Tethering my Canon Rebel XT (350D) with Aperture 2.0

When Aperture 2.0 was released, I was excited with the new features and glad that Apple breathe life into its Professional Photography Imaging application that has been waiting for this long-awaited upgrade. One of the new features that I like is tethering.

Tethering in photography allows you to remotely control your camera when connected thru USB/Firewire. Some of its use includes instant display of photo in the workstation after pressing the shutter (handy for illustration and when doing studio shoots and you need higher resolution displays to check the image quality), and intervalometer shooting. The latter is not supported in Aperture (yet?). You can already do this with Remote Camera DC that comes with the Canon software CD (I’m sure there’s an equivalent in Nikon cameras) and it also has the intervalometer shooting. It should, however, save you additional steps in your workflow to have your image in Aperture straight from the camera. Intervalometer shooting allows you to take shots in set intervals in a span of time - often used to create long-interval movies shrinked into minutes - sunrise to sunset in one minute (you get what I mean? ).

Until about two weeks ago, I was sad to know that I can’t have tethering with my Canon Rebel XT in Tiger despite having Aperture 2.0. Moving to Leopard, Aperture supports my camera at 10.5.2.

Ironically, Apple doesn’t quite have a good documentation on how to use tethering, but O’Reilly’s Digital Media Inside Aperture has an article on how simple to use it.

Here’s the simple steps.

1. Create a project, or select an existing one, that you want your new photos to go to after capturing remotely, or manually pressing the shutter in your camera.
2. Select File > Tether > Start Session…

   The Tether settings is just like the sidebar when you Import photos. You can customize import names, and have Add Metadata options.

   
   
   You can select ‘Show HUD’ or deselect it if you don’t want the HUD to show particularly when you manually press the shutter in the camera. You’d need to show the HUD in case you plan to remotely control the shutter (File > Tether > Show Tether HUD)

   

3. Pressing the shutter automatically downloads your image to the Project you selected.
   
   The selected project will show this icon in the Project sidebar

4. Press Stop Session from the Tether HUD or File > Tether > Stop Session…

Before I forget, for my Canon Rebel XT I need to set my Connection to PC Connection instead of the Printer/PTP to make this work. It’s the same requirement if you want to use Remote Camera DC.