Tethered Shooting: Many Pros, Few Cons?
The immediate advantages of shooting tethered to a computer are hard to ignore. Images many times the size of your camera LCD give you a far better look at capture detail and a calibrated display ensures that you can get a precise look at colour, exposure and contrast. Camera LCD screens produce images and histograms based on a JPEG even if you’re shooting Raw, so what appears like a blown highlight may actually contain useful detail. Because of the linear nature of sensor technology, shooting as far right to the histogram as possible prevents excessive noise and posterisation in shadow areas. So having the full range of data to view on-screen allows us to go as far right as humanly possible without clipping data, safe in the knowledge that the histogram rendition is one hundred percent faithful.
The benefits of having accurate previews on a large display for complex lighting set-ups are also obvious, making the light meter a thing of the past. You can tweak power outputs to balance your key, fill and accent lights to perfection, safe in the knowledge that what you see on screen is most definitely what you get. You can also set white-balance for a shoot using a grey card and a dedicated picker found in the capture software. Then there’s the obvious compositional precision afforded, and the ability to zoom in on areas to ensure focus is pin-sharp. The other marked advantage of tethered shooting is that you can apply Raw edits to your images during a shoot, allowing you, a client, or an art director, to envisage how the final image might look post-process. In software featuring alignment grids (or better still the overlay feature included in the Mac version of Phase One’s Capture One Pro software), you can make sure that image elements destined for compositing all line up as they should.
A handful of DSLRs join the elite selection of digital backs like Phase One’s P+ series in offering a live view facility, meaning that what you see through the viewfinder is also displayed in real time on screen. This gives the pros of tethered shooting without the need to physically hit the shutter.
Wireless transmission is also new to the tethered field, allowing you to connect and transfer to a workstation without cables by way of a wireless transmitter; a real coup for those who don’t like being tied down by fiddly cables. Unfortunately, current transfer speeds don’t rival those of wired options, making it only really a viable option for shooting JPEGs. That said, a speedier option is to shoot in Raw + JPEG mode if you can, storing the Raw files on the card, and sending the JPEGs to the workstation for preview.
The final selling point of tethered capture is the ability to operate your camera remotely.
It’s possible to change exposure settings, alter focus and trigger the shutter from the comforts of your workstation. If you’re shooting a series of images for HDR or different elements in the same frame, this means you can avoid touching camera controls and risk shifting the scene even slightly. In the studio, it means you don’t have to leave the workstation to shoot, especially so if you have studio lights that can be operated remotely too. When you stick live view, wireless transmission and remote capture together, you don’t need to work hard to imagine the location potential; focusing and triggering a camera fixed to the front of a car, for example, from the comforts of the back seat.
Most of the disadvantages of tethered shooting tend to focus on nosy clients and art directors disrupting the flow of the shoot to make comments on whatever appears on screen. This is something you have to learn to negotiate.
The only other sticking point is the software involved which has been known to cause a headache or two. Only proprietary software by the likes of Canon, Nikon, or Phase One for their backs, for example, offers the luxury of remote capture and live view, which means you’re tied into using this software if you want to use these features.
If you don’t require these features, the most celebrated third-party option to date is Phase One Capture One Pro which has established itself as the industry favourite for tethered capture with Canon cameras (it doesn’t support other DSLRs yet, but look out for future developments). It’s currently at version 3.7.8, but the release of an overhauled version 4.0 is imminent and widely anticipated, especially for Canon EOS-1Ds MkIII users, which 3.7.8 fails to support. Apple’s Aperture 2.0 has also arrived on the scene for Mac users and offers tethered shooting for a range of cameras - though not the 1Ds MkIII (as yet). However, initial reports from Nikon users suggest that images have to be written to the card first, making the process sluggish.
Capture software also doubles as a Raw conversion platform and, in most cases, an organisational platform too. So again, if you shoot tethered into one software package, you’re normally tied into doing your image selection and processing here too, though there’s a functional workaround explored on the previous page. Most software seems to have its own quirks and niggles; Capture One famously requires you to switch on a Canon camera before the software and the same in reverse when shutting down to avoid a restart. There are also reports that the new Mac Intel computers are producing slow download times via Canon software and the Canon EOS-1Ds MkIII’s USB interface; a problem said to originate from the company. The only workaround so far has been to run Windows on the Mac Intel machines, producing sensible download times of around two to three seconds. So while the pros of shooting tethered are clear, count yourself lucky if you have a smooth ride in setting up your tethered workflow! It can be tricky.
Apple: www.apple.com/uk/aperture
Canon: www.canon.co.uk
Nikon: www.nikon.co.uk
Phase One: www.phaseone.co.uk
Words: Matt Henry
