Cutting The Cord – X Ways To Use Wireless in Your Photography

There are actually a number of ways for creating a wireless connection in your camera. This will obviously depend on the camera specification but these are the most common ways.

• WiFi – In this mode you connect your camera to your local Wifi network. You will need to search for your network then enter your WiFi password. For security reasons it’s best limited to a home, well secured, WiFi network and not open source free WiFi. However if you are looking to have WiFi connections in the field you can buy portable hubs. These are often used to connect multiple devices to 4/5G data whilst traveling.
• Bluetooth – Many cameras now come with a version of Bluetooth for short range wireless connectivity. As Bluetooth has evolved it has gained more and more capabilities, making it increasingly useful in cameras.
• On camera adapters – These adapters are most commonly attached to the hot shoe and connected to a camera port via a shot cable. They allow for the wireless connection of more complex peripherals.

Those are the primary wireless connections that our camera may be able to make. But what can we do with them? Let’s find out,

The most common wireless connection we will make with our cameras is to connect to the manufacturer’s dedicated app on a smartphone. Mainly connected through Bluetooth, these apps have varying degrees of capability and usability.

Some of the functions might include –

• Remote viewing and shutter triggering.
• The ability to change camera settings remotely – usually this is limited to exposure controls and sometimes focus points.
• GPS locations gathering – many cameras do not yet have GPS built in, but some apps can geolocate the camera’s position using the smartphone’s internal GPS.
• Image transfer to a device – apps can often wirelessly transfer images from the camera to a smartphone, tablet or computer over Bluetooth. Whilst useful in the field, it can be a slow and sometimes unreliable process.
• Send images to the cloud – usually the OEM’s own cloud server but sometimes sites such as Dropbox or Google Drive

The increasing capability of Bluetooth has led to the ability for cameras to connect wirelessly to peripherals. The most obvious example of this is connecting the camera to a gimbal via Bluetooth.

With gimbals, you are able to control the camera directly from an interface on the gimbal itself. Controls might include, triggering the shutter/record button, focussing the camera and even controlling some aspects of the exposure.

Tethering is the ability to connect our camera directly to our computer, either a desktop or laptop. In wired form it has been around since the early days of digital cameras. However in recent years, it has become increasingly wireless. Mainly this is done over Wifi as it has a better range.

Some more complex wireless photographic systems require specialist adaptors that attach either to the camera’s hot shoe or baseplate. The most common applications for these are in remote photography and flash triggers.

The simplest form of remote photography will be a wireless shutter/intervalometer. This will allow the photographer to remotely control and trigger the camera from a short distance away. These types of remotes are often used in long exposure and time-lapse photography. There are also often much cheaper third party options available for OEM models .