Don't Be A Liquid Crystal Display Chimp

Did you know that LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display?   It's that little display screen on the back of your camera that shows you a miniature version of the shot you just made, plus a lot of useful information. It can also give you some misleading information and you may not want to trust everything it is telling you.

Do you know what chimping is?  According to the source of all Internet knowledge (Wikipedia)

Chimping is a colloquial term used in digital photography to describe the habit of checking every photo on the camera display (LCD) immediately after capture.

Regina Chimping

I do it and I'm sure most of you do as well.  We can't wait to see that prize winning photo we just took.   For me something often happens to the photo between the vision in my mind and what shows up on the back of the camera.

What are you looking at when you look at the back of the screen?  There can be a lot of useful information there for you depending on your camera display settings..   

Back of a Canon 5D Mark II

The display on the back of each camera is different.  The picture above is my Canon 5D Mark II.  I've set the display to show the RGB histogram (red, green and blue mountains), shutter speed (1/3 sec), f-stop (f/14), exposure compensation (+2/3), shooting mode (Av), white balance (AWB), file format (RAW), color space (Adobe RGB) and a few other pieces of information about the photo.  Most of this information is things you set on the camera before taking the picture and you don't need to chimp these.   The histogram tells you about the tonality of the picture you just took and if it is over or under exposed.   Pay attention to the histogram.  Other than checking the composition or focus you can pretty much ignore the picture display.

Most cameras automatically adjust the brightness of the LCD display to improve the readability in different light conditions.  Under some conditions it will appear bright and in other conditions it will be dark.   This does not tell you if the photo is properly exposed and you should not trust it when checking the exposure.

The most important piece of information on the screen is the histogram.  It will tell you if you photo is properly exposed.  You want the histogram to fall in the center of the graph and not bunched up against the left or right side.   The left side represents the dark areas of the photo and the right is the bright areas.  In this example the blue of the sky is almost too bright as shown by the spike on the right side of the blue channel.   I had a choice to make here.  I could have dropped the exposure to move the histogram more to the left, making some areas of the image too dark.  I have chosen this exposure to get as close to the right side as I can without over exposing.  This is called exposing to the right and is a good practice to follow.  More on that in a later post.

There is lots of great information available on histograms so I'm not going to try and explain something that others have already done a better job than I can.  You can check out

Understanding Histograms by Darren Rowse

 How To Read and Use Histograms by Darlene Hildebrandt
 
Camera Histograms: Tones and Contrast

Darlene Hildebrandt

It's OK to chimp as long as you pay attention to the histogram and don't trust the little image.

Cass Railroad

At one end of the West VIrginia Greenbriar "Rails-to-Trails" bike path is the Cass Scenic Railroad State Park.   Located on the east side of West Virginia, not far from the Snowshoe Ski Resort, the state park includes the former West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company town of Cass and 11 miles of track from Cass up into the highest points of the Back Allegheny Mountains.  West Virginia has some very nice state parks and Cass is one or the more unique.

We arrived in Cass after riding the Greenbriar Trail for 25 miles from Marlinton WV.   The train pulled into the station shortly after we arrived, dumping a trainload of tourists into the town.

It was early afternoon on a bright cloudless day, which made photographing the train very difficult.   The black engine and the white company store building behind it were two extremes in tonality.   I wanted to get both, plus the yellow tree and the blue sky.  It took several tries, each time checking the histogram on my camera and adjusting to not blow out the whites while maintaining details in the dark areas.

I didn't take too many of the engine and train.  The engine was attached to the train backwards, which just didn't look right. 

A little ways up the tracks from the town was a water tower, repair yard, the old saw mill and this caboose.  I was hoping to catch the red caboose with bright fall colors behind it.  We had missed much of the fall color on this trip and the colors in Cass were still a few days away from peak.

The state has maintained the town of Cass pretty much like it was when it was a company town.  There are streets lined with white company houses, white stores, and white churches.  In fact, I think every building in the town looked like it came from the same plans and was painted with the same white paint.   The exception is the old saw mill.

The saw mill was once the largest double-band sawmill in the world.  Today, some of the buildings remain in ruin just outside town.  The ground around the mill is littered with old equipment from the mill.  They have done a good job with signs telling about the mill and about the remains spread out all around.   Unfortunately, we could not get close (for obvious reasons) and had to be satisfied with taking pictures from  several hundred feet away.

While trying to find a short cut back to the Greenbriar Trail we ran across some old abandoned train cars from Cass Scenic Railroad's earlier days.  These are sitting on a siding with grass and bushes growing up all around.  The windows are all broken out and the cars are slowly rusting away.  

 

I used Adobe Lightroom to give these photos the edgy look that enhances the texture and colors in the old cars.   I was still struggling with the extreme light conditions and had to do some editing in Lightroom to bring out the details inside the cars without blowing out the brightest parts.

I think I could have spent a couple hours climbing around the cars taking pictures,  but it was time to head back to Marlinton so we could get there before sundown.   It was another 25 miles back after all.

There are more West Virginia photos available online in my gallery.

Histograms - Possibly The Most Useful Tool in Digital Photography

We all have one on our digital cameras, but not everyone knows what they mean and how to use them to take better photos. I've written a short article for the Eastman Camera Club on histograms and made it available on TheSiggins.net

It's a brief introduction to histograms and some suggestions on how to use them. The article is available here.