Photography Vocabulary

Aesthetics

A set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art.

Analogous Colors

Three colors that are side by side on the color wheel.

Aperture

Aperture is the size of the opening in the lens. Think of the lens as a window—large windows or wide angles let in more light, while small windows let in less light. A wide-open aperture will let more light into the image for a brighter photo, while a smaller aperture lets in less light. Aperture is measured in f-stops; a small f-stop like f/1.8 is a wide opening, and a large f-stop like f/22 is a very narrow one. Aperture is one of three camera settings that determine an image’s exposure, or how light or dark it is. Aperture also affects how much of the image is in focus—wide apertures result in that creamy, unfocused background while narrow apertures keep more of the image sharp.

Aperture Priority

Aperture priority, often abbreviated or (for aperture value) on a camera mode dial, is a mode on some cameras that allows the user to set a specific aperture value (f-number) while the camera selects a shutter speed to match it that will result in proper exposure based on the lighting conditions as measured by the camera's light meter

Aspect Ratio

Aspect ratio is simply the ratio of height to width. A photo with a 4x5 aspect ratio that has a width of 4 inches will have a height of 5 inches. You can change the aspect ratio in your camera if you know how you’d like to print your image, or you can crop your photo when you edit it to the desired ratio.

Bokeh

Bokeh is the orbs created when lights are out of focus in an image. It’s created through wide apertures with shallow depths of field. It can have an interesting effect on your image quality.

Burst Mode

You can take photos one at a time. Or, you can turn the burst mode on and the camera will continue snapping photos as long as you hold the button down, or until the buffer is full (which is a fancy way of saying the camera can’t process anymore). Burst speeds differ based on what camera or film camera you own, some are faster than others. Just how fast is written in “fps” or frames (pictures) per second.

Camera

An optical instrument that captures a visual image. "Dark Box"

Complementary Colors

Two colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel. This combination provides a high contrast and high impact color combination – together, these colors will appear brighter and more prominent. Some complementary color combinations are red–green, yellow–violet, and blue–orange.

Composition

Composition is how you arrange the elements within your photograph.

Cool Colors

Cool colors are the colors from blue to green and violet. These colors are said to bring to mind coolness, like water.

Crop

To “crop” an image is to remove or adjust the outside edges of an image to improve framing or composition, draw a viewer's eye to the image subject, or change the size or aspect ratio. In other words, image cropping is the act of improving a photo or image by removing unnecessary parts.

Cull

Select from a large quantity. We cull our images to narrow down the best photos.

Depth of Field

Depth of field is a photography term that refers to how much of the image is in focus. The camera will focus on one distance, but there’s a range of distance in front and behind that point that stays sharp—that’s depth of field. Portraits often have a soft, unfocused background—this is a shallow depth of field. Landscapes, on the other hand, often have more of the image in focus—this is a large depth of field, with a big range of distance that stays sharp.

Digital Vs. Optical

Digital and optical are important terms to understand when shopping for a new camera. Digital means the effect is achieved through software, not physical parts of the camera. Optical is always better than digital. These terms are usually used when referring to a zoom lens (on a compact camera) as well as image stabilization.

Exposure

Exposure is how light or dark an image is. An image is created when the camera sensor (or film strip) is exposed to light—that’s where the term originates. A dark photo is considered underexposed, or it wasn’t exposed to enough light; a light photo is overexposed or exposed to too much light. Exposure is controlled by aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.

Exposure Compensation

Exposure compensation is a way to tell the camera that you’d like the exposure to be lighter or darker. Exposure compensation can be used on some automated modes and semi-automated modes like aperture priority. It’s measured in stops of light, with negative numbers resulting in a darker image and positive ones creating a brighter shot.

File Format

The file format is how your camera lens will record the image or image file. Raw files contain more information than JPGs, which makes them more suitable for photo editing in various editing software. JPGs are a smaller file size which makes it possible to save more pictures in the same amount of space.

Fill the Frame

A rule in photography that emphasizes filling the frame of your photo with your subject.

Focal Length

The focal length describes the distance in millimeters between the lens and the image it forms on the film. It informs the angle of view (how much of what is being shot will be captured) and the magnification (how large things will appear). Essentially, the focal length is how ‘zoomed in’ your images will appear. For example, a Canon 35mm lens will create images that appear more ‘zoomed in’ than a Canon 18mm.

Focus

When your eyes focus on an object that’s close to you, the objects far away will appear blurry. The common photography term “focus” has the same meaning. Something that is in focus is sharp, while an object that is out-of-focus isn’t sharp. Different focus areas determine if the camera is focusing on multiple points or one user-selected point.

Flash Sync

You probably know that the flash is a burst of light—flash sync determines when the flash fires. Normally, the flash fires at the beginning of the photo, but changing the flash sync mode adjusts when that happens. The rear curtain flash sync mode, for example, fires the flash at the end of the photo instead of the beginning.

Framing

Framing in photography refers to the technique of drawing focus to the subject in the photo by blocking other parts of the image with something in the scene.

Horizon Line

The line of the horizon in the picture should be shown using the rule of thirds.

Hot Shoe

Hot shoe is the slot at the top of a camera for adding accessories, like the aptly named hot shoe flash.

Hue

In color theory, a hue is any color on the color wheel. The name of the color is the hue.

Incident Light

Incident light is the light that falls on a subject.

Intensity (or Saturation)

In color theory, intensity describes the purity of the color. How vivid or dull the color is. Colors lose intensity when mixed with white, black or their complement.

