Why and How to Shoot Tethered

Have you tried tethered yet?

An important part of photographing products is to have an effective workflow — one that allows you to work quickly as well as accurately. One of the best ways to do this is to shoot tethered.

In this class, Karl explains the basics of tethered shooting, including what tethered shooting is, what is needed to shoot tethered, as well as the numerous advantages of shooting tethered.

You’ll also learn exactly how to shoot tethered as he demonstrates how to use some of the most popular tethering software, including Lightroom, Capture One, and Phocus.

Comments

  1. Hi Carl, please tell me, when you are using studio flashes with X2D camera tethered, and for example f16 ant T1/250 is the right exposure for the scene, how you are viewing the scene on the screen in live video, as the light from the pilots is inadequate and the image is black ? Is there a way to solve this problem. Thanks a lot for your attention Carl.

    George Kitsios (from Greece)

    1. Hi George, no problem here to help but lets look at your situation step by step. First of all tethering with the X2D and using ambient light or flash is no problem at all, I do it all the time. The next thing is that the Live Video feature will not necessarily give you the correct exposure, it’s just a rough guide so you can see your composition it is not designed to be an exposure guide. To check the exposure you simply take a picture and look at the result and assess and then take another picture. You give an example of f16 at 1/250th which the f16 would depend on the power settings of your flash and the 1/250th should be cutting out your ambient exposure so that you are only seeing the results of the flash and not any daylight, modelling lights or room/house lights. In the Live View preview if you are not able to see an image because everything is too dark try the ‘Auto’ exposure button at the bottom right corner of the preview image, there is an ‘A’ button. Let me know if that works.

      1. Karl, thanks a lot for your help, i hadn’t noticed this “A” button in the right bottom corner in Focus. Your insight was valuable again. Thank you.

  2. Hi Karl,

    I’ve got a question about shooting tethered in Lightroom.

    The problem I’m struggling with is:
    When I’m shooting tethered in Ligtroom, I have no back up at my SD card in my camera (My camera skips saving images on my sd card), only on my computer. Of Course, without tethering, my camera saves the images on the SD card. Normally It is plug and play. I use original cables from Tethertools

    I’ll hope you can help me.

    thanks in advanced,

    Eric de Jonge (Netherlands)

    1. Hi, for most tethered software the images are only recorded to the computer which is normal, you just need to make a back up of the images to a separate external drive just as you would for your normal work. Previously my understanding was that in LR tethered it actually only went to the camera memory card and the computer read them from there which is why it was rather slow. I wouldn’t be too concerned about the computer method as a memory card is just as fallible.

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