Some EXIF metadata
Recently I resurrected an old camera bag, and clearing it out found my old notebook from film days. Now, one of the ways you improve your photography is by looking critically through your shots, deciding what is wrong with them, and making a different mistake next time, so when I was setting out on a shoot with a fresh roll of film in the camera I would carefully note the date, the time and the film type, and then after each shot make a note of the subject, the aperture, the shutter speed, the lens zoom, the focus distance and anything else that would help me critique the shot later. I even had a special pencil in the bag for the purpose. But it didn’t quite work out that way, because you might take several shots together, and by the time you got the pencil and notebook out you no longer remembered the exact settings from each of the shots. And then things get exciting, and you shoot off the rest of the roll and load another and take a few more shots and … The little notebook is full of pages, each with the date and time and film, and details of the first two or three shots, or even on a slow day four or six shots, and then no more. Inevitably, the shots most in need of that data are the ones where it was not recorded.
How times have changed! Now you take a shot, and if you look at the back of the camera you see not just a preview of the image, but superimposed on it markers for areas that might be over- or under-exposed, a histogram (histograms will be a later topic) and the ISO, aperture and shutter speed that you used, so you can immediately correct your settings and try again. Not only that, but as the camera writes the image to your memory card, it embeds all that information, and more besides, into the file, so that after you have transferred the shots to your computer, this information (metadata, or data about the data which is the image) is available for you to browse. Even, in some cases, the GPS co-ordinates are stored, so even if you have forgotten whether those shots were in Dublin Street, Tullow Street or across the river in Graiguecullen the location is available.
Your photo browser will generally allow you to choose which of the settings data will be displayed when you look at the image – I usually show just the “triangle” data – but will call up the lot on request. That lot is generally much more than even the most advanced pixel-peeper will require, though selected data fields will certainly help in your critiquing.