Capture and instantly post photos to WordPress with a DSLR and Pressgram

Photographer Gevon Servo wrote an article called Five Reasons Why I Replaced My Camera Phone With an Eye-Fi Card. He described a work flow for using an Eye-Fi card for "near instant" publishing to Instagram of the images taken on his DSLR. At first, I wrote this off as gimmicky and I had a number of reasons why this was impractical.

But as I thought more about I realized that Gevon's idea was actually quite brilliant. I decided to test his workflow out for myself. I've used Pressgram for almost a month and have loved the ability this app gives me to instantly post iPhone photos to my blog. It's a simple process; photo + filter + WordPress. I planned to attend the Asbury Agile 2013 conference and I thought it would be cool to use both Pressgram and Gevon's workflow.

I've had an Eye-Fi card for about a year. It's never worked reliably for me. I always had problems getting it to connect with my Wi-Fi and in the field it would often only transfer a few photos before failing. After reading and re-reading the online manual and some trial and error I finally paired the Eye-Fi card with my iPhone. I could have paired it with my iPad but my iPhone is more portable and fits easily in my pants pockets.

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Before heading out to Asbury Agile I took some test shots around my neighborhood. I set my Nikon D5100 to RAW+FINE. Since the Eye-Fi card model I have only transfers JPG files, this setting me to capture and transfer a high quality JPG to my iPhone while keeping a RAW image for later importing to Adobe Lightroom. I took a few test shots and connected my iPhone 5 to the ad-hoc Wi-FI hotspot created by the Eye-Fi card. At first no images transferred to my iPhone. After fiddling around with my Nikon D5100 I discovered a menu setting to enable or disable the Eye-Fi card transfer. Once I enabled this feature the Eye-Fi card transferred images to the photo library on my iPhone.

The transfers aren't blazingly fast but they are fast enough. I can shoot just one image, wait for it to transfer to the iPhone and then edit, apply filter and upload to Pressgram (and my blog). Or I can shoot as fast as I want (within the limits of the Eye-Fi card and my cameras shooting rate) and wait for the Eye-Fi card to download each image. I can edit and process when the transfer completes.

You can see the results. I have photos of independent UX Designer/Writer Sarah Doody and Sandeep Chand, Director for R&D at iCIMS. These images were taken from the second row with my AF-S Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 at high ISO (3200 to 6400) and f/1.8 (it was a very dimly lit room). After taking the photo, it took about 15 seconds for the images to download, another 15-30 seconds to select the right image, square crop, add a filter (or not) and import into Pressgram. A few lines of text, some hash tags, and I was ready to post to my blog (or Facebook or Twitter).

As Gevon mentions in his article, this workflow gives the photographer the freedom to choose the right lens to express his/her creative vision. I have control over depth of field, shutter speed, etc. But I really like about this workflow is that I can share my creation instantly with my social network while creating content for my blog. I plan on using this workflow on my next photography event -- Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk along the Highline.

Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale. #nobridge

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