Yesterday I received the Manfrotto 498RC ball head for my tripod. Now I do have everything complete for the tripod. I thought I could need the cheap Nikon ML-L3 wireless remote control shutter release, but I do now have another great solution for remote controlling.

There is an app for android smartphones called DslrDashboard on the GooglePlay store. I am android user so that I don’t know if you find the app for iOS as well, but I guess the app is available there too. You can control Nikon and Canon cameras remotely with this app, you just need a special USB adapter.

I purchased a small cable called USB 2.0 OTG adapter, it’s very cheap and you find it in most tech stores. You can connect that thing with your smartphone, the DSLR USB cable and your camera. As the app is free to use and as the adapter cable doesn’t cost a lot, it’s a really reasonable solution.

If you start the DSLRDashboard app while all the hardware is connected, the app will find your camera model and you can start using the app as trigger remote. The fun thing is that you can use your smartphone as live view screen. Apart from that you can control all kind of settings of your camera as well.

As soon as I discovered everything in the app, I might write about it again. Now I just tested the basics and it works fairly well. This will allow me a lot of things, like recording myself while playing guitar and I can check out on my phone if my guitar is in the screen, just to name one example. I also shot a selfie on this way, it works so well, it’s quite cool.

However, the biggest reason for this solution is to control the camera remotely. A tripod doesn’t make much sense if you still have to touch your camera, but remote controlling will allow you to take photos without vibrations on the camera, that will make it possible to use longer exposure times, for night photography and other things.

I am a little bit excited about this solution, I need to test it further. But it looks really good so that I am sure I might write about it in more detail soon.