What You Need for Tethered Shooting & How to Do It

Once you have set up the shot and lighting requirements, it's time to set up your camera. Connect your camera to the computer using the USB cable and load up the capture software. The capture software screen should pop-up with controls to set up your shot. The screen usually consists of all the regular controls that you use on your camera like ISO, aperture, shutter speed, image styles, etc. Once you’ve made the appropriate selection you can either choose to fire the camera from the computer making use of the in-software shutter release button, or start shooting with your camera as usual and you will see the images appear on the computer screen. You can select whether the images are to be saved to the computer, to the camera’s memory card, or both. Remember that if you are shooting bursts, the write speed offered by the computer might not be the best, in these situations I would suggest writing to the camera’s memory card.

On Canon cameras, as shown below, the EOS capture utility screen will allow you to perform everything that you need to get going with shooting tethered. It's a similar control screen for the Nikon software as well. Regarding tethered shooting settings on software like Adobe Lightroom and Aperture, just look for it in the help menu which would also give you the information as to whether your camera is compatible or not.

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Using software like Adobe Lightroom and Aperture for tethered shooting will provide you more control in terms of image adjustments and fine tuning. Shooting with the camera capture software would allow finer control of the camera features. You can always set up your shoot to be imported into these programs once they’ve been captured by your camera control software. Once you have established your workflow of tethered shoots you can customise your gear using special tripod setups and stands to shoot more comfortably. For example, if you have a decent enough laptop, you could try on-the-go tethered shooting!

You are not limited to professional applications like Lightroom and Aperture for tethered shooting, you can always find other free applications that will allow you to achieve the same. Remember that tethered shooting allows you to control your camera in a very different manner allowing you the possibility of trying out new shots like time lapse since some cameras do not come with built controls but do allow you to use software based control of such features.

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Images: JTWilcox and coffee3in1

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Learn more here:

http://tuffguyphotography.com/blog/2008/09/shooting-tethered-on-canon-dslrs/

http://www.photosmudger.com/2008/12/cameras-computers-and-bondage.html

http://photoshopnews.com/2006/12/06/tethered-shooting-in-lightroom/

http://www.jibble.org/canon-tethered-shooting/

http://terrywhite.com/techblog/?p=528