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Gaff tape galore could be found at a recent commercial shoot we had at the beginning of the week in which we tested out the tethering feature built into Aperture 2. It was big success as a first test of in the field tethering. It was a commercial shoot for the Color Bar salon. You can see some more behind the scenes shots that I fired off on Jamie’s blog.

If you are curious about the tech here is what we did…

We setup lights, background, other photo gear as normal. Then we setup our MacBook Pro running Aperture 2 with two RAID 1 LaCie Rugged external hard drives. We were shooting with the oh so nice Nikon D3. The D3 was tethering to the MacBook Pro via a USB 2.0 cable which was securely attached with miles of gaff tape as you can see in the picture below. We also had a SanDisk Extreme III 8GB Compact Flash card inside the D3 so files where written to both card and the two hard drives simultaneously. It sounds sort of complicated, but Aperture 2 made it extremely easy.

Shooting tethered saved alot of post production time and made us able to turn the job around alot faster than normal. Having the ability to let the client “proof” images on the spot and make selections right away saved the time of choosing images, running web proofing galleries, waiting for choices, then narrowing selections, and finally editing shots. It also gave Jamie the freedom to see exactly what the shot looked like and no second guessing about lighting, focus, etc. Although a shot like this did require quite a bit of tech-pre-planning to make sure that everything would work seamlessly. The gaff tape is also to prevent Jamie from accidentally turning the camera off during the shoot. Something he is hard-wired into doing!

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.