For the lighting nerds – 4 lights used here on black seamless. Elinchrom head shooting through a honeycomb 17″ BD about 2ft in front of subject.. one gridded head back left as a rim light / hair light, one small speedlite with red gel for background, and one gridded speedlite for his arms. Also a gold reflector to give a little edge to the side of his right arm. Canon 5Dmk2, Canon 24-70 2.8L, Elinchrom DLite4s, 430ex etc.

Main compartment: You can easily fit a decent sized DSLR in there with a couple of lenses and enough kit for day to day use, although it has foam dividers, once you get your main camera in there you’re pretty limited to other arrangements, but that is pretty standard across similar camera bags. Pretty deep though, which is a great advantage for carrying multiple lenses or flash units.

Second compartment is a bit odd, a great open size, but the lack of any dividers rather limits what you can put inside, but I guess it’s designed more for putting day to day stuff in, like a raincoat, bottle of water etc or food inside, as the backpack is definitely designed for walking around with, rather than just moving kit around. The bag is very comfortable to wear, and I definitely recommended it for people who have just one camera body and a couple of lenses, with a load of accessories & a laptop (It comes with a decent sized laptop carry case which is excellent) – but who will actually will be moving around with it their back.

Overall I think it’s a great bag, very padded and feels pretty rugged – I think this bag is perfect for someone who is outdoors a lot, and perhaps doesn’t just want to carry around ONLY camera equipment, but also day to day based clothing / food / drink / hiking equipment in a very comfortable and protected back pack. The bag feels well made and will keep up with my pretty tough usage of bags, I’ll definitely be adding this bag to my collection, and will probably become part of my primary setup going forward. For worldwide travel it could be a great bag to use, it’s on the bigger side – but will still fit in overhead baggage lockers on most planes, but double check your airline as it’s always changing. The bag has a great heavy duty Tripod strap system on the back which is very useful. It’s great to see all access is from the back (your body side) so that nothing will be able to be stolen, or fall out as you’re walking around – a great touch.

More information:
To find out more about the Vanguard Skyborne 51 please have a look at their website here, and there is a video here which helps put it in perspective too.

The main street in Hoi An which (near the waterfront) is predominately yellow, the faded colours creating a pretty backdrop – almost hiding the sheer magnitude of tourists.

View larger The Yellow stained walls of Hội An

Blue shutters and yellow walls in Hội An View larger

The hypnotic incense coils that burn consistently for a month View larger

If you would like to view these images much larger, or if you would be interested in buying a print, or downloading any of these images – please head over to my stock photography of Vietnam online store. Thank you.

The first scenario is for a local newspaper, needing an small eighth page sized image to illustrate an article. The print run of this regional newspaper would be up to 10,000. You can see the process of choosing the correct usage, print run, location and other variables that need to be entered for it to automatically calculate the price.

The second scenario is for a national advertising campaign in a traditional printed glossy magazine, the image to be used as a quarter page advert, the magazine having a print run of 250,000 copies.

Images used for advertising cost a great deal more than editorial primarily because you are using the image to sell a product or service though more effective visual advertising, for increased profit, so it’s only fair that the image that is being used to make money should cost more to use. Editorial costs will always be lower because they are supporting written articles, rather than selling products for increased revenue.

As I mentioned in the last article, RM licensing allows the picture buyer to have a specific license tailored to the exact requirements of their needed usage, so they both the buyer and the photographer receive a fair deal.

The final cost of the image is totally dependent on final exposure. It wouldn’t be fair on either party if both had to pay the same amount for totally different usages.

You’ve seen it everywhere, iStock, Shutterstock et al, all offering Royalty Free (RF) photographs at incredibly low cost, or almost free when bought under subscription. There are numerous downsides to buying royalty free images, some of which I will highlight below. There are, however, justified reasons when Royalty Free images are useful and suitable, for instance when they are used in conjunction with other background images, or filler images, icons, patterns, textures, vector images and for bulking out websites and visuals. It’s just not a great idea to use RF images for the main feature, main focus or for promoting your brand identity.

