Lessons

Lesson Info

Transmitting Live from the Field

Why are you interested in transmitting from the field? We live in a day and age where it's no longer about shipping your film obviously and a week later your film arriving at the editor's office. We live in a digital environment where we need immediate feedback, we're on tight deadlines. It's no longer about just a magazine or newspaper's deadline which is you know they go to print daily or they go to print once a week or once a month. It's now about the internet. It's about really live instant feedback. It's about social media and so there are really two reasons to transmitting kind of live from the field. One is you have the deadline. You're working for Red Bull. They want the images in the content pool immediately. You know, their PR team has already kind of pitched the idea Corey Martinez, he just won a event or another Red Bull athlete has won an event and they want that picture from the event and they need it immediately so they can distribute it on the web. You know, every secon...

d counts in those situations because the sooner that image is out there, the sooner it can get kind of populated to the world wide web, number one. So you're on a deadline. Number two, and this is really common. You're working for a client. Maybe it's Red Bull and they didn't have the budget or the editor didn't have the time to be on location with you or just wasn't applicable. It wasn't possible to have one more person in that van traveling with the athletes because there's only so many seats and so in that scenario, it might be that you're transmitting live just to make sure that what you're capturing is on point with what your client wants and so if your editor's back in Austria or down in Santa Monica and you're halfway around the world shooting pictures, you might say to yourself, I just want to send some pictures while I'm shooting to just get that confidence boost, the pat on the back that like yup, what you're getting is actually working. So I will let Brett talk the technical and describe how this works. Alright, thanks Corey. I think as we start, it's important to note that the computer and the monitor you're seeing here are only so that we can display a public-facing website. I have no direct connection. There's no longer a tether cable. This wireless transmitter is not going to the computer. The wireless transmitter is just subscribing to a Wi-Fi and you'll see a lot of digital devices are now Wi-Fi enabled. Obviously I could be at an event shooting with an iPhone. I could distribute images immediately from here via email with some secondary usage of the phone. However, you limit yourself on some of the quality. We've seen the rise of a lot of Wi-Fi placed directly into the camera. A lot of the Wi-Fi connections on prosumer devices are basically they generate a small Wi-Fi signal so that you can get photos to your phone. Then from an app on your phone, you can start generating, making changes to it, sending it out, emailing it out. What we're doing here is a little bit different. The Nikon D5 and D4 and D4S as predecessors, some of the other professional-level bodies have Wi-Fi transmitters and Wi-Fi receivers that not only can generate a small Wi-Fi signal, they can also subscribe to someone else's Wi-Fi network and that's important because what it allows us to do is FTP out directly to any server anywhere. That could be Red Bull's server. That could be a client's private servers and as we're gonna show here, it's Photo Shelter's servers. And what that allows us to do is as quickly as is image review, I can press two buttons and go back to shooting and that image is being transmitted directly to servers that generate here a Photo Shelter thumbnail gallery where we've provided access to our client. They get an immediate preview and they can download a full-res file if they need to. So let's show exactly how we do so. The first is to have a Wi-Fi signal. Now in an environment like this, there's probably an available Wi-Fi signal with a password. I can just log the camera directly into that. Had we shown this yesterday at Northstar, it might've seem a little bit more impressive because truly all we need is a cell phone signal and I can use any smart device here, an iPhone to create a personal hot spot. All that's doing is taking a wireless cell signal and generating a small Wi-Fi network. Once I've established that connection, so if I go in on my iPhone 6, I go to my settings, I can go to... Where, I just made it go away. Personal hotspot. I've created a network and I've created a Wi-Fi password and I just turn on personal hotspot. Now we have a small wireless network. This goes back in my pocket. In this case, I'm gonna set it right here and now all I need to do is go back into the menus of the camera. Again, I have attached the Nikon WT5. They've just come out with a WT that's going to be even faster and this camera and most of the pro level bodies have a dedicated port on the side of the camera where this device connects. If I was in a fixed environment like a venue at a competition down on the floor there, I might also just use an ethernet cable that could go directly into the side of the camera. But here we're showing Wi-Fi. Again, it's a little bit disconcerting that I'm here in a public building, but I could've been at the top of Northstar yesterday and I go into the network settings within the menu. I go to network, I choose my hardware which is the wireless LAN. I turn on my network connection and under network settings, I've already set this up, but I'm going to show you what's inside and I'm gonna hit edit. Whoops, I'm gonna hit edit. So under the wireless, it already sees my wireless network. I've gone down here and added my password. It's going to get its IP address automatically and then