Live tethered view · Remote art direction

Live
tethered
view

If you cannot be in the room on the day, you can watch the shoot happen from wherever you are. Every frame we take appears on your screen a second or so after the shutter, and you approve, hold or reject it while the set is still standing.

It runs in an ordinary web browser, there is nothing to install, and it is included with every booking at no extra charge. The one thing it genuinely needs is a decent internet connection, because the feed stays open for the whole shoot day and a shoot day here is four to eight hours long.

Session length4–8 hours, feed open throughout

Live feed2.5–12 Mbit/s depending on quality

Recommended line25 Mbit/s down, unmetered

Runs inAny current desktop browser

CostIncluded with any booking

What it is

Standing behind the photographer, from four hundred miles away.

We shoot tethered as a matter of course: the camera is wired to a capture machine in the studio and every exposure lands on that machine rather than on a card. Live view simply puts a second window onto the same capture station and points it at your browser.

You get two things in that window. The first is the camera’s continuous live view — a moving picture of whatever the lens is looking at right now, so you can see a hand adjusting a label, a sitter changing position, or a light being walked six inches to the left. The second is the frames themselves: each time the shutter fires, the captured file is processed on the studio machine and pushed to your window within a couple of seconds, at a size you can judge properly.

Underneath it is unremarkable technology. The capture station encodes the live view as a video stream and sends the still previews as ordinary image files. Your browser plays one and displays the other. There is no plug-in, no download, no account to create. We send you a link and a short code by email the day before the shoot, you open it when the day starts, and you close the tab when the day ends.

What makes it useful is not the picture quality, it is the timing. A note that arrives while the set is standing costs nothing. The same note arriving two days later costs a rebuild, a re-light and, usually, another booking. Clients who use live view regularly tend to book fewer reshoots, and that is the entire argument for it.

How a live view day runs

From the link arriving to the last frame approved

A half day runs four hours and a full day eight, with a break in the middle. The feed is open for essentially all of it — that is the part people underestimate when they first try it.

The day before

We email a link and a six-character code to everyone who is joining. The link works from the morning of the shoot until midnight the same day. Open it once the evening before to check the picture appears; a test pattern will be waiting, and that thirty-second check has saved a great many frantic phone calls at nine in the morning.

Joining

Open the link, enter the code, choose a quality setting. The window opens on the live camera view with an empty frame strip below it. Up to six people can join the same session; if more than that need to watch, tell us in advance and we will raise the limit for the day.

Setting up a shot

While we build a setup you are watching the continuous live view. This is the part of the day where remote direction earns its keep: the background is still movable, the props are still loose, and a sentence from you now saves an hour later. Say things out loud on the call rather than typing them.

Frames as they are taken

Each capture appears in the strip within about two seconds, and clicking one opens it large. You can zoom into a preview to roughly a quarter of full size, which is enough to judge composition, styling, focus placement and gross colour, but not enough to judge fine detail. That comes later, at full resolution.

Marking up

Every frame takes one of three marks: approve, hold or reject. Marks appear instantly on the studio monitor, which is why we can move on with confidence. You can add a short note to any frame and it is attached to that file all the way through to delivery.

Breaks and pauses

There is a pause button. Use it over lunch and while a setup is being struck and rebuilt — it stops the video stream and drops the connection to almost nothing while keeping your session and all your marks alive. On a laptop running on battery it is also the difference between reaching four o’clock and not.

End of the shoot

We run through the approved list together before we break the last set down, which takes about ten minutes and is the last chance to reshoot anything cheaply. Then the live feed closes and the session switches over to review mode.

Full-resolution review

Later the same day, or on an agreed date afterwards, the same link reopens onto the selects at full resolution, streamed rather than downloaded. That session is short but heavy on bandwidth, and it has its own section below.

Before the day

What you need to join a shoot

Four things, and only one of them tends to cause trouble. Please read the bandwidth note properly rather than assuming it will be fine, because a session that has to keep dropping to preview quality is a frustrating way to spend a Tuesday.

A connection that can hold it

25 Mbit/s down · unmetered

The live feed at standard quality uses about 6 Mbit/s sustained, and the high setting roughly 12. Because the feed is open for most of a four to eight hour day, what matters is not peak speed but whether the line can sustain that figure all day alongside everything else your office is doing.

Wired connection strongly preferred
Wi-fi is fine if the signal is strong and stable
Avoid mobile tethering — the day will exceed most data plans
Check whether your connection is metered before you join

Bandwidth

Plain numbers, because this is the part that catches people out

A live view session is a video stream that stays open for the length of a working day, and a full-resolution review session moves very large files. Neither is unusual as internet use goes, but both are heavier than most people expect from something that looks like a web page.

