From the course: Learning Tethered Shooting

An overview of tethered shooting - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Learning Tethered Shooting

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An overview of tethered shooting

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Let me walk you through the general idea behind tethering. Now, in this case, we've got a real world scenario built here. We're going to be shooting some flower shots to use on a florist's website. We're just shooting it over a simple background. We've got some strobe lighting. Pretty straightforward stuff. The thing is is that with this type of shooting environment, I want to be able to take more control. And I really want to know that the shots are absolutely sharp. Well, looking through the back of the camera through the built in eyepiece, or the LCD viewfinder here, it's really hard to tell. But, when I have the ability to look here on my large screen or on my laptop, it's great. Remember you could even get full screen previews of those images and zoom in to check all sorts of detail to see that things are looking great. Like I really love here how some of the water spots and reflections. Now, I'll need to do a little touch up here. It's natural, but it's not what you'd want on the web. And as we look through here, we can really see what's happening. Pop back out and I can then simply fire off another shot and it loads into the computer. And you see how easy it is to quickly see what you are doing. Now the whole idea with tethered shooting is its all about control. You want to be able to take total control of the shooting environment and be precise with your monitoring. In this case, I've set things up pretty straightforward. You'll notice that the camera is on a solid platform. I've then connected the camera with a dedicated cable running into my computer. And I can now monitor on the computer. In this particular case, I've actually set up a large monitor as well to make it easier for clients on set. This could be a video monitor, a large computer monitor, a TV set. There are so many ways to do this, thanks to the HDMI port that comes on most computers these days Or just getting a simple adapter. As we're putting all these pieces together, it's pretty straightforward and it may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but it's really simple. All you're doing is making a connection from the camera to a computer or another device. That device's job is to let you control the camera. Now, some solutions are really simple. Right now, I'm just using Lightroom. And all it's allowing me to do, is capture the shot and send it into a collection. I could apply presets on import to see how it's going to look. Maybe I want to see it in black and white, or punching the contrast. But essentially, I'm just shooting right to the drive. Now of course I get all the benefits of having the computer, including the ability to upload or share, or jump right in and start to make adjustments. But it's really just about remotely triggering the camera. We will also look at some dedicated hardware that allows you to take more control of the camera for even more advanced options like focus stacking, or the ability to shoot intervalometer, if you're doing time lapse. So there's all sorts of things, but as a basic setup, this is really it. Remember, all it is, is a camera that's completely safe and able to stand on it's own, connected to a device that gives you some level of control, and ideally a way to transfer the images to that device, so you can preview them, or even start to make parametric edits pretty quickly. All right. Let's dig in and go a little deeper.

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