We’ve all seen them, corporate faceless websites featuring shiny white offices, with multi racial groups of highly preened ’staff’ pouring over a clipboard. Yep, chances are we’ve all seem the same images. The vast majority of RF images are all available through the same distributors, therefore appearing on all the top sites you currently use to buy your royalty free images. Most publishing agencies use the same subscription based image libraries to buy their royalty free images from.

Perhaps you think due to the sheer number of images, the millions of RF photographs available, there’s never a chance you would end up using the same image as your direct rival competitor. Search for your specific images in these vast collections and you’ll narrow down to just a few of the top useable images, and as passing trends and recent statistics indicate you will be highly likely to be choosing from the same selection as your competitor. There are some great publicised and embarrassing occurrences. Have a look at some of these examples.

To convey an image of concern, both MetLife Inc. and Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra used the same image of a middle-aged man in a stripped button-down shirt resting his chin on his hands. And Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Student Loans sites both used the same image of a collegiate-looking boy working on his laptop for their Web sites… (Source: Blackstar)

Herd mentality. Trends. Fads. We all end up following certain trends and fads, and this is no different in the world of design. Designers, image buyers, creatives, content fillers, web designers, like everybody else follow leaders, trends catch on, and that selection of cheap images somewhat loses it’s appeal when everyone is choosing from the same collections, again.

The fundamental issue with RF is that you never know what that image has been used for in the past, or what it will be used for the same time your ad campaign goes to market. There is no data, no history, no accountability or even the knowledge if your competitor is using the same image on a project right now. Rights Managed licensing changes all that.

So how does Rights Managed stock come into this?
If RF stock is both anonymously and freely available, Rights Managed imagery (RM) offers a middle ground between the cost of hiring a photographer for a commissioned photo shoot, and the lower ground of choosing cheap RF with the distinct chance you compromise your brand identity.

Rights Managed (RM) stock is selectively and carefully licensed specifically for your requirement. The photographer may have many thousands of images ready for rights managed license, but you can guarantee that the photographer knows the history of each image, when, where and what it has been used for in the past, and if it’s currently being used in the same industry.

Although seemingly not as lucrative for the photographer as a specially commissioned photo shoot, it does allow for multiple licenses over the course over the lifetime of the image. For the client, agency or picture buyer this offers a great half way solution by offering the knowledge that the history of the unique image is known. A rights managed photograph is available to multiple buyers, but total exclusivity can also be licensed. It is quite common for a client to buy total exclusivity to that specific image for the duration of the adverting campaign, or a specific time frame.

So, Rights managed stock licensing allows a transparent way for the photographer to retain total copyright of the image and allows revenue over the lifetime of the image, whilst allowing the image buyer to know that the image they have chosen has ben specifically licensed or them, and history known. By using the rights managed licensing model, the photographer can make sure that the buyer has all options available, to take into account any marketing scenarios that may arise, the licensing is totally flexible enough to cover every eventuality, with totally transparent pricing based entirely on the final image exposure.

Rights Managed stock pricing is flexible, scaleable and based on exposure
Rights managed stock allows for a totally flexible pricing strategy by making sure that that the image buyer gets the best value for money, and by making sure that the license and cost is specific to their needs. This allows the same image to be sold for seemingly multiple prices which are explained below. We are using an example of a single image, the same image in each scenario.

If this photograph is to be used as an 1/8th page size in a regional newspaper with a print run of just 20,000, this would command a lot lower price that the same photograph used as a two page spread in a national, 1 million print run glossy magazine, even though they are both using the same image. It would be unfair to ask the small newspaper to pay the same license fee.
Fundamentally, you only pay for what you need, the more exposure, or the more ‘use’ the image will have, the higher the licensing fee.

