Tag Archive for: digital classroom

tethering without wires

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I love Sony cameras, but sometimes I feel a little bit left out in the cold by manufacturers, I even sometimes feel they don’t care or don’t realize that Sony is really very fast becoming a major (if not THE major) player. For example I’ve been bugging CamRanger since day 1 for Sony support, their response is very basic… it won’t work and it will never work because Sony doesn’t support it…. well it’s weird that Capture One for example shows live view (which according to CamRanger is not possible…. don’t get me wrong I LOVE Camranger, heck I would buy one if they would support Sony in a heartbeat.

 

What do we/I really need?
Something a lot of manufacturers seem to miss.
For me personally I don’t need to see my live view, I don’t need to do settings or anything else fancy, I just want my images to come in, preferable the JPGs in small sizes, show the images and that’s it.

 

Now where do I want it?
The new iPad pro has me all excited, and yeah I know it’s “just” an iPad but the screen size is very handy for us on location and I strongly believe that (because it’s Apple) Adobe and other app makers will start making apps especially for the iPad pro and to be honest I see myself working on an iPad Pro much more than on my MBP when flying or traveling. So my initial thoughts was to use the Sony Remote control software to shoot tethered to my iPad Pro during workshops (which we now already sometimes do during location workshops with small groups) and that works flawless, however…. we can’t get the files to my MBP, so I was actually looking into that and while searching for solutions I found a company called DSLRdashboard

 

You might know their software for iPad, iPhone and Android, but you might not know they also have a desktop version, well at least I didn’t, and it works flawlessly just connect the Sony via their smart remote app to the wifi network and start the software, search for Sony and within seconds you’re up and running. And it’s fast, plus we tried it out throughout the whole studio area and we have pretty good coverage everywhere, so I’m very happy with this. Now the only thing Sony needs to fix is that the EVF doesn’t work in smart remote (which it did in the past).

 

But is that all?
No.
While doing my research online I more and more became convinced that although CamRanger might not support Sony there must be another solution, the CamRanger is in essence a rebranded and customized TP-Link router so what did they do, well very quickly you will find out that there is a firmware flash option that will run a modified firmware on the router and that will actually transmit your files, as long as the camera has a PC-Remote option, which the Sony has. So I thought “why doesn’t it work”… and the more I looked online the more it puzzled me, according to all the programers it would work with any camera that has PC-Remote and according to the app makers it wouldn’t work…. but what doesn’t work. If you read closely they all talk about the fact that Sony doesn’t allow to change settings etc. but I don’t care about that, I just want the files to come in and I couldn’t care less about time-lapse etc.

 

So I decided to just order the TP-Link somewhere and as soon as it’s in I’m gonna try to make it work to transmit just the JPGs, so keep looking at my blog and social media for this, I could be totally wrong but in my opinion it should be possible to do it, if the Sony smart Remote can make a connection and transfer RAW or JPGs why not via a router, what’s the difference if you only need JPGs…. I’m not a programmer but it doesn’t seem like much to just show images to students right?  we will see 😀

 

Anyway, long story short.
Here is a video in the digital classroom series on wireless tethering, and I also included a tip to shoot tethered with your iPhone without the need for internet 😀
Make sure to subscribe to my channel and share the link 😀

New digital classroom broadcast

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August 26th we did another broadcast in our “Digital classroom” series.
In case you missed it, here is another chance to watch it 😀
Please spread the link and make sure everyone joins us for the next broadcast on September 23, this time with Nadine.

 

 

Many thanks to :
BenQ and Rogue/Expo imaging as main sponsors of the Digital classroom and LedGo for the lighting.

Digital Classroom July 1

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Today we finished the second broadcast of our digital classroom project.
In this project I try to bridge the cap between the videos and the normal workshops.
In the videos you watch and learn but in workshops you can have a great interaction with our team to ask whatever questions you want and I will incorporate that into the workshop and because we work with smaller groups during the workshops that is an even greater learning experience, but there was absolutely nothing in between so… we created “Digital classroom”.

 

In “Digital classroom” we stream live from our studio and I show different techniques on both lighting, working with the model and of course retouching (and much more). Now setting something like this up takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money so we are incredibly grateful to have the support of BenQ and Rogue as our main sponsors to make this possible, but also thanks to CameraNu.nl and LedGo we now have proper lighting on set (also not unimportant).

 

Because we use Google+ for the broadcast people can ask questions during the broadcast which (if possible) will be answered on the spot, another advantage is that as soon as the broadcast stops it’s available for those who missed it….. so here you go enjoy the “Digital classroom” from July 1st.
The next one will be on August 26.

Digital classroom EP1 (the test)

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Last week saw the release of a new series in our educational program.
I’ve done a lot of workshop and webinars and both are 100% different, a workshop is a real 1:1 experience (we always work with small groups), a webinar is more a “watch and learn” experience.

 

For a long time I wanted to do something in between and never had the chance to do it, setting this up costs a lot of money as you can imagine (different camera angles, assistants, fast internet etc) but thanks to our friends at BenQ, Rogue and of course Elinchrom we finally were able to pull it off.

 

We dubbed it the “try out episode” but as far as we could see everything went very smoothly and what we ended up doing was a 3 hour intense instructional video with interaction from you guys.

 

We did not promote it a lot because we didn’t want a lot of people online if it would go wrong 😀 but… don’t worry we recorded it and you see it via this blogpost (or on our YouTube channel of course).

 

Please feel free to share the link, watch it and comment on it here or on YouTube, the idea is to do these kind of sessions 10x a year and normally they will have a topic just like the workshops, so except some smoke, movement, masks, location work etc.

 

Is it the same as a workshop?
No of course not 😀
A workshop is much more intense and has way more interaction, but I think we bridged the gap between a webinar and a small group workshop.

 

Is it the same as your instructional videos?
No of course not 😀
The instructional videos and the KelbyOne videos I do are much more in depth and will have totally different topics. The idea of the digital classroom is to show you guys how we work, what we do to complete a photoshoot and you can interact and ask questions, it’s not meant to replace the instructional videos or our other videos like on KelbyOne, if this gives you the hunger for more…. there are actually those options… book a workshop or watch/buy the instructional videos.

Enjoy.

Many thanks to our friends at BenQ, Rogue and Elinchrom to make this possible.