Shooting tethered is great if you want to see the result of your work in large format right after you have hit the shutter! Or if you want to present the client with the result instantly – the feedback can be valuable and you can change the scene or the setting on the fly rather than the client being disappointed seeing the result some days later. No much how much editing you do, it is difficult to change a headshot if the client suddenly sees that the shirt he is wearing is not fit for purpose, or the like.
What you need
You obviously need your beloved Nikon D4 with a charged battery and a lens mounted, but in addition you will – as the name indicates – need a cable. They come in many shapes and forms and different lengths, but you can start looking for what you’ve got on stock to see if you can get going without buying a cable. It is a regular cable, a USB one, with a USB-A connector in one end and a mini-B in the other.
The second thing you will need is a piece of software to communicate with the Nikon D4. I am not sure of NX tether will work with the D4 or D4S as the spec sheet only promises it will work for the D6 and more modern cameras.
I use Lightroom and it works ok, although on my Mac it has a tendency to crash often – usually in the beginning of a session and then it stabilises. I don’t have that issue on my Windows laptop.
I know that many portrait photographers prefer to use Capture One and that is an alternative to Lightroom. I am not aware of any freeware that will support tethered capture.
The final thing you will need is a computer with a screen. If I am out and about I use my laptop and the screen it has – it is clearly not as big as my office monitor, but so much bigger than the rear LCD of the Nikon D4. If I am in the office I use my mac mini with a 32″ monitor attached.
How
If you hook up the Nikon D4 to the laptop / PC / mac with the USB cable and make sure the camera is turned on, the only thing to do is to activate tethered capture in (in my case) Lightroom. I do that by simply selecting: File > Tethered capture > start tethered capture, and confirm using the window that appears. You will start session where the images are transferred to a dedicated folder in Lightroom and they will emerge as you shoot – one by one. The transfer time is rather fast – I would estimate it to be 1 second or thereabout.
Backup
Be mindful that the images are NOT stored on the memory cards on the Nikon D4 when you are shooting in tethered mode. They are transferred directly to the laptop / PC / mac and only stored there. I recommend that you asap and preferably in real time take a backup of the images.
When you shoot with the Nikon D4 without tethering and with 2 card slots, you automatically have a backup as the images are written to both cards. This is not the case when shooting tethered, so make sure you have a process for making backups asap.
Other than that, there is not much to it! I wish you all the best with tethered shooting.