11 advantages to buying Rights Managed (RM) stock (Source: Black Star)

1. Rights-managed photography continues to be the industry norm.
2. Wider range of topics.
3. Protection from reuse of the same image.
4. Top photographers sell RM.
5. Clients can purchase exclusive use licenses.
6. RM is not always more expensive. Depending on the end use for the photo, a single use RM license may actually be the less expensive option. Since pricing on RF photos is based on size, for the small buyer looking for a photo for a single use, the better option could often be the RM license. Not only does the buyer get a better quality image, he is also assured that he will not see the same image in use repeatedly.
7. Higher quality images.
8. Weeds out inferior images.
9. Avoids imitation.
10. Cheaper than commissioned work.
11. Protects the buyer. While protecting the photographer’s revenue, the specifics of the RM licensing also provide protection for the buyer. The photographer is aware of what the intended use of the image is and can therefore make the buyer aware of any likely conflicts in the use of the image. The nasty arena of brand confusion can be bypassed simply by making use of RM licensing.

The next article will look at some actual examples of editorial stock photography licensing, as well as using rights manage stock photography for commercial advertising.

Thanks to Chris at Photoasia & Craig Ferguson for their help with this article.

I love my iPad, I really do, but there are somethings about it that are really becoming a pain in the neck. Blogging, I update my blog 4 or 5 times a month, and quite often I am abroad or away from my laptop – so you would think the iPad would be perfect for this.

For simple blog posts:
For simple blog post, i.e. mostly text and simple formatting, it’s not bad at all but if you want to start adding images and adding links in the text to enrich the readers viewing  pleasure it’s a but more problematic.

Wordpress iPad app:
For instance, I’m writing my blog right but I’m not using the word press ipad app to do it. I find the spellchecker and typing experience better in something like iPad ‘pages’ which is auto saving which is a huge bonus. To be honest although i can get the iPad word press app working fine back in the UK, its been giving me problems even connecting to it from abroad.. So I’m sort of stuck without the app at the moment.

Writing drafts in the app:
A great thing about the iPad word press app is that you can draft posts offline which helps in the situation I am in now, although it offers no more features than just writing in the iPad pages application.

Adding links:Still a pain, but its still more a case of lack of multitasking and the hassle of finding the page, getting the URL, pasting it in etc, it just takes so much more time in the ipad than on my laptop.

Speed of typing on the iPad:
Not bad at all, in fact better than I expected it to be, especially with a bit of practice. I would say that although it, for me, is as quick as typing on the iPad as the laptop, the time taken still increases as soon as you want to go back and edit the text, especially if you are getting lots of mistakes along the way – but to be fair, the majority are self adjusting and correcting which is pretty great.

Adding images.
Pain in the neck. Wordpress app is ok, but still limited in what you can do. Using the online original version has its problems too.. Such as flash based image uploader. So what do you do? Well, I took a photo on my iPhone, emailed it to my iPad.. which I couldn’t upload because I don’t have flash. The wordpress app does allow for image upload direct from your saved photos folder, but if you need to resize and optimise your image for the web you will need to find a app that does that before you upload it.

Personally I am a little disappointed with wordpress blogging on the iPad, the wordpress iPad app could have so many more features to make it perform more in line with normal web version.

I think if i wasn’t having this weird XML parser error when trying to connect to my blog from abroad then maybe I would like it a little more, but with my 4-6 month trip to the South Pacific in October I need to get a solution sorted by then. Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

Final thoughts. It’s good enough to do a basic blog post, but in my opinion not as good as it could be. I’d love to see a third party app developer get their teeth into it and see what comes out the other end. I think i’ll just keep drafting them on the iPad, and then wait until I get to a computer and give it the final touches.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and your own review of the Wordpress iPad application too!

1 . Don’t try and save costs buying a cheaper bag to protect your several thousand dollars worth of equipment, invest in decent bag such as this low pro bag, which will probably last you a lifetime. Get a bag with multiple compartments, lots of extra padding and if you need it, a space for a small laptop.

2 . When carrying multiple charging units, such as I carry one type for a canon 40D battery, and one or my 5Dmk2 battery, carry just the one power cable in your hand luggage. On these chargers the wall socket to charging unit is often the same, which is also the same cable used for lots of other devices, so even if you get one lost along the way you can soon replace it, or just use your other cable you left in your cabin baggage. This will save you a little bit of weight by putting in your checked baggage rather that your cabin luggage.

