Histrogramania

Today I was reading the Digital Photography Blog and saw an article about using histograms. I’ve seen them both on my camera and in Photoshop but never understood how that worked. I think I was assuming that since I never had heard about using histograms, that they must not be very important. Now I’m kicking myself for not learning about them earlier. If you have a camera where it displays the photos histogram, make sure you read it too.I can’t wait to start using it. It will be nice for doing exposure compensation, but what I like the most about it is being able to tell if portions of the photo are washed out. If I take a photo and the shadows are too dark the camera will capture them as pure black and none of the detail will be captured, the same goes for bright areas being all white. If that detail is not captured no amount of tweaking in Photoshop will be able to bring the detail back.I wonder what the next useless thing will turn out to be indespensible?