Turn the LCD Review Off for a While
Okay. Last lesson was setting up a shot from scratch in full manual, and if you did the homework you've got a memory card with some real shots on it, taken deliberately, one setting at a time. Good.
Today's lesson is smaller but I think it might be the one that actually changes how you shoot. It's about the screen on the back of your camera.
Here's the thing. Every time you take a shot, that LCD lights up and shows you the picture. And it feels responsible to check it. It feels like good practice. You took a photo, you look at the photo, you make sure it's not garbage, you move on. Makes sense on paper.
But watch yourself do it sometime. You take the shot, you look down at that little screen, you squint at it, maybe you zoom in with your thumb to check focus, maybe you adjust something and take it again and check again. And this whole time your head is down and your eyes are on a two and a half inch screen instead of on the actual scene in front of you. There's a name photographers use for this, chimping, and I think it's a real habit worth breaking. Not because checking your shot is bad. Because of what it costs you while you're doing it.
What it actually costs you
I'll tell you about the night it cost me a moose.
I was up Provo Canyon a while back, early evening, and there was a moose working its way across a meadow, just this slow unhurried walk through good light. I had my camera up and I was fiddling. ISO wasn't quite right for the light, I adjusted it, checked the screen, adjusted the shutter speed a hair, checked the screen again, and by the time I looked up from that screen the moose had walked off into the trees. I got nothing. Not one frame.
That nagged at me for a long time. Not because moose are rare up there, they're not particularly, but because I had it, the animal was right there doing something worth photographing, and I lost it to a screen instead of to bad light or bad luck. I lost it managing my own settings instead of watching the thing I was supposed to be photographing.
I'll be honest with you, I still think about that. And the opinion I've landed on, and I'll say it plainly because I mean it: a slightly wrong photo you actually took beats a perfect photo you missed. Stop chasing perfect settings when the light is doing something in front of you. Get the shot. Fix the craft later, in the next frame, or next time.
The actual exercise
So here's what I want you to try, and it's uncomfortable at first, I'll warn you now.
Go into your menu and turn the image review time down. Most cameras let you set it to two seconds, one second, or off completely. Turn it off, or if that feels like too much, set it to one second and don't chase it with your thumb.
Then go shoot something for twenty or thirty minutes without checking the screen after every frame. Trust your settings. You've read the meter, you've balanced shutter and aperture and ISO, you know roughly what you're going to get. Take the shot and keep your eyes up and moving, watching the light, watching what's happening in the scene, not what happened two seconds ago on a screen.
You can look at everything when you get home. That's what the computer is for. In the field, your job is to watch the world, not review your own work constantly.
A caution here, because I don't want you doing this blind: it is still smart to check your histogram once in a while, not every frame, just periodically, especially if the light is changing fast, so you're not shooting an entire hike of overexposed frames without knowing it. I've done that. I'll tell that story some other lesson. A quick histogram glance every ten or fifteen shots is fine. That's different from chimping every single frame.
Why this actually teaches you something
The whole reason I keep pushing you toward manual, one setting at a time, is that Auto isn't teaching you anything. It makes fine pictures and keeps you exactly where you are. The LCD screen can do something similar if you let it. If you're constantly checking a small screen instead of watching real light change in real time, you're not building the instinct. You're building a habit of correcting after the fact instead of anticipating before the shot.
The moose taught me that the hard way. You don't have to learn it that way. You can just turn the review off for an evening and notice how differently you pay attention.
Before next time
Go shoot for half an hour with review either off or down to one second, no chimping between frames. Notice what you saw in the scene that you'd normally have missed with your head down.