Shooting tethered

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I’ve been looking into tethered shooting. I want to do more studio work and I think being tethered to a laptop would be good for adjusting lighting and poses (especially with a bulk of my stuff probably being selfies, that is until I can get others sitting in front of me)

So a couple of questions,

1, Do you shoot tethered? I see a lot of pro studio people doing it, I’m sure they do it for a reason.

2, Is capture one better than lightroom or is there other alternatives?

3, Can you recommend a laptop? I’m not really a mac fan, I don’t want to play games on it, I would only do minor edits on the laptop, major stuff on my big computer. I would like to take it out on travels for storage, internet surfing and film watching, budget probably £500


Thanks
 
I shoot tethered in my studio using Lightroom. Never tried it with Capture One, but it works perfectly for me and I've never felt the need to explore other methods. It's great for immediately checking if critical focus is dead on and also for quickly going through a few variants on a pose immediately with the client to see which they prefer (I shoot a lot of bands and they're incredibly subjective about their own individual appearances; this way I can quickly isolate the pics where they all feel happy with their expression, pose etc without additional back-and-forths after the session). I use a long USB lead which I have suspended from an overhead beam so it doesn't trail at my feet. You have to watch out for buffer speeds when rattling off shots as transferring via USB is a little slower than simply writing to CF.
 
I used to use LR for tethering but switched to Capture One last year... Apart from the fact that C1 has more features (like control of aperture, ISO, focus.... live view... etc.), I find I get far less dropouts and a more reliable connection than I do with Lightroom.
 
Tethering is often used both so clients can see, and for getting a really good view of lighting, focus and layout, all the time, yes. It's super useful.

Capture one's tethering and way of supporting ongoing changes as you shoot tethered are far superior to lightroom's very basic and frankly tacked on capabilities. Capture One was basically designed from the ground up for tethering.

Can't reccommend a specific laptop I'm afraid, especially in that price bracket. Depending on your camera, a real key is to have a USB 3.0 port, and to use a powered extension cable.
 
Another vote for capture one, I use it every day for tethered capture. Mostly to a PC but some times to a mac book pro.
When doing large shoots we always make sure our session files are on a different ssd drive to the operating system.
The mac book pro works ok but the small monitor and lack of extra internal drives can be a limitation.
 
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