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. Cheers, Dave -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
