Real World Workflow

Here is a photograph of Annie Leibovitz holding what appears to be a Canon 1DS Mark II. As you can see there is an insane amount of tape holding the cable in. Recently, I’ve been a lot neater about the tape, but I can remember using gobs of tape to hold it in, especially when it would be a near disaster if it fell out while shooting a celeb. Obviously someone’s life depends on that cable staying in.

The first thing we do is put the “boot” in. The “boot” is a small plastic device intended to be used to hold the cable in more sturdy. The reality is, the boot doesn’t fit so well and occasionally falls out, so we have to tape it down to the body. Canon developed the boot, after they realized that their shoddy 4-pin cable connection wasn’t secure and caused the firewire ports to go out over time. I’ve heard that the repair costs about $120 – fairly steep for an obvious design flaw.

Now that we have the boot secured with SMALL, NEAT (and BLACK) strips of gaffers tape on each side, we can put the cable in the socket. The photo above shows that Leibovitz is using a Granite Digital firewire cable, probably a 15 ft cable with an extender or a 30ft, although I would stay away from 30ft cables as they are prone to more problems and just go with an extender. Also note that sometimes third party cables don’t always fit perfectly into the socket of the boot. I usually put one piece of tape around the cable where it meets the boot. That is usually enough to hold it into place. From there you can place the cable inside of the tether-lock and viola, you are ready to shoot.