3 . Try and find a bag that has a waterproof cover, for instance I was caught in a thunderstorm with my smaller lowepro camera bag, but fortunately it has a pull-over rain cover, which is always attached. Well worth the money, check this one out.

4 . Be careful carrying too many camera batteries, especially lithium ion, as some carriers only allow 2 or so in your checked baggage,and none at all in your checked baggage. I only actually found this out recently.

5 . Be aware that camera bags always draw attention in customs and bag searches, be ready to be able to unpack everything and lay it out for the to see, I’ve had situations where they have passed each lens, camera body etc through the x Ray machine separately.

6 . Carry a small 4 way extension cord in your checked luggage, I have been in loads of hotel rooms over the years and only had the one plug socket, or it’s been in a odd place in the room.

7 . Carry a smaller camera bag in your checked luggage. I use a smaller lowepro bag when I am out and about, and fold this flat in my main luggage, then when I get to the destination I can decant exactly what I need without having to trail my much bigger bag around with me.

8 . Try and keep your memory cards with you at all times. I keep my little case of memory cards in my pocket, regardless of whether i have my camera with me. When i get back to my room in the evening I will copy all images onto my external drive and back them up, so if I either loose my memory cards when I am out, or I have anything stolen from the room I should hopefully be covered.

9 . Take a few micro fibre cloths. No matter how many I start with, some get lost along the way. Put one in each of your bags to make sure you always have one with you.. and resist the temptation to use a towel or your shirt sleeve to clean your lens!

10 . Insurance, not really a packing tip, but its the only thing you will have if your luggage gets lost or stolen on the way, there are a number of decent places out there that specialise in camera equipment insurance, both at home and abroad.

READ MORE: Have a look inside my travel photographers kit bag…

All the other bits and pieces were slung in my hold baggage, so things like filters, extra cables, 4 block extension cord (yes i take one, the amount of times I have got to a hotel room and there has only been one plug socket… trying to charge my small arsenal of electronics has proven somewhat difficult.

When I travelled to Hong Kong earlier in the year, I packed another DSLR body as backup, and continue to do so to make sure i have a body on standby if something would fail. Depending on whether I am photographing for myself, or photographing for a client whilst abroad, I pack accordingly – the more client work I have the more backups of equipment I take with me.

Regardless, my carry on cabin baggage is always my lowepro vertex bag, it’s got tough taped heavy duty zips, which is reassuring when your lugging the rest of your kit around and do not want to have to think about anything else. It’s also padded enough to be slung around when someone else moves your bag around…

I think the next post will be about tips for travelling light, and tips for packing your camera equipment in your hand luggage bag.

I’ve found from experience that you can never rely on your checked in baggage to actually make it to your destination so you must pack as if you may never see it again….but there is a fine balance between saving weight, and keeping the minimum possible. For instance, I will pack the main charging unit for my spare camera batteries but will pack the standard charger to wall cable into my checked in luggage – why? Because I know nearly every electronic shop in the world sells this kind of cable. Weight saved, but not at too much expense.

Read more: Read my review of the Vertex Camera Bag
Coming up next: 10 important tips and things to remember when packing your travel photography bag.

I have spent a fair amount of time on TinEye in the last couple of years, I was one of the early users of this software back when it was only just out of it’s beta stage, and loved the idea. It its early stages, it struggled finding images, as it still hadn’t indexed some of the bigger search engines and image libraries, and I seem to remember telling them about loads of image libraries that hadn’t yet been indexed. A couple of years on and they are really starting to get involved, it seems the search engine has now indexed over a billion images, a fair feat for a company that is still running on donations only.

