Tuolumne said:
Do you think it's any different shooting outside the studio environment when your concentartion is challenged by so many different things?
To some extent, yes... although I'd say that one thing that separates really successful photographers from the less-successful is the ability to concentrate under difficult conditions. I know that I usually get better pictures when I'm well-rested and feel "sharp" than when I'm tired or distracted.
But your post suggests to me that there's another factor that may play a role. As several have said, it isn't all that easy to
see exactly what's going on at the exact moment of exposure; visual distractions may intrude.
BUT... although we don't usually think about it, a camera is something we use by touch as well as by sight. The kind of camera I usually use has a focal-plane shutter, and I definitely can feel it when this shutter fires, both through the part of my face that's pressed against the camera and in my fingers.
Since the shutter in an RF camera is simple, with no reflex mirror or autodiaphragm to add extra motions, I can be pretty sure that the moment I "feel the click" is the moment of exposure. Since I can see through the camera's finder at the same time I feel the click, it's easy for my brain to correlate these two different stimuli and give me the reassuring "got it!" sensation that many of us associate with using an RF camera.
In other words, the fact that the brain can receive this information on two channels -- the visual channel and the tactile channel -- helps reduce the impact of the distractions that might overwhelm purely visual perception.
I grant you that this whole line of reasoning is speculative. It would be an interesting experiment -- at least interesting to RFF geeks such as myself! -- to devise some kind of camera that offered NO tactile feedback at all, then see what effect this had on a photographer's ability to catch peak action.
Based on my own experience, I suspect the effect might be more considerable than we'd think. For example, compact digicams are notoriously crummy for action shots, a problem generally attributed to shutter lag -- but maybe their almost complete lack of tactile feedback also plays a role. After all, shutter lag didn't stop sports photographers of the '30s from getting great action shots with their Graflex 'Big Berthas'!
Getting back to your original question about the value of continuous viewing, I'd concede that the vast majority of the time it makes little difference. After all, with most subjects there isn't one specific, make-or-break "right" moment to take the picture; there's a band of time during which any given instant will yield as good a picture as another. In that type of situation, seeing slightly before and slightly after the picture is just as good as seeing
during the picture -- nothing will have changed significantly during the blackout interval.
It's only in special cases that the ability to view continuously makes a difference. In those cases, though, it can make a
big difference.