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Lesson Info

Tethered Shooting

one of the great features of light room classic is the ability to do tethered shooting, which means that you can take a camera and connected to your computer with a USB C. Cable or any kind of cable that connects USB cable between your camera and your computer. Now, the cable that you use depends on the camera itself. So I'm using a tether tools. Tether Pro USB C cable to my Canon are five and uh, so maybe if I had an older camera, it might just use a normal USB cable, not U S B C. Um and so it depends on your camera, which cable you use. So zip over to tether tools dot com and they have an entire guide choosing the correct cable to connect your camera to your computer. Now this is fantastic for doing tabletop photography or in the studio photography. You can take your camera off the tripod and run around these long cables allow you the freedom to do that. And the advantage of shooting tethered is that allows you to see what you're shooting in real time. You can make adjustments to tho...

se images. You can do some basic tonality changes and corrections. You can even do a quick develop preset and apply that as you're shooting. You can use your uh light room classic screen to show the model what you're shooting. You can check critical focus to make sure everything is spot on. If you're working in a team environment where maybe you have a makeup artist and art director, a client or whatever, you can be shooting into that and they can see what you're doing. If you're a wedding photographer or an event photographer, you might have maybe a photo booth at a reception um, or at the party of the ball of the corporate event, whatever it is. And you can be tethered shooting into light room Classic. And then you can automatically be updating a slide show and showing those images up on a big screen. So that's really a big party favorite at weddings and events and things like that. If you're a product photographer and you need to make sure you have critical focus and composition and color, you can tether to make sure there's so many advantages of tethered shooting. Now it's called tethered shooting because it's tethered, you're actually physically connected from the camera to the laptop. But now you can shoot wirelessly. There's a lot of cameras have wifi built in or you can use this guy, this is a tether tools, air direct. So these days you don't have to be physically tethered to your laptop or computer. You can either use a cable or you can use a wireless option, it's up to you to choose what works best for you. And so if you want privacy and really fast speeds, I always use a cable because it's really, really fast but if you need the freedom of movement, use a wireless option that works much better as well. Okay, so we know we have to have a camera, we know we have to connect via cable or some kind of wifi connection. How do we get Light Room Classic to recognize this device? How do we can control this device? Well, before we get into the Nitty gritty one caveat and that is Light Room Classic works with many, many different cameras, Canon and Nikon and Fuji and Olympus and like and all kinds of cameras and each of those cameras depending on how new they are, what functionality they have allow you to do some things and some don't do those things. And so I'm going to keep the functionality at the most fundamentally basic level to show you what most cameras do. So you might have a more modern camera that does more when you're tethered than my camera or you might have an older camera or a a off brand camera that doesn't do as much as my camera. So we're going to keep it simple. This is a Cannon are five, it's pretty modern, it does most things. So the first thing I want to do is go into Light room Classic and I will go to file tethered capture, start, tethered capture and it's going to be similar to importing photos. So it's gonna ask me what the session name is. And so this could be a session name, you could be, you know, the Wilson wedding, it could be the, uh, the product, a photo shoot, it could be the adventure of whatever. It doesn't matter. You can name it, whatever. So I'm going to name this session, um, tethered heather demo. Okay, There's my tether demo. And so I also want to check this segment photo by shots. So the reason that you might want to segment photos by shot, if you're doing catalog work or if you're doing a wedding, if you're doing things where you have very specific segmented photoshoots within one thing. So for example, if you're shooting a wedding, you might have here are all the pictures before the wedding of the bride and the bridesmaids. And then next you have the groom and the groomsmen, and then next you have the groom and the groom's family. Next you have the bride and the bride's family. Next you have the entire wedding party except the bride and groom cause they can't see each other next. So you see how that sort of segmented or if you're doing product photography, you might do products number one Is a bunch of shots. Next product # two next, etc. So their segments inside of a larger photo event. So we are going to segment our photos by shots and we're gonna be shooting some interesting things on my shelves and we're gonna segment those photos by that. The next thing it's gonna ask is how do you want to name these things? And so uh, there are all kinds of templates here. You can use a custom name, a data file name, however you want to do it. I'm just gonna choose session, name and sequence. So it's going to name it. Tether demo, 010203 etcetera. So just for fun, we're going to start at start number of started whatever you want. So it would be tethered demo 101 A 1102 et cetera. The next thing we have to choose is where are these going to be saved? So we're gonna put them on our fake hard drive in the photos folder. So I'm gonna say choose and I'm gonna go to my light room hard drive to my fake hard drive in the photos folder and I will choose that. And then in fact I'm probably gonna add another folder inside of that called tethered ah sessions. There we go. So we've got a very distinct folder for that. And then also you can add these two collections. And so I'm gonna create a collection and I'm gonna say products, I don't have to create a collection. I don't have to sink this to the collection. But I think that is a pretty good thing to do. And I will I'm not gonna put it in a collection set and I'm not gonna sink these with light room. It's a great option to