under FTP I entered Photo Shelter's FTP destination and I've created a username and password that's going to feed directly into our gallery. So now this website is currently displaying a couple images I transmitted prior, but I have my hotspot connection enabled and if this works smoothly, I can simply go to our latest portrait and just scroll ahead to where we finished this in portraits and again, I want to reiterate that none of the computer, the laptop, any cabling needs to be here. This is only to show you a public website. I hit, oops, I hit these two buttons in sequence. I get a green arrow to show that it's transmitting. If I go here, I can check the status. It's going to take about 10 more seconds for it to finish transmitting and again, that's connected to a small wireless connection that's on my phone and those are the only items I need here. If I come back over here, I can refresh and hopefully that image has already appeared again on a public website anywhere in the world. And one point I want to make because this is important. If you go out here to do this with, for your client or you're on deadline, don't take for granted how much power this burns on your phone. So bringing a backup or a secondary battery source for your smart phone, if you're going to be working all day, you will burn through your smartphone's power really quickly so jut having power. 100%. That's an excellent, excellent point. So I just wanted to show that once I set that up originally, I can turn around, I can hopefully take a halfway decent picture of Corey. All I do, press my button, it's already transmitting. I'm back to shooting and that's quick as is. Once you set it up once, all the things I showed you and we can go into depth on this, but the real sale on point is that I'm continuing to shoot, I'm following the action, I'm still working with the athlete. I haven't lost his attention. I'm able to re-engage with everyone around me. This image has probably already finished transmitting already and if I refresh again, oh, give it another second. In this model, your editor knows. Oh that's a winner, that's a winner. There's Corey. So in this model, your client knows they're logged into Corey Rich productions, our Photo Shelter account as a client and they know that periodically they're refreshing or if for example, it's truly just for client review, I'm maybe even sending them a text to say hey, check out this portrait that we just did with Corey. I think it looks good. Is this over the top, do you like it? We send the photo with the halo and the hazer and the light looks cool and hopefully my editor at Red Bull says awesome, we'll hire you again and if they don't like it, you start sweating profusely and you start trying to figure out how to make a better picture. For sure. Yeah so again, I just, Wi-Fi is coming to more and more devices. There's lots of ways to connect via your phone. You could have a laptop on the field, but the beauty of this system is that in its simplicity, once we set it up, we don't have to touch it again and we barely have to interrupt our shooting process in order to continue to transmit images directly from anywhere with a cell signal where we can generate that hot spot or if we are in a venue with an established Wi-Fi or with a cable, we can shoot that. You're seeing that at a lot of major sporting events. You can certainly see it on location and this used to be very expensive, something that only the bigger, the Gettys of the world, the Associated Presses of the world could do. Now it's something that's available to almost any individual or photographer. These transmitters are dropping in price. Some of these cameras have this built in and the Photo Shelter system, relatively inexpensive. Those are the two pieces of the puzzle that you really need along with something to generate the Wi-Fi hotspot that comes with a lot of smart devices and you're done. You could be in Whistler transmitting from the side of a mountain, you can be in Downtown Detroit without any need for laptops or anything else with you as you're moving through the streets and this web page, again is available. It's already a public web page. We've distributed the link. We can make that a public link. We could add a password for download permissions. You could set a certain size and it's really changing the way an individual can compete with some of the larger agencies and some of the more established presences by getting those images out for web use, for social media use. The immediacy of images these days, I mean the demand for immediacy has never been quite as high as it is now. In competition, on location, moments after an athlete wins a competition, they've got the celebration shot. We transmit from the side of a mountain and it's posted to our web page where an editor can put it on the headline or ESPN.com or Red Bull or wherever it is. And I think you know, Brett just made a really good point which is today there's immediacy is key, right? The sooner you can get to market, the better if you're operating in that news, current event world and there's a lot of technology out there. We've talked about a lot of tools, we've shown you a lot of tools and part of your edge as a photographer, as a photographer that's looking to grow in this industry whether it's for fun because you're shooting your family and your kids, doing adventure action sports or whether you're doing it professionally as the four of you are, the more you understand those technologies and you decide which technologies to embrace and which to sort of put in the back burner, that is part of your edge as an individual. If you understand lighting, if you understand how to upload your pictures from the field, if you become a Photoshop guru, whatever those scenarios are, it's what separates you from the pack.