Capture One Capture Pilot Is A Really Cool Tool For Tethered Shooting

Image by Mario Sferrazza

Hi and welcome to my blog. Today I want to share with all of you some really cool tools I just started using for tethered shooting. First off, let me explain why you might want to consider shooting tethered. Have you ever made a picture that looked perfect on the back of your cameras LCD only to get home and look at it on the computer to see it is kind of terrible? Well if you haven’t, great for you, but for me it used to happen a lot more than it happens, now that I tether. You see, everything looks great on that tiny little LCD on the back of your camera. Also what you are seeing is a jpeg representation of the Raw file you captured, so the image has been processed a little so it looks much better than the unprocessed raw file that you will develop in post.

If you choose to use a tethered workflow it provides you with immediate feedback on your images, and on a much larger screen. This makes it simple to judge critical focus, exposure, color, etc. In the bigger picture, tethering increases your keeper rate exponentially. Also if you want to place your camera in some funky low or high angle, tethering will save your back.

A long time ago, I remember assisting a photographer during product photography sessions, where we would shoot from a table top. I remember at the end of the day, my body was aching from all the bending over, to check focus. It was heaven when Live View came along and the ability to feed that Live screen could be viewed to a monitor. Essentially, it was the first tethered shooting. Boy, have we come a long way since then.

Software is available, from most camera manufacturer, that will allow you to shoot tethered. If you shoot Canon there is EOS Utility and Nikon shooters have Nikon Camera Control Pro 2. Also you have third-party offerings like Lightroom that does work, however it has very limited functionality and can be a little temperamental. Not to mention, very slow to upgrade its ability to work with new cameras (I waited months for the 5D MkIII to work with LR 4). Next, there is a really cool piece of software called Capture One by the makers of Phase One medium format cameras. All I can say is Capture One got it right. To use Capture One, all you do is plug-in the camera and it just works. Capture one is feature laden and can do things none of the rest can. For example I can shoot wirelessly from my iPad, and there is zero hoops to jump through to make it work. I made a video to show you how it works and you just have to see this in action.

Thanks for taking time to visit my blog today. I hope you all have a good one. Sincerely, Thomas Shue