A900 Tethered Shooting via Remote Camera Control

[John Seaman]

<p>I guess many owners already know this, but I just discovered that you can connect the A900 (and presumably A850) directly to a PC via the USB port, and control it using the Remote Camera Control feature of Sony Image Data Suite.<br>

You can download it here: <img alt="" />http://www.sony.co.uk/support/en/product/DSLR-A900/downloads/sids_win#about<br>

<br />The Sony website says it only works for the A700 but I tried it with my A900 and it works fine. You have to go into the second page of the camera's "spanner" menu and change "USB Connection" from "Mass Storage" to "Remote PC". The Remote Camera Control programme then recognises the A900, and you can operate the shutter from the PC, and the images download directly into the "My Pictures" folder.<br>

<br />Obviously change it back to "Mass Storage" when you've finished.<br>

<br />Hope this may help someone, any more comments or suggestions would be appreciated.</p><div></div>

[gregory_king1]

Yeah, sadly they put this in the top three cameras before, but took it out of the A77 for some unknown reason. So the

only new camera that does it is the A99.

 

I bought the A850 mainly to add tethering to my A77.

 

And no, you don't need to change the setting back to mass storage, unless you actually use the USB port for transferring

files. The cable port is so spindly, I only use it for tethering.

[John Seaman]

<p>Gregory, I do use the USB to download in preference to a card reader, although I agree its small and fiddly - there seems so be an unwritten rule amongst camera makers that "the bigger the camera, the smaller and more fragile the USB terminal". I've known a couple of instances where pins in the camera have been broken off when re-inserting the CF card.</p>

[manuel_odabashian]

<p>I have never shot tethered before and have been advised not to as it takes ages for the images to upload. Now that i remember i have done it once using a nikon which was set up in a workshop and it came up fine so why was i told this?</p>

[John Seaman]

<p>Manuel, the upload is pretty quick even on to my rather ancient laptop.</p>

[scott_lewis3]

<p>Hi you can go one steep further and shoot direct to lightroom usinig the tethering software ... the link will show you how to set up a hot watched folder in lightroom and then you set the Sony software to save your tethers photos to that folder. <br /><br />http://www.scottlewisphotography.eu/?p=1286</p>

<p>it takes a few seconds for the photos to show up in your imports but its a cool way to shoot macro or studio stuff so you can check exposure, d.o.f and focus so much better</p>

[John Seaman]

<p>Thanks Scott, that's interesting. I don't use Lightroom right now but I've bookmarked your link in case I get it in the future. I wonder if it can be done with the free image file viewer I use, that is FastStone Viewer</p>

[redwoodtwig]

<p>Works on windows 8, mostly. I installed it on the win8 desktop, not in the windows 8 "native" app space. Plugged in my a900 and it found and identified my camera. I can use either the camera shutter button or the fire it from the laptop. It reasonably quickly moves the file into the folder I'd told Lightroom to watch, and lightroom brought it right in.<br>

<br />Two major problems, at least for me:<br>

<br />I really don't want the image file to go directly to the laptop; I want a copy to be sent there and the original to stay on the CF card. local WIFI makes it fairly easy to import from the folder they ended up in, but this is an extra step I had not planned on. The tethered shooting for me is mainly a way to provide me and my models a much better image than the camera preview. The laptop I tether to will run Lightroom, but just barely. And I'd really rather not do any editing on the laptop, then have to go through gyrations to move just the relevant part of that LR catalog to my workstation. Plus, I rotate my CF cards so that they are in effect my initial backup after I've downloaded to my workstation (enabling me to recover images lost when my main drive failed on top of my most recent backup being corrupted).<br>

<br />Bulb does not work. at all. I do a fair amount of long exposure work, up to several minutes. The remote control panel on the laptop shows I have it set to bulb. But whether I use the camera or the remote control, all it does is open and right away close the shutter: It did transfer the totally underexposed image, but that was not what I wanted.<br>

There may be some other factor involved, some setting on the A900, since about the only way I can consistently get Bulb to work properly on the A900 is the set it remote control and use the Sony hand-held infrared remote control (twice, once to open and once to close). Sometimes, if set to single, it will open and stay open using the normal on camera button until I click again, but most of the time it does not. Instead it opens and closes right away, ignoring the bulb setting.<br>

What other settings might be causing the camera to override bulb? Should I expect the remote control software to do this correctly?</p>

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