Shooting tethered
When a client is present on a shoot, it is a given that the photographer will have to shoot tethered. For this purpose, I rely on EOS Utility and Adobe Lightroom. To this end, I apply the following steps before the shoot:

  1. Open EOS Utility and set up a watch folder (called “Monitor Folder” in EOS Utility).
  2. Go back to the main window and select “Remote Shooting”. The main window will close and the Remote Shooting window will appear. From within this window, I can manipulate the camera; adjust aperture/shutter speed/ASA and trigger the shutter release.
  3. Open up Adobe Lightroom and Enable Auto-Import. But first, I point Lightroom to the watch folder that EOS Utility will download images to.
  4. Once the first shot is taken, EOS Utility will launch Digital Photo Professional. I simply minimize it out of the way.
  5. Upon sensing that there are images in the watch folder, Adobe Lightroom will move them over to an “Auto Imported Photos” folder; where this folder resides is dependent on your settings within the Auto-Import configuration box.
  6. I can now start the shoot and have each shot come into Adobe Lightroom where I can do a variety of checks on the images.

This is all fine when I have only one camera set-up. On a shoot last Thursday, I ran into one snag after another in getting EOS Utility to work in a tethered shooting scenario.

The problem
It began when I had to move the camera to another angle that was out of reach of the USB cable and I had to untether the camera. Since USB cables are restricted to a five meter effective distance, the chances that I had to unplug the cable at some point were pretty high. The steps I performed before I moved the camera are as follow:

  1. Turn off the camera.
  2. Unplug the USB cable on the camera end.
  3. Close EOS Utility.
  4. Close Digital Photo Professional.
  5. Move the camera.
  6. Plug the USB cable to the camera.
  7. Turn on the camera.

At this point, Windows XP sensed the presence of the camera and appropriately launched an autoplay box. From it, I selected to launch EOS Utility. Except EOS Utility began behaving erratically.

Sometimes, the main EOS Utility window launched only to quit by itself, appearing briefly and, just as quickly, disappearing from the desktop. However, when I looked in Windows’ Task Manager, I could see that EOSUtility.exe was clearly still running.

Opening DPP and attempting to launch EOS Utility from its menu did not work.

Force-quitting EOSUtility.exe and relaunching it either on its own or from within DPP did not work either; EOS Utility either failed to launch or failed to connect to the camera.

The only way I got EOS Utility running again was to restart Windows and going through the seven steps as described above. It went into Remote Shooting mode and I was able to continue shooting until I had to disconnect the camera for a new set-up. Then the same set of problems began anew.

My assistant and I spent an entire hour experimenting with every possible variation of connecting the camera and launching the various applications to resume shooting tethered. In that hour, much to our embarrassment, we got it working only on an average of three out of ten times. Eventually, I made the call to resume shooting by rotating two CompactFlash cards between set-ups.

Post-shoot, I did a little bit of Googling and learned that others have had faced the same problems with EOS Utility. Judging from the following post on a forum, it does appear that it is not a OS-related problem:

I do (or did) almost all of my shooting tethered…. When I can get EOS Utility to work, it’s great but I’ve had so many inconsistent problems that it’s driving me nuts. It seems to work reasonably, predictably and reliable on my G4 laptop. I can’t seem to get more than one session out of my G5 before it crashes. I’ll have to force quit and usually re-boot before there’s any hope of getting it to launch and briefly work again. It’s frustrating to put it mildly because I can’t find any one particular set of events that causes it to hang.

Troubleshooting
Earlier tonight, I tried to reproduce the problem to see if I can establish a pattern of how EOS Utility will fail. The tests were ran under the following conditions:

  1. EOS Utility was configured to send images to a watch folder D:\CAPTURE.
  2. Auto-Import in Adobe Lightroom was set to move incoming images from D:\CAPTURE to D:\CAPTURE\<Date>.
  3. There was no CompactFlash card in the camera.
  4. CALMAIN.exe has always been set to startup upon rebooting and was hence running. The process belongs to the Canon Camera Access Library installed with Canon Camera software. It is used to connect and configure the settings for Canon Camera.
  5. Autoplay in Windows XP was disabled for all drives.
  6. Adobe Lightroom was definitely not at fault here since it was not communicating with the camera in any way.

