Tangents
Digital <i>Jargon </i>
Digital Photographers During Holi. Photo: Ihtisham Kabir
I love to photograph children, particularly when they are immersed in their own world. The other day I saw a child walking out of an alley, lost in his thoughts. I got my camera ready. At the right moment – his expression, the light, the distance, background everything came together – I pressed the shutter. But the same instance another kid jumped in front of my camera. He had been watching from my side and decided to make his move at the critical moment. I had just been photobombed. Digital photography, which has enabled millions of new photographers, has also given rise to a new jargon. Many digital photographers look at the picture immediately after taking it. This is called chimping, which is not a good idea if the events you are photographing are outside your control and changing rapidly since your decisive moment may pass in the seconds you take to look at that photo. On the other hand, chimping makes more sense in a controlled studio situation. (Before digital photography, studio photographers often used Polaroids to preview their photographs and make sure the lighting, pose etc were correct before making the final exposure.) Sometimes a situation arises which is of such great interest that several photographers stand elbow to elbow trying to photograph the same subject. This grouping is sometimes called the scrum or the pack. In the world of model, glamour and fashion photography there is the GWC: Guy With Camera. This is a man with a camera who is posing as a photographer to get close to the models. In wedding photography, a guest who shows up at a function with lots of camera gear and gets in the way of the professional wedding photographers is sometimes called an Uncle Bob. BIF is a favourite term of bird photographers. It means Birds in Flight. Perhaps some of these birds can be captured by the Bigma, nickname of a big telephoto lens made by the lens company Sigma. On the other end of the scale, a point-and-shoot camera is sometimes called a PhD – Push Here Dummy. Of course great images have been made with all kinds of cameras. To photoshop a photograph means to enhance or change it using software such as Adobe Photoshop. Professionals sometimes call this post-processing or, simply, post, as in “He knew the lighting was bad and was planning to fix it in post.” During post, a pixel-peeper zooms up the entire digital image on his computer checking the pixels. Spray and pray, a term from combat, refers to a soldier rapidly firing a lot of bullets at the enemy without particular attention, hoping he gets lucky. With today's high-speed digital SLR cameras, spray and pray has migrated to photography. While many photographers disapprove of the technique, some find the technique useful in fast moving situations such as in bird, wildlife and sports photography.
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