So I randomly did a check on a couple of images on one of my blog posts, I chose my blog post with an image of some french shutters (Image 3)- I chose this one because looking at Google Analytics the night before I was getting search traffic for ‘french shutter photos’ and as I remembered that this image for some reason had slipped through my watermarking process.. and may be a easy target. I loaded up TinEye and pasted the URL of the actual image on my website, clicked the search button and let it chug away for literally only a couple of seconds.. and it returned an interesting result. (Image 1)

Tineye found a reference to one of my images, and showed that it had searched 1.6 billion images, and had picked up a usage of my image on quite a large blogging website, so I checked the URL provided by TinEye and had a scout around the site until I found it. Nothing sinister about the usage, they were just talking about choosing the right image to represent your blog post, but even so – they didn’t ask for permission to use this image, so I was justified in contacting them. Due to the positive nature of the image within this blog post, I spoke to the lady in charge of the website who apologised for the error, and I agreed that she could continue using the image as long as she linked to my website from the image. She changed it straight away, what an excellent result.

So thanks TinEye, a great outcome, and I suggest that you should do the same with your images. It’s a long process, but perhaps a random check now and again doesn’t hurt.. you never know, you might just find one..

For more information have a look at TinEye here.

PROBLEM:
For me this was quite a specific problem that I was trying to address, but hopefully if you are reading this it will help you make the switch if you need to also. Fundamentally, I had my blog that I have been updating since 2007 on my domain www.11thstudio.com/blogs/ – but I wanted to move JUST my blog across to www.chrisridley.co.uk/blogs. BUT, I wanted to leave my existing site (not the blog) up on 11thstudio.com, which has some of my wedding photography, and the more commercial side to my business on it. I wanted to have my main blog on my www.chrisridley.co.uk domain purely to help strengthen brand and, well, because I just wanted to. So, this wasn’t just a quick move and a simple catch all 301 redirect, it needed to be a much more tailored solution. I needed to keep all my traffic, SEO, rankings and all that malarkey.

SOLUTION:

1. Backup, backup backup

Before you start, Back up, back up, back up, THE most important part of this whole endeavour I kid you not. I cannot stress this enough, please. Back up your files across all sites via FTP and backup your existing wordpress database in it’s entirety.

2. Use FTP to download your files to your machine

I used my FTP client to make a full copy of my entire /blogs folder on my 11thstudio.com domain to my local folder on my desktop.

3. Upload via FTP to new site

Uploaded my entire /blogs folder that I had just downloaded, to my www.chrisridley.co.uk/blogs folder (same path)

4. Set up new database on new site

Go into you control panel of your new hosting on your new site, and create a new blank database for you to install Wordpress into.

5. Copy your old (live) wordpress database into you new blank database on new site.

You can use specific software for this such as Navicat, or you can manually do this from within your phpMyadmin on your hosting. What you are trying to do here is copy your entire existing database from your old site, so in this case from my 11thstudio domain, into your new blank database, so in my case on the chrisridley.co.uk domain.

6. Change your wp-config file on new site

Make sure you update your wp-config file with your new connection data so that your install connects to your database.

7. Check site to see how it’s looking

You should now be able to see a running version of your blog on your new site… but it’s likely to not be working 100% yet, you’ll probably see image links broken all over the place, and URLS not behaving correctly and pointing to your old domain, this is because Wordpress likes to hard code FULL URLS into it’s database which is a pain in the butt if you were not expecting it.. but we have a solution..

8. Find and replace hard coded URLS.

Be careful here, there are never any ‘undo’ functions, but if you do mess it up remember you can install from a backup you made, you did make one right?! Right, so assuming you have a semi working version of your blog now on your new domain, you need to install and run Search and replace plugin to solve the hard coded URL problem. Install plugin, and once installed, activate it in the usual way, and you’ll see a couple of options. In my case, I searched for ‘www.11thstudio.com’ and replaced any instances of it with ‘www.chrisridley.co.uk’, in my case was about 950 places it got changed. You’ll find now that everything should be working correctly. It did for me anyway.

9. Set up redirects in HTACCESS file.
Careful editing htaccess files, I warn you in advance.
On my 11thstudio site I created a .HTACCESS file with the following information and placed it in my 11thstudio.com/blogs/ directory folder.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blogs/
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.chrisridley.co.uk/blogs/$1 [R=301,L]
This tells the browser it’s a permanent redirect via a 301 redirect, and to tell it that anything that comes after the /blogs/ to redirect it to the same page on the chrisridley.co.uk domain exactly the same..

