How to Tether Camera to Computer – For Macro Photographers

Don’t know how to tether your camera to your computer?

Here’s a shortie but goodie! In this macro photography tutorial, I will show you How to Tether the Camera to Computer – For macro photographers.

Here you’ll learn MY best advice on how to tether your camera to your laptop or computer and how to work on tether information using Lightroom AND more information you will find useful on your photography journey.

My huge tip to you is to get everything cleaned up in your area especially if you’re using a cord, as I do. You can see that Noah and I are getting the studio set up with my sawhorses and everything’s cleaned up because I have actually tripped on my cord before so be careful.

Okay so you could see that I’m in Lightroom, now you notice that a lot of photographers will say “okay now let’s set up your camera”. I don’t do that, I will go in and work on the tethering information

You’ll go to file and you’re going to go to tether capture and then what I would do is start tethered capture.

Tethering is absolutely amazing for macro photographers because our subjects are so small. So let’s just go into this area here so we can really focus on getting you organized. Right here it says session, session name, and then name what you’re shooting.

So we’re just gonna do life and death version two. Let’s just say that but really I do subjects, so if I was shooting cucumbers or you know, let’s just say fruit. Another thing that’s really awesome for macro photographers is segments. Because you can stack a set and know that that set goes with your shoot.

If you’re stacking your images, sometimes the stack can get confusing. The next area naming is pretty important. I like to add my own information so it’s easier to find and what’s nice is it shows you what it’s going to look like and it’s nice to have numbering because if you’re doing stacking, you want to have your numbers then you’ll know that what picture you’re working on.

Example fruit 2, 00, 01, 02, 03. You can also add your sequences if you’re doing a lot. These numbers make a big difference. Once you’re done, you just push done.

Your destination is really important so you can find your work so I’m going to choose the location that I want. If you already have a folder you would pick the folder. If you want a new folder then you would just type the new folder.

Another great tip I want to give you is adding to a collection so this way if you really are working on a portfolio or something that you know you are clumping together, click on add to collection.

So next what you’re going to do is take the time to add some information because it’s going to help you find your images. You can make a new group of information, see in “new metadata” and then you just add your information here and then give it a name.

It’s really easy to do and really important to do for copyrights and then also a couple of keywords. So if for some reason that you forgot to do the information because I did when I was making this video, you’ll have to shut down Lightroom and come back up to this tethering information.

There are other options and I wouldn’t disable auto-advance for us photographers because we want to see it every single time a photo is shot. Let’s go ahead and just plug in the cords to the camera and push the shutter button halfway to wake up the camera.

Plugging my cord into my camera on the side of my canon is pretty easy, you just got to be careful to put it right in. I highly recommend tether tools to help you out if you’re going to be tethering.

Today I’m sharing with you how to tether from Lightroom but I’m curious, do you use ON1 or another software program. Let me know down in the comments below and I may just make you a video on tethering in that software.

See more in my video how I go over the settings of my own camera so it’s easier to understand. So now, we could focus stack now, so much easier.

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Timestamps:

00:00 | Intro

00:37 | Bonus Tip

01:10 | CompleteTethering Information

06:04 | Plugging into the Computer

06:48 | A question for you

07:03 | Time to Photograph

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