Tethering with Lightroom 3 and Canon 7D

While watching Hell’s Kitchen last night, there was a moment where the chefs were having their food creations photographed. What I noticed was that the photographer was tethering his camera to a nearby laptop. This had me realize that Adobe Lightroom 3 has a tether capture feature! I had to try it out as I had to do some product shots for an upcoming camera review.

I set up my Canon 7D (along with my EF 50mm f1.8) on a tripod (I need a new tripod, the $30 Velbon can’t handle the weight of my Canon 7D). Used one of my (many) USB cables and plugged it into my new Asus G51J laptop. Pretty simple actually. You then (in Lightroom) select File -> Tether Capture -> Start Tethered Capture… That’s about it. The great thing about this is you don’t need to have a memory card inserted into the camera! Granted, using a memory card would allow what you are shooting to be stored on them as well as the computer your camera is attached to.

I switched into Live View, manually set my settings, manually focused on the item in the light-tent and voila! Images were being recorded and transfered to the laptop via Lightroom and stored in the location I specified. Instead of seeing the result on a 3″ screen, I could review/edit/delete on the laptop’s 15.6″ screen instead. Definitely a great way to shoot in a studio type setup.

I’m pretty excited to shoot more things like this as it is much more efficient than taking a series of photos, dumping the card to the computer/server, importing into Lightroom, reviewing and then editing. I skip a bunch of steps and streamline the product photo process. This would also be great for studio work, granted I am using a USB cable with an extension, I do know both Nikon and Canon have Wireless Transmitting grips for remote tethering. This sort of setup is a bit more budget friendly than remote WiFi transmitters.

I am not sure if all cameras support this tether capture feature of Lightroom 3, but I am sure the larger manufactures and their dSLRs should be able to.