IE if someone clicks www.11thstudio.com/blogs/category/post1333/ it will change it and redirect it to www.chrisridley.co.uk/blogs/category/post1333/ This is important, as if you miss this part and just use a normal 301 redirect, it will send ALL blog traffic to just your new blog page default homepage which is no good for SEO. I hope that made sense. So now your full 301 redirect should be in action and should help Google find your changes and update itself.

10. Update your RSS feed.

In my case I used feedburner, so I just went to ‘edit feed’,  changed my incoming feed link to the new wordpress default RSS feed link, which for me was www.chrisridley.co.uk/blogs/feed/ , and left the existing feedburner link the same. This way your subscribers won’t see any difference..

11. Done.

Double check everything, test a sample post and click your way through random pages in your blog – depending on how complex your wordpress template is, you may have a couple more things to do. But I think the above steps cover pretty much everything you need.

Any problems, feedback or new and better solutions please let me know and I can update, as this was just the way I did it, I’m sure there are other ways!

If you did use this and find it helpful please let me know using the comments below!

This post should address the following questions; moving wordpress blog to a new domain, moving wordpress blogs without losing search traffic, wordpress HTACCESS setup, and how to move your wordpress blog to a new domain and redirect SEO search traffic without losing any search traffic at all.

I have had Lowepro bags in the past, and I have never been uphappy with them, hard wearing and great value – and the zips haven’t shown any sign of wear as of yet.

What I needed:
I needed a bag for general use, for my main bag for wedding photography, and also an aeroplane suitable sized for travelling abroad with. My standard kit for this bag would be for two DSLR Canon bodies, as well as 3/4 Canon lenses, which is my ‘core’ kit. I wanted a bag that I could wear on my back, as well as just have for storage – but one that was pretty sturdy and hard wearing.

What I bought: ( 14″ Notebook Backpack for Digital SLR & 3-4 lenses) (See here on Amazon)
Big enough for most of your travelling kit, I can easily fit my Canon 5DMK2, Canon 40D body, 24-70 2.8L, 16-35 2.8 L, 2 x Pocket wizards, a 580ex Speedlite, all sorts. It’s super tough, with hard taped seams that look like they are never going to break, and offer a kind of splash resistance, certainly no dust will get through. Lots of internal storage and moveable foam velco dividers, enough to fit in pretty any configuration you want to throw at it.A Lowepro Vertex 100 AW

All in all it’s a great bag, not forgetting you can easily fit a 13″ Macbook pro, as well as an Ipad, spare memory cards, batteries and all the other guff that goes along with standard photography kit. There is also a bigger version of this bag should you need more space, this can be seen here: Lowepro Vertex AW 200 and the even bigger Lowepro Vertex AW 300.

Final opinion:
Excellent, 5 Stars. It’s taken a fair bit of abuse already, and I don’t think it will fall apart very easily at all. Highly recommended. To buy this bag, or see more please check it out here for more information.

Problem: I use Windows 7 on my PC laptop, and have just recently bought a WD Passport 1Tb drive (Arrived formatted to NTFS) to replace my overflowing 500Gb drive, but the problem was that Windows 7, by default only lets you format a drive in exFAT32, which (as far as I am aware) is not supported by Apple Mac machines… So, I searched around the internet looking for solutions, and the most common suggestion to help with Windows 7 format fat32 was to try the command line way, which supposedly worked for some people – I tried it however, and it toook my laptop a whopping 12hrs to format the drive, and when the counter flicked over to 100%, it errored with the message “Drive size too big for FAT32″. Great, thanks for the 12hr waste of time. So I don’t recommend the 12hr command line way. After talking to a friend about it later the day he found a link to the Verbatim website, which documented the problems and suggested solution, which was to download the software for Verbatim drives (which mine was not) and format the drive from there.

