Tethered shooting is the backbone of a real-time event photography workflow. With your camera connected directly to the BrandStudio capture app, every image you take is available for branding and delivery as soon as it's shot. This guide walks through the setup, from plugging in your cable to watching photos appear in guest galleries while the event is still going.
Start with the hardware. BrandStudio tethers Canon cameras over USB, with live view and remote shutter, on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Sony, Nikon, and Fuji are on the roadmap; until then, those cameras can feed a watch folder on the Mac. Connect your Canon to the device running the capture app and it becomes your tethered hub: the app detects the camera and starts importing images as they're shot. Your overlay (logo, frame, watermark) is applied on the device before the photo uploads, so nothing ever goes out unbranded.
Once a photo uploads, BrandStudio routes it to the right guests. In a photo session, everyone the photographer added at the start (by badge scan or name) gets every photo from it. If face match is on for the event, faces in the frame are matched against guests who registered with a selfie. Guests who gave a phone number get a text with a link to view and download their photos as soon as the session's photos finish uploading. On a good connection that happens while the guest is still in the room — a big shift for photographers used to delivering galleries days after an event. With no signal, photos and texts queue on the device and go out when the connection comes back.
A few practical tips for reliable tethered shooting at events. First, use a good USB cable and secure it, since a yanked cable is the most common failure at a busy station. Second, think about file size: shooting JPEG (or RAW+JPEG, with the RAW staying on the card) keeps the upload queue moving, and guests don't need 50-megapixel files on their phones. Third, set up before the event starts: pick the event, check your overlay, decide whether face match is on, and run a test shot all the way to a phone.
