A few weeks ago I was dealing with strongly backlit black skinned subjects with the occasional shadow and highly contrasted clothing… Needless to say that I had to go wild with exposure compensation and I was not quite self-assured. So I ended up falling back to more chimping than usual.

To tame the bright sunlight sunlight I was wearing a pair of sunglasses. The lenses being corrective for my rather bad myopia I needed to keep them on. So with the combination of unsure exposure and not having my clear corrective lenses I ended up chimping with sunglasses. I suspected this was a daft idea, but now I have seen the results there is no doubt left about it.

LCD monitors on camera backs are quite inaccurate for tonal quality and even more at a less than perfect angle. And looking at them in bright sunlight is as bad as looking at a CRT monitor in daylight. So I guess that chimping has its limits – at some point the instinctive exposure skills of the expert film photographers of old show that their value are still current, even in the digital world.