Shooting Tethered on Canon DSLR’s

Posted on 18. Mar, 2009 by Symbol Photography in Equipment

Hello all, this topic has been covered by others. But i, like many, probably have had difficulties getting this all to work togther. So in order to help out those of us that are a bit more ‘challenged’, i created this tutorial.

The Purpose

To shoot tethered and have images that were shot immediately appear on your computer screen for review

What’s Needed…

1. Camera , 2. EOS Utility, 3. Canon Camera Cable, 4. Lightroom

Steps

1. Locate the cable that came with your cameara.
Seen Here. Standard USB large to small connector.

2. Install EOS Utility Software from Canon.
This may differ based on what camera you have, i’m using it on a 5D. I’m pretty sure it’s generic across most of the recent bodies such as the 1D, 5D 20D, 40D etc… Select EOS System, Your model camera and once displayed click on the ‘Drivers and Support’ tab select software ‘EOS Utility 2.4′ here.

3. Ensure camera is set to Communication = “PC Connection”.
This is a very important step. Without this being set, your camera won’t be able to communicate to your computer. Go to your camera’s menu system and look for the menu item called ‘Communication’. See;

4. Plug in your USB cable into the camera and laptop.
The smaller USB side fits into your camera and the larger side fits into any standard USB computer port. Turn your camera on.

5. Create a folder for ‘watching’
Simply create a folder. Put it someplace easy to access or someplace with plenty of disk space available. Mine like others that have done this use the desktop.

6. Open Canon EOS Utility

Click Camera Settings…

You’ll now see this screen;

If you still don’t see this screen popup, hit the shutter button on the camera, it may have gone asleep since you started this tutorial! lol…

Ok from here, in the EOS Utility, click on File-> Preferences. Tab to the ‘Destination’ tab, and let’s set that to your ‘Watched’ folder, wherever you created it. Seen here;

Uncheck any of the checkboxes…

Then, we’ll tab to the ‘Linked Software’ tab, set this to ‘None’.

7. Lightroom Settings
Now on to Lightroom. Go to File-> Auto Import, select “Enable Auto Import” choose choose Auto Import Settings.

When the dialog appears (shown above), at the top where it says “Watched Folder” click on the Choose button and find your watched folder and select it. Any images that are placed in here are now auto imported into Lightroom.

And that’s all folks… start shooting away! Enjoy!

Tags: Canon Tethered Shooting, Lightroom Canon remote shooting