Tethered Shooting

Bristolian

Bristolian

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Name
Steve
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I've just tried tethered shooting for the first time. Mainly just out of interest but also because I'm going to be shooting a local high school prom soon and thought it might make checking the formal shots a bit easier than looking at the rear lcd screen.

Anyway, two things I noticed which I thought I'd share with you:
1. My laptop (old IBM Thinkpad R31) isn't up to the job - too slow displaying the pictures.
2. The camera loses control of the picture count (DSC_xxxx) - prior to tethering I'd taken some shots normally and had deleted a couple from the sequence - the remote flash hadn't fired. When I went back to normal shooting again the picture count re-started from the first of the deleted images and incremented from there. I ended up with about 5 shots with the same number in the camera which were given suffixes by TransferNX when downloaded to the pc.

Are there any other quirks I should be aware of regarding tethered shooting?
 
What software are you using to tether? ...and what do you consider slow? ...are you shooting raw or jpeg? ...when you say the laptop is slow to display the images do you mean the time it takes for the images to appear on the screen from when you take a shot or the time it takes for the image resolution to be resolved clearly after the image comes up on screen?

I now just use nikon camera control pro 2 (NCCP2), in the past I have used lightroom along with it to view the images but I've found just using NCCP2 is a bit quicker and does the job for me. I only really use it to check IQ, focus, DOF, etc. whilst on location. I don't do any changes to the images, I leave that for my main PC at home. I've used NCCP2 on a really old toshiba laptop before and it worked great. I use a 10ft USB 2 extension, shoot in raw, and the transfer time is about 4 seconds. The image when it comes up in NCCP2 is then pixelated for a couple of seconds whilst it creates the high res preview. So about 6 seconds altogether before I have the full high res image.
 
Hi Mark,

I'm also using NCCP2 - only bought the full version recently - and using the inbuilt viewer to look at the pictures. Shooting RAW it takes about 8-10 secs for the image to display at all and a couple of seconds more for it to resolve fully. I tried shooting jpg and the increase in speed was quite noticeable.

I wonder if my anti-virus software (AVG 9) is slowing things down? I'll try again tomorrow with it disabled and see if it's any quicker.

I have to say, for product shots or studio work I think being able to see the results immediately should be a boon even if you don't do anything with the shot there and then. If nothing else you can make sure the focus/lighting/dof/etc are right. I can see me using this more in the future.

Thanks for the input :)
 
usb tethering is v slow, shooting jpeg saves a lot of transfer data. Remember to make sure it writes to card aswell as tether in case the tether falls over
 
Hi David,

Indeed, jpg is much faster ... especially when I turn off the AVG anti-virus :D

As far as I can tell, there's no way to get the D90 to save to the memory card when shooting in tethered mode This is a pity as it would preserve the file number sequence.
 
Shirley there must be an option to save to multiple locations?
 
admirable said:
Shirley there must be an option to save to multiple locations?
Click to expand...

Well if Shirley knows I wish she'd post the info on here :lol:

No offence intended :D

I've looked in the D90 owners handbook, Ken Rockwell's excellent guide to the D90 and Thom Hogan's superb D90 guide and none of them speak of tethered shooting in anything more than a passing comment. The NCCP2 manual doesn't offer any suggestions either except to say that images will be stored on the computer not on the memory card.

Bummer :thumbsdown:
 
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