In this episode of The Breakdown i'm going to talk to you about how I tether
my Sony Alpha cameras to my laptop computer using capture one
Adorama TV presents The Breakdown with Miguel Quiles
Welcome back to The Breakdown my name is Miguel Quiles. I'm a Sony Artisan of
imagery and today we're going to talk about tethering it's one of the most
common questions that I get and it seems like a very complicated and a very
difficult thing to do but in actuality it is very simple and it's a very
powerful way for you to learn your lighting, to learn your camera settings,
to see exactly what your images look like without evaluating them on the very
small screen on the back of the camera, and instead using your laptop computer
so it's a very easy thing to do it I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to break
down everything that you need to know about tethering a Sony Alpha camera to
your laptop.
Now let's talk about the actual products that you're going to need in order to
shoot tethered in the studio or even outdoors because tethering is one of
those things that most of the time when you think tethering you think in-studio
but for myself I actually do a lot of tethering on location as well so it can
be done anywhere and it can be done very simply, but first things first,
the one thing that you are going to need is a tether cable like this one,
this particular tether cable is made by a company called Tether Tools
it is a fantastic product and I would tell you after many years of shooting
tethered in the studio
I've tried many different tether cables and tether options out there,
I tried very inexpensive cables that were
overseas brands, no name brand USB cables and I found that in some way shape or
form, either the cables or the connections don't last very long
Oftentimes I'll get errors where I'll plug in the camera and I'll start
shooting and all of a sudden the laptop doesn't see the photos anymore,
The most consistent experience that I've had shooting tethered has been using
these cables from Tether Tools
So this tether cable is connected via USB to my MSI laptop and this laptop is
running a version of Capture One which is Capture One Pro which will allow me
to be able to preview the images on a large screen this is a 17 inch screen on
this laptop and it's going to allow me to preview each of these images as they
come through. Now there's some other features that actually are part of this
Capture One set up which are really really cool and really awesome so I'm
going to go ahead and take a first shot here, so you guys can get an idea of how
the tethering works and what it does
so that way when you go ahead you try you'll know exactly what to expect
Ok so before I demonstrate how to tether using Capture One and using this setup
that we just talked about
I also want to make sure to bring particular attention because I didn't
mention it, but one of the things you may want to consider if you're going to be
shooting tethered is to pick up a good Tether table
Now these are also made by Tether Tools and they're really fantastic because you could
set them up on a tripod you can set them up on a rolling stand and you can kind
of move around and maneuver them where you need
There's also additional accessories that you can pick up for these tables where
you can put your hard drives and hook up even drink holders, camera holders,
different items and accessories to be able to quickly access them when you
need them
so definitely check out the Tether Tools tables but let's talk about this setup
here really quickly. So we have everything in terms of our table our
laptop is set up, our camera is set up
I went ahead and I pre-tested the settings for these particular images
We're going to shoot just to see how they would come out and so I've got this
set at f/11 1/60 of a second ISO 100 and let's go ahead and let's see
what happens when I start shooting these images and I''ll give you two different
ways that you can shoot images using Capture One
Ok so the first way that you might end up shooting tethered in the studio is
basically just the same way you would shoot normally which is to go ahead and
take your shot using your shutter button on your camera.
So let's go ahead and take a shot here and so again you'll see the image pop up on
the screen and I do want to mention here that when you are shooting tethered the
images are not actually being stored on your SD card on your camera they're
actually being saved on your computer's hard drive which is pretty awesome, that
saves you a lot of time in editing and in post-production because instead of
having to take the photos on your camera and then transfer multiple GB of
data in many cases to your laptop you could actually go ahead and it transfers
right over into the laptop computer as soon as you take the images, so that's
one of the first ways and that is the first way that you can go ahead and use
this tethered setup is to just go ahead and snap your images and again this
could be a model this could be products this could be whatever
there's a lot of people that use this in real estate photography as well to take
pictures of interiors and exteriors of homes but again very simple setup you'll
see here momentarily that the images will pop up on the laptop screen now the
other way for you to be able to do this is to actually use the Capture One
software to be able to shoot these image
so let me go ahead and show you how that works
Ok so I have Capture One here set up on my screen and one of the things that I
also want to point out to to kind of help you guys out when you're shooting
tethered any time you connect your camera to your laptop
you want to make sure that you see the camera information here in this little
panel of Capture One which is on the second tab up here where the camera icon
is and so this will tell you your camera that's hooked up your camera settings
your white balance if you're shooting and raw what your aspect ratio is
basically everything that set up internally in the camera you can
actually control much of that here on this little tab if you go down below as
well on this little camera tab down low
you'll notice what your camera settings are and there's a little icon that's
pretty cool here there's a little movie icon here that in the beginning I
thought was actually shooting video but it does something really, really,
excellent. You click on that and wait a moment you'll notice that a little
window opens up here to the side,
now I'm going to go ahead, and off camera I'm going to position this little camera
in different ways, and you notice it's live view that is being set up and you
can see that from your laptop computer which is pretty awesome.
So I could go ahead and I could set this thing up and frame it exactly how I want
to in the frame,
I can go ahead and get this thing in focus and if i wanted to i could go
ahead and from the set up here
I could go ahead and take images so it's very easy for you to be able to go and
take an image using this Live View window and what you'll do is at the very
top here there's a little button looks like a camera and when you hover over it
it will say capture, and you simply press that button and boom - you take a photo
now in the other window you'll notice the image will pop up and you can go
back and forth in between these two windows if you have a second monitor set up.
That's also a really cool way to do this you can have the live view window and a
separate monitor and then have Capture One running running on the second
monitor and you could have both of them up at the same time
and again from here i could go ahead and I could ship this around get some
different orientations in different positions for this image, so we'll center
that right there,
go ahead and get that in focus, and take another shot
so again super easy, very easy for you to be able to capture the image whether
you're just using the software to take the image or if you are physically
taking the image pushing the shutter button on the camera.
Now once you've taken this image again these are all being saved onto the hard
drive of your laptop device but what's really awesome is that you can go ahead
and you can zoom into these images and see full screen
what the image looks like that you just shot so for example I could take a look
at this really close up and I could see a lot of dust
this is stuff that I would not be able to see if I was shooting with this
particular camera, looking at the back of the screen because the screen is a lot
smaller
even if I zoom in it might be a little bit difficult to see some of these
details
so this would be something that lets say if you're photographing a model or you're
photographing somebody in the studio
you know maybe the makeup needs a little bit of just of adjusting or maybe
there's an eyelash or something that is in the way that you want to get rid of
this is a really quick and easy way for you to be able to see the images much
closer and much bigger this helps you out this helps out your makeup artist
and hairstylist than anybody else that is onset, helping you to create the best
images possible
So there you have it folks, a very easy and simple way for you to tether your
Sony cameras to your laptop computer using Capture One
I hope you guys enjoyed it and I hope you learned something new today, if you
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Thanks again so much for watching and I will see you again next time on the
next episode of The Breakdown - Bye everybody