Erin Sparling’s Camera Workflow

The Canon 5D Mark III has allowed Erin Sparling to create a quite absurd automatic photo workflow: The end result of this madness is that, while shooting in the studio, photos can be immediately reviewed on the ipad, projected on the wall, uploaded to Flickr and entered into his lightroom library, all by just pressing the shutter on his camera.

Erin Sparling is awesome.

12 Comments leave a comment below

  1. What about this workflow is amazing? It seems to me like all of this has been done by most tech savy photographers using EyeFi and Dropbox for ages.

    Am I missing something awesome?

  2. Also a bit puzzled. Couldn’t this also be achieved without the Mark III?

    Or is this a date related post?

  3. haters gonna hate…

  4. It’s not about the hating. I genuinely want to know what it is about this workflow that is unique to the Mark III.

  5. The novelty here starts in two places: first, the fact that the 5d mark iii has both SD and CF is not entirely unique, but rare, and second that it has good eye-fi pro integration. The multiple memory card integration goes the extra mile, for allowing different types of files to be written to each memory card simultaneously, thereby prioritizing the end use of the file to its appropriate medium. The integration of the eye-fi card presents you with a menu to control the cards features, or at least a subset of them.

    Your comments are correct in that many cameras previous to this have been able to use this particular SC card, and the use of the service is also common, and to be expected. What made documenting this workflow worth it to me was the absurd interconnection of services that were easily drawn out from these connections, with the pervasive “click once and forget” mentality and the photos intelligently route themselves through a complex system, generating thumbnails, lo-res proxies, while hi-res raws are backed up in at least three different places and are viewable to the public without any work.

  6. Hi Erin,

    Thanks for the detailed response.

    Firstly, I hadn’t spotted that two different cards types were being used! That’s pretty neat. And the additional information about the Eye-Fi integration, routing and automation definitely makes this flowchart make more sense in terms of what is achieved.

    Appreciate you clearing that up!

  7. Anytime. The big issue here is conflicting demands from the photographer who wants the highest resolution to the partygoer who wants to see the photos immediately. Just using the SD card by itself with raw photos is prohibitively slow because of the file size and wireless transfer rate. The splitting up and routing of two different types of files immediately is just wonderful. This way, within a matter of seconds, the relatively lo-res JPEG’s can be on the projector or an iPad, whereas previous workflows require downloading processing or extremely long waits.

  8. Erin,

    Thanks for the info. That’s the explanation I was looking for.

  9. What a well laid-out system! Great idea.

  10. not to whine, but have been doing this for ages.. and I’m just a hobby photographer

    and if I’m *missing* the point a lot of cameras have dual slots for storage like my own d7000 – so it’s easy to raw it to one card and send the jpg to the eye-fi card

    would think I have a *smarter* setup with an ipad direct connecting to the eye-fi card – and using shuttersnitch to live preview photos and edit/tag them for whatever and send them wherever(3g ipad).. – this setup works on the go, and even with no 3g or local wifi available – but I don’t have pretty omnigrafle charts to show..

    but granted the mark3 looks great – it and d800 are strong contesters for when i go fullframe some day;-)

  11. It was nice reading the comments too. Interesting work flow (and, highly convenient).

  12. I have a panasonic gf1 with the eye-fi card. I am very much an amateur so not that fancy setup as in the example… but just wanted to say that you can do some fun stuff when you combine the eye-fi card with the ifttt.com service. At the moment I’ve set it to automatically upload my photos directly to my blog… so everything I take.. I can imagine that is not for everyone… but still with the ifttt.com service you can get quite creative with the card.

    If anyone is interested I can send you an invite for ifttt.com.