Last Updated on 09/29/2017 by Chris Gampat
Recently, Tether Tools announced a new exclusive manufacturing, sales, and distribution agreement to make them the exclusive producer, seller, and distributor of the Tether Block. Tether Tools, as the company’s name suggests, has long been a go-to source for photographers looking for solutions to make their lives easier when shooting tethered. The Tether Block is a base plate for your camera with special grooves designed to be large enough to hold a tether cable. This allows photographers to connect their tethering cable and then run it through the Tether Block to prevent tugs and other potential damage done to the camera port by way of the tether cord. You can also attach it to your tripod plate to make using a tripod easy as well.
This eliminates a major problem for a lot of photographers still using cables. For starters, it means that if you’re shooting and tethering into Lightroom and your cable comes loose, there is less likelihood that something awful may happen. The best case scenario is everything just stops and you need to set it all back up again. The worst case scenarios, and these have happened to Editor in Chief Chris Gampat personally while teaching workshops, include your memory card and Lightroom catalog going corrupt. So that suddenly means all the images you were working with are now gone and you need to reshoot everything.
If you’re an Arca Swiss plate tripod user then you will love that you can buy the Tether Block Arca, which has the Arca grooves already built into the plate, so you can just set the Tether Block up and use it handheld or on your Arca Tripod without the need for any extra plates.
The Tether Block was designed, developed, and patented by photographer David Blattel, who has now entered into this partnership with Tether Tools to basically take over the product in terms of manufacturing, sales, and distribution alongside their other popular tether and cable management products. Depending on the version of the Tether Block that you desire, you are looking at ~$90-$100 and if you are interested in picking one up you can buy them directly from Tether Tools now on their website as well as through Tether Tools retail partners online and locally.
And just in case you’re wondering, no, wireless tethering still isn’t fully viable and great due to RAW file sizes getting larger and larger. But if you’re doing something for a workshop or presentation, then you’re probably shooting and sending JPEG files to increase the speed of things.