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B+WCOMMENT
timclinchphotography.comModern technology, for Tim Clinch, is a blessing from the
photographic gods, not an impediment to creativity. This month his
grumbles include contemporary photographic jargon, innovative
camera launches, Facebook posts and much, much more...
A FORTNIGHT AT F/8
‘Popped on to any medium or large format
camera, a Polaroid Back showed you exactly
what you’d get once your fi lm was developed.
Cumbersome was the word though.’
C
himping. Any of
you know what this
means? Confession
time...until a few
days ago I’d never heard of it.
In my persona here at this
wonderful magazine, which
seems to be ‘Mister quite
grumpy quite a lot of the time’
and ‘Mister rather sceptical
rather a lot of the time’, I have
had to confess to a fair degree
of ignorance about a lot of
modern terms in the world
of photography.
I am, for example, still
struggling with the fact that a
picture with a shallow depth of
field can be described as having
‘nice bokeh’. Hmmm. Still not
convinced about this one but
have grudgingly come to terms
with the fact that I might beswimming against the tide.
I was made aware of this
‘chimping’ term by a post on my
Facebook page (facebook.com/
TimClinchPhotography). The
post was about the – to my mind- slightly ludicrous decision by
Leica to release a new, limited
edition, digital camera without
an LCD screen on the back.
According to the manufacturers,
working with the Leica M
Edition 60, ‘...intentionally
demands the same care and
attention as working with an
analogue model’.
One of the comments on the
post came from a young woman
who stated: ‘Love it. Bring an end
to chimping once and for all!’
I Googled it. Wikipedia
describes chimping as:
‘A colloquial term used in
digital photography to describe
the habit of checking every
photo on the camera display
immediately after capture’.
The Urban Dictionary goes one
further with: ‘...what one does
after taking a picture with a
digital camera and looking at the
result. Derived from the wordsthey speak when chimping:
‘Ooo-oo-oo!’O
h deary, deary me.
Mister Grumpy is
back in town. As
always in these
circumstances I take myself
back 20-odd years and imagine
someone offering me some of
the technology that’s available
today and thinking what I’d
have made of it.
Take, for example, the thing
that I relied on for all those years
to make sure the picture I was
taking was well composed,
exposed correctly and looked
exactly the way I wanted it to
look. The Polaroid. It was a
wonderful thing and I couldn’t
have lived without it. Popped on
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