Why shoot tethered?
6 years ago, shooting tethered on advertising shoots was really cool, and new and amazing. Without Adobe raw file processing, checking highlight values and shadow values was very important: if you didn’t nail it, there was no going back and using sliders to correct your over or under exposure. A photographer could also check focus and show an AD exactly what you were getting when you were shooting. There was some work being done in post, but not nearly the amount of extensive retouching being done today using layer masks and combining multiple images. Essentially, shooting tethered provided the photographer with a digital polaroid that resembled the final image.
Jump forward 5 or 6 years and shooting tethered makes little sense. If an AD is on the set, I may still shoot tethered, but the final result of the image will not resemble what is on the screen, so I now have a retoucher on the shoot who can frankenstein an image together that will somewhat look like what we are thinking of for the final image. Shooting tethered makes little sense any longer. Using cards and downloading cards is easier. The program doesn’t crash or loose its connection to the camera and the screen on the back of my 5D MKII is so good, that I can get a really good sense of the image. I don’t even need to read histograms anymore. I think it may be even faster to shoot to cards. For these reasons, I only shoot tethered if I have to.
One Response to “Why shoot tethered?”
Flannel says:
July 7, 2010 at 11:25 pm
everyone is still shooting tethered.