sync these with light room because you could have a client Across the globe watching you shoot and they can see those images coming in on a shared light room folder. So this is a really cool thing. So there could be a delay of maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes and you could be shooting here and people over in Paris France or over in who knows, cambodia, they could be seeing the results of what you're doing with not much of a delay, it's sort of cool. Okay I'm gonna create this collection called products and then the metadata. Guess what? We've created all those presets, we might as well use them. So I'm gonna use my demo metadata. And for the keywords I'm gonna say class, I'm gonna say bowl, I'm gonna say stuffed uh animal stuffed bear and I'm gonna say Russia and you'll understand why and a little bit. And then the other option we have here is to disable auto advance. And so by default, when you're shooting tethered, you'll take a picture that will show up in light room. When you take a new picture, the new picture will auto advance and show up. And as you're shooting light room is going to automatically show you the most recent photo. So if you don't want it to do that for some reason you can shut off auto advance. I wanted to do that. So everything is set up. And so I'm going to say, okay, the first thing that's going to say because remember we said segment photos by shots, it's going to say, what's my initial shot name? So back here behind me, I have this little bull and what I want to do is I just want to take a picture of the bowl itself and nothing else. So I'm going to say this is my singing bowl, this is from Nepal and it's actually from India from India. So I'm going to say, okay, let's do that. And now it's saying where's your camera? I need to turn my camera on. So I am going to do that right now. My camera's turned on and it connects. And you see this little bar that shows up, this is my tethered bar and it shows me the camera name right here shows me my session name, my shot name. The other thing we can do here with this camera and with a few other cameras is if you hit live you can see a live preview. so I will auto focus that really quickly. I can see what my composition looks like. I can see there's quite a bit of delay but there's my hand in the shot. Take my hand out there is like a five second delay there I'm gonna turn that off because I don't really need it but you do have that you can control your shutter and aperture and esso and white balance so I want this to be a little bit have a little bit more depth of field. So I'm going to change these values and so what we'll do here is we're going to go in Change this to I think we'll do F16 I'm going to do auto white balance. Otto I is so let the camera figure out everything for me. And the other thing we can do is we can use a preset. All those develop presets. Man, they show up over and over and so for this I'm going to use oh I don't know. Let's say black and white. No let's do a color and we'll do high contrast color. Okay, so now we're ready to shoot all I can, all I need to do is either I can press the shutter release on the camera itself or over here in light room. Classic. I have this big button here and if I click that it tells the camera to fire and we look here and already bam there's our photo. I don't like that, develop preset. And so let's do this. Let's go over here to our quick develop and let's find a preset that looks pretty good. Let's do natural. Think that's a little bit better. Okay, so we'll just use that one. You can go in here, color or do natural. All right, so now I have this singing bowl that I have taken a picture of. I'm gonna move this so I moved that to the other side and now I will take a picture That comes in 12 three, it's about three seconds so I'll move this so it shows up in the frame. I'll take another photo there, you get the idea? So, I've got my singing bowl shots. Now, what I want to do is I want to take pictures of something else. So I'm gonna click on this. All cancel. So what I did is I went right down here on my tethered bar to where it says singing bowl. I'm going to click on that and I'm going to say Russian bear, what I'm gonna say. All right, so I have this little guy right here. This was a gift that was given to me by a friend of mine uh in Novosibirsk Russia. It's a handmade little bear. And so it's one of my most treasured items from my trip around the world. So I'm gonna take this little guy and we're gonna stick him in the singing bowl and that's pretty cool. I'll take a photo and then there we go. We can see that that is out of focus. So I need to focus that up a little bit and see if I can. There we go. There we go. So I was able to trigger that from the camera instead of of the laptop itself and you can see that I can check my critical focus. I can do a shot name. Let's try one more. Change this to coin jar. So I have a coin jar from somewhere over uh over in cambodia I think. Yeah. Okay, I focus that up. I'll take a photo of my coin jar and then bam there it is. Got a lens cap in the photo. I'll do that again. All right. So now that came in and you can see that we have all kinds of fun with tethered shooting. Now the point of this is that you can control your camera remotely. You can check things and be really scrupulous about those. Of course if this was a real photo shoot, I would have taken my time to make sure everything was level and set and lit and all of that kind of stuff. But the idea is it's very, very simple to tether. One other thing I want to show you in light room Classic over here is over on the left. I had those folders. So I said we had the tethered demo that was in my folder and then every time I changed the shot name it created another sub folder. So tethering like this and dividing it by shot will allow you to really organize your files as you're shooting. Um The other thing that you should note is here on my tethered shooting bar, way over here on the right, there's this little teeny circle that's almost imperceptible. So it's this little gear right here. If I click on that, it brings up this same tethered capture setting dialog and so I can change the session name. I can change if I wanted to be by shot that can change the name, I can add new keywords I can disable so I can change those settings even when I'm in the midst of tethered shooting. So that's all there is to it. Tethered shooting is a wonderful thing. I use it all the time and I hope you find this valuable for your workflow as well.