Live feed — sustained rate per viewer
Quality setting	What it looks like	Sustained	Over a 7-hour day
Preview	720-line video, softer, fine for watching a setup being built	2.5 Mbit/s	~8 GB
Standard	1080-line video, the default, good enough to direct from	6 Mbit/s	~19 GB
High	1080-line at a higher bitrate, cleaner in shadow and on fine texture	12 Mbit/s	~38 GB
Paused	Session and marks stay live, video stops	< 0.1 Mbit/s	negligible

Everything else in the session
Item	Notes	Cost in data
Still preview per frame	Pushed automatically after every capture, 2560px on the long edge	2–4 MB
A busy product day	600–900 captures, previews only	1.5–3 GB
Full-resolution select, streamed	Opened during review; arrives in tiles as you pan and zoom	45–90 MB
Review session, 40 selects	Typical catalogue review, everything opened at 100%	2–4 GB
Peak while panning a full-res file	Short bursts only, a few seconds at a time	25–40 Mbit/s
Voice, if routed through us	Only when you use our audio rather than a phone	0.1 Mbit/s

What we actually recommend

A wired connection on a line rated at 25 Mbit/s down or better, with at least 12 Mbit/s genuinely free for the session, and no data cap. That leaves headroom for the review bursts and for the rest of your office continuing to work while you watch.

If your connection is shared with a busy team, the practical test is not a speed test at nine in the morning. It is whether a video call at full quality holds steady for an hour in the middle of the afternoon. If that wobbles, the shoot day will wobble too, and you should plan to sit at standard or preview quality.

Where it goes wrong

Mobile tethering is the usual culprit. Nineteen gigabytes in a day will empty most plans before lunch, and cell connections rarely hold a steady rate for eight hours. Hotel wi-fi is the second: often fast in a speed test, rarely stable across a working day, and frequently capped per device.

Corporate networks are the third, less because of speed than because of the load a long-running stream puts on a shared line. If you are unsure, ask whoever runs your network before the shoot rather than at half past nine on the day.

During the shoot

Approving frames as they are taken

Three marks and a note field. That is the whole vocabulary, and keeping it that small is what lets a decision travel from your desk to a set in about a second.

Approve means the frame does the job and the set can be struck. On product days we will not break down a setup until every item on it carries at least one approval, which is the single most useful thing the system does.

Hold means keep it, but it is not the one — useful when you want a second option to compare in the review session without stopping the shoot to decide.

Reject means do not bother processing it. Rejected frames are not deleted; they simply drop out of the proof gallery unless you ask for them back later.

Notes are short and attached to a specific file. “Label rotated two degrees clockwise” on frame 214 arrives with frame 214 all the way to delivery, and the retoucher sees it without anybody having to write a summary email.

After the shoot

Streamed review of the full-resolution selects.

Previews are for direction. Sharpness, sensor dust, a hair on a shoulder, the exact behaviour of a glaze under a soft light — none of those can be judged at a quarter size, and they are exactly the things that get a set sent back after delivery.

So the same session reopens, usually within a day or two of the shoot, onto the frames you approved and held, at their real size. A full-resolution capture from either of our bodies runs between forty-five and ninety megabytes. Sending you forty of those as a download is roughly three gigabytes and a long wait before anybody can look at anything, so we do not. The files stay on the studio machine and stream to your browser in tiles as you pan and zoom, in the way a large map does: you get the part of the picture you are actually looking at, at full detail, within a second or two.

In practice that means you can sit at 100% on a fabric weave, move across the frame, jump to the next file and compare two versions of the same shot side by side without downloading a single complete image. It also means a review session is bursty rather than steady — short pulls of twenty-five to forty megabits a second while you are moving around a file, and nothing at all while you are thinking about it. A forty-select review usually moves two to four gigabytes in total and takes forty minutes.

Reviews can be booked as a scheduled call with one of us on the line, which we recommend for anything over about twenty frames, or left open for you to work through alone. Either way the marks you make in review become the final selection, and the delivery follows from that list without another round of emails. The session link stays live for fourteen days and then expires; the ordinary proof gallery, which is lighter and works on any connection, remains available for sixty days as usual.

If your connection cannot comfortably support the review session, say so and we will simply post a drive or send a link to downsized files. Nobody is required to use any of this. It is a convenience, not a condition of working with us, and a shoot directed by telephone and email will get exactly the same care.

