Award Sounds Music, Photography & Consultancy

Scenario: You have a digital camera with a USB connection such as the Nikon D80 Digital SLR Camera and the standard Apple software package of iLife, including iPhoto and want to do tethered shooting.

There's no direct way to do this, no options in the menu, there's no software included with the Nikon camera that supports this and, as you may have found out, iPhoto isn't very well catered-for in Automator. I believe some other DSLRs such as the Canon EOS 400D do provide for tethered shooting, but if you've got a Nikon, then you need to do something different. You can buy software to do it, but luckily if you want to do it for free, there is a way.

OS X 10.4 includes automator and apple scripts. We can do this using automator and image capture.

- Firstly set the camera's USB mode to PTP.

- Download and install the automator scripts to download images from camera - you may need to edit the workflow to add a slight pause so that the photo file has enough time to download from the camera

- Ensure this downloads to a known folder

- Write a folder action to launch image capture

- Have image capture import new photos to iPhoto

- Connect the camera to the Mac

- switch the camera on and set-up the shot

You can do tethered shooting now by launching the workflow. Every time you press it, the file is downloaded to the folder specified in the workflow, this monitor function picks up on the added file and imports it into iPhoto. Hey presto - tethered shooting on the cheap. It's not brilliant, but it does work. 

I realise I haven't given all the details here, mainly because I'm on a different computer right now. If people are interested, let me know and I can go into more accurate detail about how I got it to work

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