I came across a reference to the practise of “Chimping” a while back. That is, the practise in digital photography of checking every photo that one takes on the LCD screen. You know what I am talking about. It is not uncommon to check every photo that we make on the litle screen on the back of the camera, point and shoot cameras now use this display to compose the photo so you know what it is going to look like before you even take the photo.
So does chimping make us better photographers?
Back in the days of film we would have carefully compose photographs to get a desired set up and look. Film was not a huge expense and the cost of a digital camera these days is well above what a film camera used to cost so the price is offset a bit. Digital is not that much cheaper unless you are shooting huge volumes of pictures. Yet there was still an immediate cost of film that is just not present in digital. You can shoot a hundred photos of the same subject and not worry that the hundred photos is going to cost you $5.00 a roll plus developing costs. So back in the days of film you were much more likely to take your time with composition, making sure the light was right, the exposure was on, the subject was interesting and well composed. Today we are much more likely to just shoot the hundred photos and hope we have a good one. We don’t have to worry as much about exposure charts because we can snap a test shot and check the results on the back of the camera. If we don’t like what we see we make the requisite changes.
So in a way chimping does give us an advantage. It lets us be sure that what we capture is the same as what we imagine the image to be. It can lead to the dangers of simply spraying and praying, where hundreds of photos are taken with the simple hope that something good will come of it. If we fall into this trap, no amount of chimping will be able to help us.
One way to make sure you are making the most of your chimping time is not to rely soley on the small picture that is presented on screen. Often this is a poor representation of what the photo will look like when it is displayed on a properly calibrated monitor or in a good print. I will often come back from a photo shoot disappointed with my photos till I look at them on screen, the small LCD display simply does not give an accurate representation of what a photo will look like.
A better way to chimp is to use the luminescence histogram that is now built into most cameras.
It should look something like this one taken from photoshop. A histogram will tell you how much light and may even tell you what proportion of colours there are in a photography. It will do this accurately and well if you know how to read them. A good rule of thumb is that a good histogram looks somewhat like the one shown above, with the majority of the peaks falling somewhere in the middle and not to one side. Simplified, this is a representation of the exposure levels of the photo, if the peaks fall in the middle and not to one side the photos is well exposed throughout and does not have any blown highlights or underexposed shadows.
A histogram that has a good deal of its mass falling to the right, means that much of the photo has highlights, often if the mass is far right or off the chart as in this photo it means that the photo has areas that have been blown and are pure white. These no longer have any colour detail and are very hard to work with. Often this is not something you want to see in your photos but here you have to be careful, sometimes you want to have a lot of white or bright areas in your photo, it depends on the look you are trying to achieve so don’t make the mistake of thinking highlights are always bad.
A histogram that has much of the mass to the left means the photo has many dark areas, if they are too far right or there are too many of them, they also mean a loss of colour data and are hard to work with. As with whites, darks are not always a bad thing so here again don’t make the mistake of thinking that a histogram that falls to the left equates to a bad photo, that is not always the case.
So turn on that histogram, learn to use it if you have to chimp. It will give you a much better idea of what your photo will really look like then just relying on that little LCD screen display of your work. It takes some getting used to but once you are used to it you will wonder what you were ever doing shooting without it.
