Towards wireless part 2

Wireless workflows are one of the most important new developments for photographers across a range of genres. To this end, Canon released its second WiFi unit, the WFT-E2 which we profiled here with the WFT-E3. One of the strongest proponents of wireless shooting is Andy Mettler. In a recent article for CPN, he put forward his arguments for wireless shooting and provided some pointers on getting it setup with your computer. Since then, Andy has taken wireless shooting a step further and put his techniques to the test in a very demanding situation - the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland at the end of January 2008.

This event requires fast thinking and fast shooting, and the ability to get images from the camera onto the internet in the quickest time possible is a real competitive advantage. Andy’s new workflow is based around the WFT-E2 and a third party piece of software from Idruna called IRES.

Andy’s agency, Swiss Image, was the official agency for the World Economic Forum, which meant added pressure to make images available in the shortest time possible. Andy says: “The WEF web team were projecting images onto large plasma screens around the venue and by the end of each session, a member of their journalism team would have chosen a quote from one of the speakers and would need an image of that speaker. By sending my images from the camera directly to my remote editor in near real-time, my editor could select images and put them online for the WEF team to choose from. It was only a matter of minutes between taking the picture and it being available online for the clients to select from. Often I’d walk out of a session to see one of the images I’d just taken already on a plasma screen in front of me.”

A remote editor uses several computers to deal with the incoming images from two photographers simultaneously at the World Economic Forum.

So what is IRES? IRES stands for Idruna Remote Editing System and in short, it allows a remote editor sitting anywhere in the world to see the images almost as you shoot them. They browse thumbnails of the images on your camera and can select which ones to download for use. It removes a large burden from the photographer. “Previously I’d have run out of a session, back to the press room, downloaded my images to a computer and then either edited them myself or had an editor look at them for me. Now, I sift through the images on the back of the camera while in the session, press the SET button for each image I want the editor to see, then get back to shooting. At the end of the session I can slowly move to the next session without rushing around worrying about pictures - they’re online already,” says Andy.

Remy Steinegger pre-selecting images to send to the remote editor during a quiet moment at the World Economic Forum.

It’s this pre-selection of images that Andy believes will be crucial in winning over photographers. “Most photographers are very precious over their images. They don’t trust editors to pick the best pictures. The days of finishing a roll of film and handing it off to a runner to be dealt with are long gone and photographers like to feel in control, even if they don’t like the computer work. By pre-selecting on the camera, the photographer retains the choice over what the editor sees or not, and we speed up the system by not uploading every image we take.” This year at the WEF, Andy and his team of three photographers and two editors did the job of 14 photographers last year. This may sound like it’s putting other photographers out of a job, but the reality is that the new technology is allowing photographers to concentrate on what they’re good at - taking pictures. For an agency it makes more sense financially as well. Andy says: “Usually the editors and photographers spend the day after an event sorting through the images and editing them, before uploading them to the internet. With the IRES system and the WFT-E2 I left the event earlier than usual and spent more time resting. And I didn’t have to go back to my computer the following day to continue post-processing. All the
images were already online and I was free to go
to another event or just have some free time.”

This sounds wonderful in theory, but in practice, there are always little glitches that need working around. The World Economic Forum presented one such issue. “The main data transmission was from the camera via the WFT-E2 across one of the 50 hotspots around the conference centre to a remotely located sub-notebook computer acting as a remote server in the conference centre. Occasionally though these hotspots were either unavailable or too busy to transmit the images. When this happened, I connected the camera wirelessly to an OQO e2 pocket PC and used the 3G HSDPA data networks for the editor to browse and download the images. It was a little slower, but still quick enough to have the images online in under 10 minutes,” says Andy.

Andy Mettler sending images using the OQO e2 during a period when the WiFi access points were blocked.

It sounds like quite a complex setup and Andy does agree that it takes a little time and preparation to get the systems in place and to understand how they work, but he says once it’s up and running, it’s easy to use. “One of our photographers at the World Economic Forum had never used the system before, but after a quick five-minute tutorial, he found it simple and intuitive to use. So much so that he said he’d rather use this system all the time if he could.”

Workflow

Andy’s kit was an EOS-1Ds Mark III set to M1 JPEG, level 7 compression, a WFT-E2 WiFi transmitter, a Sony Vaio sub-notebook and an OQO e2 pocket PC with a built-in SIM card slot.

Images are taken and pre-selected on the camera by pressing the SET button while reviewing images. This tags the images for sending to either the sub-notebook via a wireless hotspot or to the OQO pocket PC via wireless FTP. The IRES software running on the sub-notebook and the OQO pocket PC deals with the incoming images, adds basic caption and copyright data and uploads a thumbnail of it to the IRES remote server hosted by Idruna. The remote editor logs into the IRES server and views the thumbnails of the images as they appear there. They can then select the images they want to put onto the internet, fully caption them using pre-prepared caption text, crop and adjust images if needed, and upload them to the web for clients to view.

It may appear to be a long-winded process, but using pre-prepared data, a fast wireless hotspot and with no adjustment needed to the images, Andy managed to have an image online within 10 seconds of taking it. This is clearly the extreme end of the scale but throughout the World Economic Forum, Swiss Image maintained a rate of around 90 seconds from pre-selection to images being available online for client download. And it was all done without him or the other photographers having to leave their shooting position to return to a computer.

It does of course depend a lot on the remote editor. Andy is quite clear on this: “You need a good remote editor. Not everyone can do it straight away. It is more like a step back in time for them when they were the front-line in the picture selection when they received a roll of film. Once trained though, one editor can handle two photographers at a time, provided they have good communication between them.”

He is very pragmatic about the advantages to the photographer as well: “I can stay in a session and concentrate on shooting more and better images. I no longer need to stay up until midnight selecting and post-processing images. And most importantly, my images are available online long before many of the other agencies and are therefore more likely to be used. It ultimately produces what I’ve been aiming for for the last five or six years - better quality images in less time.”

Bill Gates giving a talk to the World Economic Forum.

Now that his dream of remote editing has been realised, Andy is setting his sights further along the road “The next step will be to have a camera that incorporates the WFT-E2, a SIM card slot and IRES software all within the camera body. The camera is essentially a computer, so why not build in all the communication options as well?”

Overall he said, the World Economic Forum test had been a resounding success, far greater than he could have hoped. It has provided proof to him that the system is ready to tackle other big events like the Euro 2008 tournament and the Olympics. “It’s no longer a question of if remote editing will become commonplace, but when,” he says.

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Towards wireless part 2

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