So, are you taking full advantage of digital?
I certainly try. ;-)
1. Do you feel you understand the histogram?
Yes. It's a tool for simple frequency analysis of the scene
brightnesses, a graph with brightness plotted from left to right and
count plotted vertically. It is most useful when used in conjunction
with evaluating the scene to understand the expected shape.
2. Do you ever look at the histogram while you are shooting? When?
Under what
situations?
Extremely rarely, usually under either very difficult or very average
lighting only.
3. Do you ever look at the blinkies? When? Under what situations?
I set the hot spot blinkies for review only, and set the review to
fire for 3 seconds when I use it. The advantage of blinkies over
histogram is that they show WHERE in the image you are nearing
saturation, not just that you are nearing saturation like you do with
a histogram.
The spatial and saturation information is useful if you understand
what the hot spot blinkies are showing: it's showing what a JPEG
rendering of the scene using the camera settings has done to
highlights. I interpret that display relative to what I can rely upon
as the difference between a customized RGB conversion curve vs the in-
camera processing.
4. Do you find one of them (histogram or blinkies) more useful than
the
other? Do you look at it more? Or do you tend to use both in concert?
I use the hotspot blinkies when shooting, unless I've turned off
review entirely. I occasionally use the histogram when evaluating a
difficult scene in Play mode.
Godfrey
