After months of thinking about it, I finally got around to it and setup my laptop with the proper software to allow tethered shooting with my Canon DSLR. I then spend the evening doing a shoot and it was GREAT! I’m sorry I procrastinated for so long.

My normal cycle is take a few shots, check the LCD on the camera to make sure the exposure is ok. Zoom in on the LCD and see if things are in focus (can’t always tell), then take approximately 10-20 shots. Take the Compact Flash card out of the camera and carry it in the study where my computer is. Import the photos into Lightroom, look at them, determine that I don’t like them because of focus, or shadows, or 100 other different reasons. Schelep the card back to the camera, take another 20 shots. Lather, rinse, repeat until I get some photos in Lightroom that I’m somewhat happy with.

This if course takes hours with all of the walking back and forth and waiting for Lightroom to import the photos from the card. With the tethered shooting I saved a ton of time by being able to actually see the photos on a large screen in almost real time. I ended up having to take a lot less shots than normal to get the desired result.  But there was still room for improvement.

To speed up things even more I then setup an Auto Import folder in Lightroom. Lightroom is running on my desktop computer in the study, so I shared the tethered capture folder on my laptop, pointed Lightroom at that folder and then as I took the photos they automagically got imported into Lightroom. So when I was done with the shoot I walked in and sat down at my desktop computer and all of my photos from the studio were there waiting for me!

If you are doing studio shooting and you haven’t yet tried tethered shooting I highly recommend it!

An example of one of my studio photos that would have benefited greatly from having tethered shooting.

Â

Just got back from the Scott Kelby training seminar Photoshop CS3 for Photographers Tour in San Francisco. My head is about to explode from the amount of information I absorbed.

It was a great seminar and if you ever get the chance to go to one I would highly recommend it. Basically it covered Curves, Hue/Saturation/Lightness, and Advanced Masking/Selection techniques. There was more information presented that I did not know than information I did know so it was well worth the $79.

I got there about 20 minutes before it started and there was a short check-in line and I decided to go to the restroom first. In the 2 minutes it took me to go to the restroom a hundred people got in line and it was out the door. By the time I got in it was starting and and I didn’t get the best seat, was way off to the side. Next time I will be sure to get there early. I was surprised by how popular it was, I counted over 600 people in attendance.

I am now off to try out some of my new found skills.

I just signed up for the Scott Kelby Training seminar “Photoshop CS3 for Photographers Tour” by Ben Willmore being held in San Francisco next week. I’ve been meaning to take some Photoshop classes for some time now because post-processing is definitely an area I need to improve in my photography. Anyway I’m looking forward to it and will post a review when I’m done.

I have recently started using colored gels over my strobes in a lot of shots. To hold the gel over the strobe I have been just taping it using blue tape, this left a lot to be desired. So a couple of days ago I fabricated a gel holder that attaches to the flash.

Here is the complete system consisting of the flash, gel holder, and gels from Lee. Shown is the free Lee Sample Pack. The holder also works with the Rosco Gel Sample Pack gels.

Click here for construction details on how to build your own. I now also offer these Gel Holders for sale. Visit GelHolder.com for details.

Attended the South Bay Photography Meetup this evening and had a great time chatting with the folks there and looking at all the great photos that others are taking.

I gave several of the people there a link to this blog and told them I would have a link to my photos. So here is the link to my flickr page were all my photos currently reside.

Welcome to my blog. I will mainly use this blog to post about my current obsession which is photography. I may occasionally throw in something related to woodworking or the world in general. Have to see how it goes.

My goal is to have each bit carefully handcrafted for your reading pleasure.