The Eye-Fi Wireless SD card

As I have mentioned before I am a photographer. I very often do event photography in which I snap a photo and print it immediately to be given to guests at the function. I love my job, and I love being able to deliver a product in a flash to the guests.

My main drawback in this was that if I took a pic, or my assistant took a pic, the memory card would have to be removed from the camera and put in the laptop to copy the photos for printing. Depending on how busy I am this sometimes holds things up.

Enter the Eye-fi! I had heard about these when they first arrived on the market over a year ago. It seemed like exactly what I needed. I held off buying one hoping that they would soon give in to demand and add support for adhoc wireless networks. Well, some time passed, and more time passed, and I got tired of waiting.  I purchased one last week and I also bought a D-Link DWL-G730AP portable wireless router on the recommendation of someone in the Eye-Fi forums.  Getting it all setup and working was a little tricky, or so I thought. It turned out to be the fault of bent pens in my Ethernet jack at home because one of my kids stuck a crayon in it! Gotta love those kids. Once that was fixed, setup and use was a piece of cake!

I will get to really test it on a couple of jobs this weekend. So far, I love it. The only thing I have noticed is if I pump my Canon Rebel T1i up to full res of 15.1 mb, the upload of each pic is reaaaalllllyyyyy slow. But, I have no reason to use it at full res for what I will be using the Eye-Fi card for which is on-site photos usually printed at only 4 x 6 and no bigger than 8 x 10. With the resolution set at 8 mb, the upload of each pic to my laptop takes only a few seconds.

I think this card will make my job a lot easier and save me a lot of time and hassle.