fantastic setup for shooting events where on-site printing is required, although on location shoots I generally just use it for behind-the-scenes shots), the Eye-Fi cards (mostly I shoot D300s bodies, which have dual card slots, one CF and one SD), the iPhones, the iPad, occasionally (but not often), a laptop (which will soon be replaced by a CubieTruck).
In a studio this isn’t an issue, but random locations out in the middle of the Lake District generally don’t offer WiFi facilities, so we have to create our own.
When I first heard of AirPlay, I figured “Apple only”, being the proprietary types that they are. I’d always seen it bandied about with words like “Apple TV“, “iMac” and “Macbook Pro“.
As the only Apple devices I own are iPhones and iPads, I never really looked much further into it.
A few days ago, I started trying to see if I could find an application that would allow me to record my iPhone or iPad display to a video file, for including in a tutorial video I was putting together.
As it turns out, there ain’t an app for that – at least not one that runs on the device itself.
TTSOL is going to become a section on the site that I will populate over the coming weeks, months and years. It stands for “Taking The Studio On Location”, and it’s really just an attempt to make life easier for myself.
Working in a studio environment is great. It really is. It’s warm, it’s dry, there’s always coffee available, you have easy access to all your equipment, lights and modifiers, you can shoot tethered to a laptop or desktop and usually you’re not too far from a local pub to grab something good for lunch (or at least have a kitchen and microwave).
But, you see, the thing is, you can’t really create sets that look like this inside a studio.
