This should take you to the Tethering page, and if it doesn’t then find your own way there. Click “scan for devices”, and when it recognizes your camera click “tethered shoot” (figure 1).
With your camera still attached, open Darktable. When your test succeeds, congratulations, you can do tethered shooting! Now you can be a command-line commando and stick with ghoto, or you can fire up Darktable. If any of the shooting commands don’t work, check your camera settings because it may be too close to an object to focus, or your room may be too dark, or it’s not set to shoot RAW. It will emit a lot of “PTP Property”output, store the image in your current directory on your computer, and then wait for more input. Press Ctrl-C to abort.įile capt0000.cr2 exists. Run this command and then press the shutter button on your camera: $ env LANG=C gphoto2 -port usb: -capture-tethered New file is in location /capt0000.cr2 on the cameraĭeleting file /capt0000.cr2 on the cameraĭeleting 'capt0000.cr2' from folder '/'.Īnd you can test tethered shooting. This command copies it to your current working directory and deletes it from your camera’s storage card: $ env LANG=C gphoto2 -port usb: -capture-image-and-download
Now test taking a picture and downloading it to your PC. Images are automatically transferred to Darktable for instant review and editing. So it won’t have the Live View in Darktable, but you can still control exposure, shutter speed, and do time lapse and bracketed photographs. PTP is an older protocol for transferring images from digital cameras. Note the differences: the Rebel does not have Preview support, as it operates only in PTP (Picture Transfer Protocol) mode. (The other available options are audio capture and video capture, though the man page warns that video capture is not yet available.) For comparison, this is the output from an old Canon Rebel 400D: $ env LANG=C gphoto2 -port usb: -abilitiesĪbilities for camera : Canon EOS 400D (PTP mode) ‘Capture choices’ shows that both image previews (Live View) and capturing images are supported. $ env LANG=C gphoto2 -port usb: -abilities This tells you if ghoto sees your camera: $ env LANG=C gphoto2 -auto-detect This first command outputs a more complete list of supported cameras: $ env LANG=C gphoto2 -list-cameras Connect your camera to your computer with its USB cable, make sure it is detected but unmounted, and run these commands.
When you install Darktable it should pull in the ghoto libraries automatically, but it may not install the userland tools, so look for a ghoto or ghoto2 package to get these. If your camera is not on the list you can run a few commands to see if works. Supported Camerasĭarktable uses gphoto2 as its backend, so you can consult their Remote controlling cameras guide to see if yours is supported. Sure, buying spendy gadgets is fun, but it’s nice to have options. If your camera doesn’t support Live View but is still supported for tethered shooting in Darktable, then you have an easy and cheap way to do time-lapse photography without having to buy an expensive programmable remote control or other spendy gadget. You know those glorious wildlife photos that look like the photographer was just a few feet away, and the critters were super-cooperative and held attractive poses? These are often made from stationary positions with a tethered camera and a long lens. Newer Canon and Nikon dSLRs come with Live View, and other brands are rolling it out as well. This makes Darktable a great tool for staged macro photography, astrophotography, portrait photography, and for getting the best composition and most accurate focus on long telephoto shots. If your camera has Live View, then you can control it from Darktable and preview and adjust images on your Linux PC. There are two scenarios where this might be useful to you. Obviously this is not very convenient for hiking or street photography, but for studio and tripod work it’s the bee’s knees. My current favorite feature is tethered shooting, which is connecting a camera to your computer and controlling it with Darktable. We’ve talked about Darktable before, because it is a wonderful advanced RAW photo editor and workflow manager.