That's called "second guessing yourself" and misreading the situation. Easy to make mistakes that way.
I don't chimp. I turn the auto review function off and concentrate on what I'm doing. When I am working a difficult lighting situation or an odd-ball exposure situation, I make a few exposures and analyze them with the review function, using histogram and highlight blinkies. I might check my focus on a setup to be sure that I haven't jiggered it. That's it. I trust completely that the camera will do what I told it to do, and don't bother to look except as above. I'm too busy concentrating on the subject matter I'm working on. It's that 'personal discipline' thing again. I'm very confident about my equipment when I go out on a shoot with digital capture equipment. Much more so since at any time I feel it necessary, I can monitor what it's doing and not worry about whether the film was loaded correctly, was the right emulsion, etc etc. G On Mar 25, 2008, at 9:24 AM, David Savage wrote: > G'day All, > > Last night I went out to dinner with a bunch of local photogs and we > were talking about the differences/advantages/disadvantages between > film & digital. The discussion got around to the subject of chimping. > > One of the guys is a long time working pro, He shares a studio with 3 > others and they do commercial photography. He related a story from a > recent shoot that I found interesting. > > He was working with one of his partners on a table top product shoot. > They set up the camera (5D) , lights, metered the scene & worked out > the lighting ratios together. He started shooting. He went away for a > while & his partner started chimping the shots already taken & came to > the conclusion that based on the histogram the shots were over > exposed, even though he had helped set up the lighting. > > As a result of this chimping -1.5 stops of exposure compensation were > dialed in. The next day the guy I was talking with started the post > processing. And guess what. They were all (200 odd exposures) > underexposed. By 1.5 stops. > > Now his theory was that chimping is a symptom of people: > > a) not trusting their own skill > b) not trusting this new fangled digital technology. > > Personally I think that the guy who was chimping either had the in > camera settings wrong or he doesn't know how to read a histogram. > (I've never met him or seen his work so I can't really make a comment > on his technical acumen.) > > I am a chimper, I do it even when I don't need to & it's a habit I > have been working on breaking for some time. When I was shooting film > I'd take maybe 2 or 3 frames of a subject & move on, but I find myself > in this digital age fooling around with my camera & fiddeling with > exposure settings, Maybe it's just me, but from waht I seen of others > "in the field" I don't think so. > > I found this idea of a correlation between chimping & trust quite > interesting, so I thought I'd throw this out for comment & discussion. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
