I finally got my hands on an Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8GB SD Card and was extremely excited to see the possibilities it would allow me to do. If you haven’t heard, Eye-Fi creates SD cards with Wi-Fi chips embedded inside them allowing you to take pictures with your SD card compatible camera (point-and-shoot or DSLR) and instantly have it uploaded to a social media or photo sharing website of your choice. In the beginning the only drawback was that your computer and camera both had to be on the same Wi-Fi network. Over time, Eye-Fi came out with different SD cards that allowed more flexibility. The recent release of its “X2 Pro” gives people the most options when trying to upload pictures on the go.

For about $150, you get an 8GB SDHC card that has 802.11n built-in. An “endless memory” mode, letting you take pictures continuously, and since your uploading the pictures as you take them once you have no more space the SD card immediately starts deleting the first pictures you started with to make room for new ones. (It will not delete any if it hasn’t safely delivered it online.)

You also get a year access to AT&T hotspots (Starbucks, McDonalds, Hotels, Restaurants, etc) for uploading pictures with your camera if your Internet-less, and free lifetime Geotagging of your photos. The X2 Pro supports RAW formats too! (.CRW, .CR2, .NEF, .NRW, .DNG, .PTX, .PEF, .RAW, .RW2, .MPO) You of course can always upload JPGs only if you wish have speedy uploads for your picture sharing websites.

So, what did I have in mind for the Eye-Fi card? With the X2 Pro, you now also have the ability to connect to Ad-Hoc networks. Perfect for those iPhone and iPads that have been jailbroken and have an app that creates a portable Wi-Fi spot. I use one called MiWi with WEP security so others don’t hop on and steal bandwidth if they happen to be in the area.

A few minutes of setting up the network and privacy settings in the Eye-Fi Control Panel and I’m good to go. Now with the 3G data connection as my Internet source, and the iPhone Wi-Fi network for my Eye-Fi card, I can start shooting! I can leave the netbook and laptop at home and completely bypass SD card adapters all together. No more stopping what Im doing, transferring pictures, reformatting the SD card and wasting precious shooting time. I turn my WiFi network on the iPhone and set my Canon DSLR to take both RAW pictures at high quality and JPGs at medium quality giving me the most flexibility later on. I set Eye-Fi up so that it only uploads JPGs that I choose and ignore RAW files when Im on my personal iPhone WiFi network. That way, I can share what Im shooting and if I want to edit the picture later in RAW I can do that when I get home.

There are plenty of picture sites you can choose to upload to.

Its not listed in the photo services above, but in the Control Panel you can set up your Twitter account for instant tweets once a photo is uploaded. (Although I’m not sure how this will work in the next few months once Twitter goes all in with OAuth forcing 3rd party services to use that as a means to connect to Twitter.) I love the fact that you can choose FTP as an option too, giving people true freedom to do what they want with their pictures once uploaded if other social media sites fail to do what the user wants.

After testing it, I found that a 3088 x 2056 JPG (shown above in a thumbnail) takes about 20-25 seconds on a 3G connection. Not – bad – at – all! Considering thats a “medium” setting on my Canon XSi, I can choose to even bump that down to a “Small” setting and uploading something on the scale of a 1024×682 for even faster uploads. (Probably around 5-10 seconds per picture!) Still perfectly viewable for sharing.

I can’t wait to put this thing to the test this weekend and take batches of pictures at a time, without lugging around a netbook/laptop I feel Eye-Fi has given me more freedom to do what I want creatively as a Photographer.

For even more creative ways to Eye-Fi on the go, check out ShutterSnitch app for both iPhone and iPad. It allows you to create rules for Eye-Fi pictures in case you wanted to upload only certain types of JPGs (like ISO specific shots, etc).

I predict this will be a big hit with iPads since the only way at the moment to currently import pictures is to have them already on your desktop and sync them, or to buy the iPad Camera Connection Kit for $30.

I hope this helps any photographers who want another option to wirelessly share pictures while on the go, if you have any questions tweet me or comment below. Thanks!

On my way out of the house last night I happened to look up at the sky. Expecting to see a clear night sky, I saw something I’ve never witnessed. A weird “moon halo”. I was mystified by it and couldnt turn away, it was so cool and eerie. I qiuckly took my iPhone out to take a snapshot but, alas no luck since it was almost pitch black and the only light source was the moon. A small bright dot in the middle of the picture was all I saw. I tweeted about it & ran back in the house to grab my DSLR camera.

Back outside and holding the camera as still as I could I took some shots of the moon and its halo. At first I couldnt get the right exposure but after importing it into Photoshop I was able to adjust the levels a bit to get the halo more apparent.

I added some more images to my Flickr page if your interested.

Acoording to Wikipedia the scientific explaination is as follows:
Moon halos are mostly caused by ice crystals in cold cirrus clouds located high (5–10 km, or 3–6 miles) in the upper troposphere. Sometimes in very cold weather optical halos are formed by crystals close to ground level, called diamond dust. The crystals behave like jewels, refracting and reflecting sunlight between their faces, sending shafts of light in particular directions.

In another more indepth Wikipedia article explaining 22 degree halos it states:
22° halos form when the sky contains millions of poorly oriented ice crystals. Some of these happen to be aligned perpendicular to the sun light as viewed by one observer which produces the illuminated 22° circle, while other crystals produces the same phenomenon for other observers. An Alexander’s band can be seen inside the halo.

It was quite a remarkable sight and the image is still seered into my brain. I can’t wait to see my next one, and I hope you get to see one too!

PS: See Guso, you didnt really think I wouldn’t take pictures of something so cool did you? ^.~