At this year’s Wedding and Portrait Photography International expo, I spent several hours talking to vendors of cameras, equipment, accessories and services. The people at the Think Tank booth, gifted me a small accessory for everyday use.

This accessory goes by an unorthodox name: My 2nd Brain 11. I suppose the name suggests that all of your necessities can be easily kept in this single case.

The “11” refers to the size of a tablet or notebook that it can hold, in this instance an 11″ model of either.

Load up the case with what you need, throw it over your shoulder and you’re ready to attack the world.

My 2nd Brain 11 comes in black and green. The suggested price of My 2nd Brain 11 is $85.

Think Tank also has larger My 2nd Brain cases for 13″ and 15″ tablets or notebooks.

For more information, please visit Think Tank.

The 6D is the newest DSLR from Canon. Its full-frame sensor has a resolution of 20MB with good low light performance. Its autofocus system uses 11 focus points. Compared to it’s bigger brother the 5D Mark III, it is smaller in size, lighter in weight and less expensive.

The two “new” built-in features are the GPS receiver and its wireless capability. Having GPS automatically adds location information (latitude, longitude and altitude) to the EXIF data of the images.

My interest in the 6D was to see how its wireless capabilities worked.

The Canon 6D can communicate wirelessly with several types of devices: another camera, a smartphone, a printer, a web service or a DLNA device.

For this review I’ll describe my experience connecting with a smartphone. For wireless, there’s a few preliminaries that have to be performed.

The first is to give the 6D a wireless identifier. This step takes just a few minutes using the menus on the back of the camera. Here I’ve set it up with the identifier “Arnie 6D“.

By completing this step, the 6D is now its own wireless station.

The 6D can be used with either an Android or iPhone smartphone.

You’ll first have to install the free EOS Remote app for your particular smartphone.

In my case, I installed the app onto my iPhone.

Using the Settings menu on the iPhone, you connect to the camera with Wi-Fi. Look for the camera’s identifier – Arnie 6D.

For security, you’ll have to enter the Encryption Key to establish the connection.

After the camera and smartphone are connected, the EOS Remote app is ready to use.

It can perform two different functions.

Firstly, you can view the images that have been captured with the 6D.

Secondly, you can use the smartphone as a remote shutter release.

Viewing Images from camera

Choosing Camera Image Viewing brings us to a screen on the smartphone that looks like this.

By default the thumbnails are ordered by date but this can be changed to order them by rating (1 to 5 stars) or folder (if multiple folders are on the camera’s SD card).

In addition to the thumbnail, the technical data each image is also presented. This is helpful if you plan to evaluate the images while still in the field with the purpose of adjusting the settings.

Tapping one of the thumbnails presents a larger version of the thumbnail. For each image you can:

• Download – to smartphone (1920 x 1280 jpg)
• Email – send image with a text message
• Rate – 1 to 5 stars
• Delete – removes it from the camera

Capturing Images using the smartphone

Your smartphone can be used as a remote shutter release with extra capabilities.

Here I’ve set the camera on a tripod.

Choosing Remote Shooting activates the 6D Liveview. The smartphone then presents the same view as the camera.

By tapping on the different areas of the smartphone screen, I can change the autofocus.

Depending on the 6D’s mode setting I can also change the ISO, shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation using the smartphone.

Another simple tap and the camera shutter is released.

Here’s the image that I took remotely.

And of course, the just captured image is immediately available if I change back to EOS Remote’s Camera Image Viewing.

Anyway, Ziv was excited to tell me about a new feature that the company was developing. Finally last week, Eye-Fi unveiled a fascinating new capability for any of their X2 series cards.

With this free update, the Eye-Fi can now send images directly to a mobile device – either an iPhone, iPad or Android. By itself, this provides an automated way to backup your images.

On the mobile device, you’ll need to download and install either an iPhone/iPad app or an Android app. These free mobile apps (also provided by Eye-Fi) receive the images from the Eye-Fi card.

The apps provide another very useful feature – they let you resend the images to other online sites. And since they use cellular to upload, the mobile devices replace the personal computer.

• Canon XS
• Canon XSi
• Nikon D40
• Nikon D60
• Nikon D3000