The test
In the following steps:

  1. With Adobe Lightroom running in the background, I connected the USB cable to the camera and turned it on.
  2. EOS Utility launched.
  3. I chose “Remote Shooting”. The Remote Shooting window appeared as it should.
  4. I took two shots.
  5. Adobe Lightroom successfully imported the images.
  6. I turned off the camera. The EOS Utility window disappeared from the desktop, but, looking at Task Manager, the process EOSUtility.exe remained running.
  7. I turned the camera on again. The status LCD on the top of my camera repeated blinked “BUSY”. After ten minutes of inactivity, with the “BUSY” message still blinking, I turned off the camera; it did not seem that the “BUSY” message would go away. This is the first result.
  8. EOSUtility.exe continued to run in the background.
  9. I launch EOS Utility again. Now, there are two EOSUtility.exe processes running, but there is no EOS Utility window on-screen.
  10. I force-quit both instances of EOSUtility.exe.
  11. I turned on the camera.
  12. EOS Utility launches and its main window flashed briefly on the desktop. A second later, the main window appeared and remained on-screen as it should.
  13. I chose “Remote Shooting”. The Remote Shooting window appeared as it should.
  14. I took one shot.
  15. Adobe Lightroom successfully imported the images.
  16. I turned off the camera. The EOS Utility window disappeared from the desktop, but like before, the process EOSUtility.exe remained running.
  17. I force-quit EOSUtility.exe.
  18. I turn on the camera.
  19. EOS Utility launches and its main window flashed briefly on the desktop. A second later, the main window appeared and remained on-screen as it should.
  20. I chose “Remote Shooting”. The Remote Shooting window appeared as it should.
  21. I took one shot.
  22. Adobe Lightroom successfully imported the images. This is the second result.

At this point, the test has essentially become a loop; I could either perform Step 7 and get the first result, or start over beginning with Step 11 and get the second result. A reproducible pattern has emerged.

Summary
The cause of the problem seems to be EOS Utility’s insistence on not—or inability to—fully quit itself after it loses the connection to a camera and, instead, stays resident in memory. Upon the reconnection of the camera, a new instance of EOS Utility launches, further compounding the problem, since the EOS Utility user guide clearly states, on Page 10, that “the camera cannot communicate with multiple softwares.” Does having two instances of EOSUtility.exe running at the same time not mean that both processes are confusing the heck out of the camera?

Can it be that the solution is simply a recoding of EOS Utility so that it either quits itself whenever it loses the connection with a camera or it can somehow better respond to a disconnection/reconnection scenario?

Additional notes
This article from the Lightroom blog contains some very useful tips:

When shooting tethered using the EOS Utility to get images into Lightroom, it is really important to remember that the Watched Folder (Auto Import Folder) needs to be empty. One of the settings in EOS Utility creates a subfolder by date. If you use this setting (which I think is on by default), your images will not auto-import. You need to untick all the boxes as in the screen capture above. You get to this preference screen by clicking on the little computer icon under the ISO setting.

One other handy setting to change is to set the Linked Software to none, to prevent DPP or Image Browser opening once you start shooting. If we quickly examine the Utility window open on the right we can note a few things. The File type here is RAW, something someone mentioned having problems with. This certainly is working fine here. Also the camera is set up for manual exposure. All the settings can be changed either in camera or here on the computer. Lightroom has no issues with any setting once the file shows up in the correct folder on its own.

After reading the article, I believe the two gotchas I have placed in emphasis above could have further compounded the problems I had faced during last week’s shoot.