ISO

The ISO determines how sensitive the camera is to light. For example, an ISO of 100 means the camera isn’t very sensitive—great for shooting in the daylight. An ISO 3200 means the camera is very sensitive to light, so you can use that higher ISO for getting shots in low light. The trade off is that images at high ISOs appear to be grainy and have less detail. ISO is balanced with aperture and shutter speed to get a proper exposure.

Lens

A lens is a transmissive optical device that focuses or disperses a light beam by means of refraction. The lens of a camera captures light from the subject and focuses it on the sensor.

Long Exposure

A long exposure is an image that has been exposed for a long time or uses a long shutter speed. This technique is useful for shooting still objects in low light (used often by landscape photographers), or rendering moving objects into an artistic blur.

Luminance

In color theory, luminance is the amount of brightness or light in a color.

Manual

Manual mode allows the photographer to set the exposure instead of having the camera do it automatically. In manual, you choose the aperture, shutter speed and ISO, and those choices affect how light or dark the image is. Semi-manual modes include aperture priority (where you only choose the aperture), shutter priority (where you only choose the shutter speed), and programmed auto (where you choose a combination of aperture and shutter speed together instead of setting them individually). Manual can also refer to manual focus, or focusing yourself instead of using the autofocus.

Metering

Using manual mode isn’t all guesswork—a light meter built into the camera helps guide those decisions, indicating if the camera thinks the image is over or under exposed. Metering is actually based on a middle gray, so having lighter or darker objects in the image can throw the metering off a little bit. Metering modes indicate how the meter is reading the light. Matrix metering means the camera is reading the light from the entire scene. Center-weighted metering considers only what’s at the center of the frame and spot metering measures the light based on where your focus point is.

Middle Gray

Middle gray is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale.

Monochromatic

Shades, tones, and/or tints of one base color. Provides a subtle and conservative color combination.

Noise

Noise is simply little flecks in an image, also sometimes called grain. Images taken at high ISOs have a lot of noise, so it’s best to use the lowest ISO you can for the amount of light in the scene.

Primary Colors

On a traditional color wheel, the primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue.

Point of View

The position from which something or someone is observed.

RAW or Raw Files

RAW is a file type that gives the photographer more control over photo editing. RAW is considered a digital negative, where the default JPEG file type has already been processed a bit. RAW requires special software to open, however, while JPEG is more universal. Typically, it’s better to shoot in RAW because the image retains more quality making it better for editing.

Rule of Thirds

A rule among photographers that divides the view in the picture being taken into thirds, which allows for different viewpoints in the image.

Secondary Colors

These are color combinations created by the equal mixture of two primary colors. On the color wheel, secondary colors are located between primary colors. According to the traditional color wheel, red and yellow make orange, red and blue make purple, and blue and yellow make green.

Saturation (or Intensity)

In color theory, saturation is the intensity or purity of the color.

Shade

In color theory, a shade is created by adding black to a base hue, darkening the color. This creates a deeper, richer color. Shades can be quite dramatic and can be overpowering.

Shutter Priority

Shutter priority, also called time value (abbreviated as Tv), refers to a setting on cameras that allows the user to choose a specific shutter speed while the camera adjusts the aperture to ensure correct exposure.

Shutter Speed

The shutter speed is the part of the camera that opens and closes to let light in and take a picture. The shutter speed is how long that shutter stays open, written in seconds or fractions of a second, like 1/200 s. or 1”, with the “ symbol often used to designate an entire second. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light that is let in. But, anything that moves while the shutter is open will become a blur, and if the entire camera moves while the shutter is open the whole image will be blurry—that’s why tripods are necessary for longer shutter speeds.

Shutter Release

That’s the button (or shutter button) you press to take the picture. It allows you to point-and-shoot.

Simplicity

Simplicity allows the viewer to really focus on your main subject, without being distracted by other elements–such as unnecessary background elements, or other subjects that detract from the main subject.

Single Lens Reflex

A single-lens reflex camera has a single lens that forms an image which is reflected to the viewfinder. Digital single-lens reflex cameras or DSLR cameras are the most versatile of the digital cameras.

Tertiary Colors

The combination of primary and secondary colors is known as tertiary or intermediate colors, due to their compound nature. Blue-green, blue-violet, red-orange, red-violet, yellow-orange, and yellow-green are color combinations you can make from color mixing.

Time Lapse

A time-lapse is a video created from stitching several photos together taken of the same thing at different times. Don’t confuse a time-lapse with a long exposure, which is a single image with a long shutter speed.

Tint

In color theory, a tint is created by adding white to a base hue, lightening the color. This can make a color less intense, and is useful when balancing more vivid color combinations.

Tone

In color theory, a tone is created by combining black and white—or grey—with a base hue. Like tints, tones are subtler versions of the original color. Tones are less likely to look pastel, and can reveal complexities not apparent in the base color.

Value

Describes the lightness or darkness of a color. Adding black to a color changes the shade. Adding white changes the tint. Adding Grey changes the tone. Overall the color value changes with any of these changes.

Viewfinder

That’s the hole you look through to take the picture. Some digital cameras don’t have one and just use the screen, but all DSLRs and most mirrorless cameras use them.

Warm Colors

Warm colors are the colors from red through to yellow. These colors are said to bring to mind warmth, like the sun.

White Balance

Your eyes automatically adjust to different light sources, but a camera can’t do that—that’s why sometimes you take an image and it looks very blue or very yellow. Using the right white balance setting will make what’s white in real life actually appear white in the photo. There’s an auto white balance setting, but like any automatic setting, it’s not always accurate. You can use a preset based on what light you are shooting in like sun or tungsten light bulbs, or you can take a picture of a white object and manually set the white balance.