After months of thinking about it, I finally got around to it and setup my laptop with the proper software to allow tethered shooting with my Canon DSLR. I then spend the evening doing a shoot and it was GREAT! I’m sorry I procrastinated for so long.
My normal cycle is take a few shots, check the LCD on the camera to make sure the exposure is ok. Zoom in on the LCD and see if things are in focus (can’t always tell), then take approximately 10-20 shots. Take the Compact Flash card out of the camera and carry it in the study where my computer is. Import the photos into Lightroom, look at them, determine that I don’t like them because of focus, or shadows, or 100 other different reasons. Schelep the card back to the camera, take another 20 shots. Lather, rinse, repeat until I get some photos in Lightroom that I’m somewhat happy with.
This if course takes hours with all of the walking back and forth and waiting for Lightroom to import the photos from the card. With the tethered shooting I saved a ton of time by being able to actually see the photos on a large screen in almost real time. I ended up having to take a lot less shots than normal to get the desired result. But there was still room for improvement.
To speed up things even more I then setup an Auto Import folder in Lightroom. Lightroom is running on my desktop computer in the study, so I shared the tethered capture folder on my laptop, pointed Lightroom at that folder and then as I took the photos they automagically got imported into Lightroom. So when I was done with the shoot I walked in and sat down at my desktop computer and all of my photos from the studio were there waiting for me!
If you are doing studio shooting and you haven’t yet tried tethered shooting I highly recommend it!
An example of one of my studio photos that would have benefited greatly from having tethered shooting.