Honest limits

What your screen can and cannot tell you

Colour

The studio monitors are calibrated and profiled monthly. Yours almost certainly is not, and the stream is compressed on the way to you. Judge composition, arrangement, expression and gross colour on the live feed with confidence. Do not sign off an exact colour match from it — if a specific swatch has to be hit, we photograph a reference card in the setup and match to that in the file, and we will send you a small proof to check on whatever screen or printer you actually trust.

In review mode the files are shown at full resolution but still through your own screen. It is far better than the live feed, and it is still not a colour-managed proof.

Delay

Expect roughly a second of lag on the live video and about two seconds between the shutter firing and a preview appearing. On a busy line it can stretch to four or five. This matters for portraits more than anything else: by the time you say “that one”, the sitter has moved, so we work by describing what we want next rather than reacting to what just happened.

If the delay grows past about ten seconds the session will drop itself to a lower quality setting and tell you it has done so. That is normal behaviour on a congested line and not a fault.

If something goes wrong

Practical fixes, in the order we would try them

The picture keeps stalling

Drop from high to standard quality first, and to preview if that is still not steady. A soft picture that keeps moving is far more useful than a sharp one that freezes every twenty seconds. If it settles at preview, leave it there for the setup work and step up to standard only for the frames that matter. Closing other tabs, particularly ones playing video, is the second thing to try, and moving from wi-fi to a cable is the third and usually the last one you need.

The colour on my screen looks wrong

Before assuming it is the file, check your screen is not on a warm night-time setting and that no brightness-adjusting software is running. Then look at the reference card in the corner of the setup, which we include in every product frame precisely for this reason. If the card looks right and the product looks wrong, tell us immediately — that is a real problem and it is much cheaper to solve while the item is still on the table. We keep a spare set of reference frames from the same setup and can send one as a small file to open outside the session if a second opinion would help.

Full-resolution review is unbearably slow

Review moves much more data than the live feed, in bursts, so a line that coped all day can still struggle here. Try it at a quieter time of day first. If it is still slow, we will downsize the selects to something your connection can handle, or put the full files on a drive and post it. This happens perhaps twice a year and it is never a problem — just tell us rather than sitting through it. It is also worth trying a wired connection for the review even if you watched the whole shoot happily on wi-fi, because the short heavy bursts are exactly what wireless handles least well.

Questions we get about it

Asked often enough to write down

Does it cost extra?

No. It is included with every booking, half day or full day, in the studio or on location. We built it because it saves us reshoots, so charging for it would be slightly perverse. The only related line that ever appears on a quote is the digital technician on high-volume product days, and that is on the rate card whether or not anybody is watching remotely. There is no charge for a test link either, nor for extra viewer codes, nor for a review session that has to be repeated because a connection failed the first time.

Can we use it for part of a day?

Of course, and plenty of clients do. A common pattern is joining for the first hour while the first setup is agreed, leaving the session paused through the middle of the day, and coming back for the last half hour to run the approved list. That uses a fraction of the bandwidth and captures most of the benefit, since a paused session costs almost nothing to leave open. Tell us roughly when you intend to join and we will schedule the setups you care about most into that window.

Can I download frames during the shoot?

Preview files, yes — there is a download button on each one and they are around three megabytes apiece, which is fine for showing somebody down the corridor. Full-resolution files are not downloadable during the shoot. They are unretouched, unsorted and often exposed for a later composite, and a raw capture escaping into a layout is a problem for everyone. Finished files follow the usual delivery, ten to fourteen business days after the selection is agreed.

From clients who use it

Two notes

Booking it

Ask for it when you book, not on the morning.

Live view needs about ten minutes of setting up at our end and a test at yours, which is why we ask for a day’s notice rather than turning it on while a sitter waits.

Mention it in your enquiry, or any time before the week of the shoot, and we will add it to the call sheet along with the names of everyone who needs a code. If you are not sure whether your connection will hold it, say so and we will send a test link a week early so you can find out on a quiet afternoon instead of a busy morning. The full rate card, the licensing terms and the delivery timings are all on the main page, and the contact page has the studio hours and a short enquiry form.

One last thing worth repeating: none of this is compulsory. Plenty of our work is still commissioned by a phone call and delivered by a link, with nobody watching anything. Live view exists for the clients who cannot get to the studio and would rather not find out on Thursday what was photographed on Tuesday.

Figures on this page are measured on our own capture station and reviewed each January. They are typical rather than guaranteed; your own connection, screen and browser all affect what you actually see.

Livetetheredview