Solution: After downloading the software from Verbatim, installing the small program, selecting the drive to format – it then formatted the drive to FAT32 in a matter of minutes, which seemed to work. So there you go, don’t wait 12hrs of you want to format a 1 terabyte (1TB) external WD Passport drive, when a little bit of software will allow you to do it in 3 minutes. Don’t forget if you want to you can actually format to FAT32 on your mac, but I needed to find a workaround at the time as I was out of the office with my PC laptop… formatting on the mac is probably the easiest option if you have one to hand. Here comes the long task of copying 500Gb of data onto the new drive, see you in a few days! Windows 7 format fat32 solved. Buy this item: If you would like to have a look at this 1TB drive on Amazon please click here.

Update 7/1/11 Verbatim changed the link, but thanks for a helpful commenter Eric – we have a new link that seems to work – glad you’re finding a use for this post!
http://www.verbatim.com/index/support.php?lang_id=1&cat=9&action=downloads&pid=5411&aid=197

If this is article helped you please like us on facebook below! Thanks!

Above: Woman flagging down the trams on Johnston Street, Hong Kong.

Above: Looking towards Amiralty from Wan Chai, Hong Kong.

Above: Love this image of the hands on his shoulders as they speed past. Cheung Chau island

Above: Speeding through the tiny streets – Cheung Chau island

Above: Street movement – Heading out of Wan Chai, Hong Kong

This is just a few select photos from my full album that can be found here: Stock Photography Photography of Hong Kong – 2010

Trying to time it right to make use of the ‘blue hour’ - which is basically half an hour after sunset.. while the sky is a brilliant blue before it turns black. So I walked around and manually popped the flash, highlighting bits I wanted.. and the last few shots I was playing around with coloured gels to try some different effect. I also used my trusty Maglite torch to pinpoint areas also. All great fun, want to try it again this week!

Having not used a tethered setup in a while as I usually work on location, I had to double check everything was working correctly for an upcoming project. I thought I would compile my thoughts into a ‘How-To’ for other people who might have problems setting up tethering.

How to shoot tethered with a Canon 40D and Adobe Lightroom.

Install Canon EOS utility for your canon camera, in my case I was using the Canon 40D, I found that the EOS utility from the Canon XTI worked fine (I think it’s the same program for the majority of Canon models). You’ll need your existing software, as only the updates are available on the Canon software website these days.

First of all, i’ve plugged my camera straight into my laptop via usb, turned it on, and fired up Canon EOS Utility.

1. Open EOS Utility and go to preferences. You can see that the camera is attached, and ready to just work normally – we now need to change the preferences to make it work properly tethered. So once you have opened the program, if you click on the “Preferences” bottom left, it will take you to some options.

1. Fire up EOS Utilty & Click on preferences

2. Configure your destination folder that it saves to.

On the destination folder tab, I have selected the destination folder, which in this case I have put on the desktop for testing purposes. I have ticked the boxes; download images, remote shooting and monitor folder. You can see here that it makes a new destination folder as a subfolder – based on the shooting date – this folder must be empty before it will work.

2. Specify destination folder

3. Set to save to memory card.

I have chosen to save the images on the memory card, because it serves as an instant second backup, and also if I shoot quicker than the write speed to the computer, it’s still saved regardless.

3. Set to save to memory card

4. Configure Lightroom. Now that the Canon EOS Utility is set up, you can now start up lightroom.

Go to File -> Auto Import -> Auto Import Settings, not forgetting to tick the Enable Import.

4. Set to Auto Import

5. Configure import settings. You can see here that I have specified the watched folder, which is pointed to the new subfolder in the folder structure (You’ll find if something doesn’t work for you, it’ll be the subfolder selection that’s been missed, I did it myself!)

I have chosen to copy my file from the desktop into my usual lightroom file structure, which is on an external 500GB drive. You can just choose the destination folder you want, or wherever your file structure dictates.

5. Configure Import Settings

Now you are ready to shoot, so try taking a photo with your tethered camera, wait a couple of seconds and you will see your ‘Import’ button bottom left in lightroom click on and off – and the image will appear in your Lightroom window!

That’s it, there is very little to it.

Let me know how you get on.