Tethering

I’ve been want­ing to con­nect my DSLR to my com­puter for a while, think­ing that it would be nice to get instant pre­views on a big screen and sav­ing directly to disk.

I didn’t know how, how­ever, and after hav­ing searched for soft­ware, spent some time on Google with­out really going any­where, I learned a few things:

1. It’s called ‘shoot­ing tethered’

2. You don’t need soft­ware you don’t already have.

For a sim­ple setup, all you need to do is to set your cam­era to PPT and launch Image Capture.app (OS X). Here, you can press a but­ton to shoot pic­tures and in the­ory you can auto-transfer and run an action (eg. ‘open in Preview.app’) upon trans­fer. Auto-transfer was flaky, so I went to Automator.

With a sim­ple work­flow (), you can take the shot, trans­fer the photo to a folder of choice and open it in Preview.app. Automa­tor is a bit slow (on my machine), but it’s nice nevertheless.