In digital photography ... What is "Chimping"?

Chimping is looking at your screen on your camera after every shot. So do, some don't, some do it a lot.

While this is normally a put down, I have to disagree with casting this in such a negative light. Why not make the technology work for you? If you can look and know you got the shot, why not look? This is a great tool for a novice photographer because it makes the learning curve much less steep.

The problem comes when this action seriously hampers work-flow. For instance, you will lose the interest of a young child with all the stopping and starting. Models aren't fond of this practice either.

A happy medium that will keep everyone happy and keep you from being "put down" is to "chimp" at the beginning of series and then go with the flow through that series. If the lighting and such isn't radically changing, there probably is not a need to look after EVERY shot, unless of course you're a novice or are working in difficult conditions.

Chimping IMO is taking a shot (digital of course) and then viewing the histogram for that shot. If you have too high of spikes or too much is happenning on one side or the other of the histogram it probably wont come out well.

If you have a camera that flashes the blown highlights at you it pretty much does the same thing, except it wont tell you if your too dark.

To chimp you take a shot, usually with some flashes going off that arent TTL, and you check your histogram, make adjustments to your camera settings or lights and then do it again to see if its right. Some do it more than others.

Try Trick Photography Special Effects - http://tinyurl.com/bCY87baoOk

It's monkeys taking digital photographs, which accounts for the quality of most of them.

V