street photography Quick Tip: Don’t chimp!
‘Chimping’, if you didn’t know, means looking at your LCD screen to view the image you’ve just taken - and it’s considered to be a bad habit for street photographers. Here are five reasons why:
Chimping takes all your attention away from what’s happening around you. It takes your eye of the ball, it takes you out of the zone and it could mean that you miss that vital ‘moment’ about to happen.
It can signal to the people around you that you’ve just taken their picture and could lead to a challenge or confrontation. Do don’t immediately look at the image you’ve just taken - walk away and view it later.
Chimping uses up vital battery capacity; every time that big screen lights up, your batter loses a little energy (less of a problem with DSLR’s admittedly, but it can be a big issue with mirrorless cameras).
Your shooting will have more of a natural, uninterrupted flow and will feel more ‘organic’. Imaging byou have a film camera and avoid all temptation to look at the screen. Trust me, once you break the habit you’ll feel good about it!
It removes the pleasure, the excitement and the serendipitous surprises of viewing your images later (a bit like waiting to pick up your envelope of prints from Boots back in the film days). Sometimes I’ll leave it days or even weeks before looking at my images from a day’s street photography; putting this distance between the taking and the viewing of the images helps me look at them more critically and dispassionately.
So my advice is to eliminate chimping from your street photography. Break that habit!
