People who are new to digital photography (‘Newbies’) are often overwhelmed by the vast amount of terms and slang used in the forums and various websites in this recreation/profession/hobby.
Below is a list I’ve compiled, and by no means a full or definitive list, of some of these terms and slang I see commonly used that might be confusing to some.
PLEASE, by all means, if you feel I should add any to the list, feel free to make suggestions so I can consider them.
~A~
ABSTRACT – a photo that usually does not show the whole subject but instead, generally emphasizes lines, patterns, colours and geometrical forms, and their relationship to one another.
AF – Abbreviation for “Autofocus”
AMBIENT LIGHT – Existing light on a subject or illuminating a scene without any additional light supplied by the photographer. Sometimes people say “Available light” and “existing light” to mean the same thing.
APERTURE – The aperture is the hole inside the lens that allows light through. Aperture is measured in “f” numbers – a ratio of the diameter of the hole and the focal length of the lens.
APERTURE PRIORITY – a commonly used mode on most DSLR cameras that allows you to select the aperture you want and the camera then selects the shutter speed it thinks is right for the photo.
ARTIFACTS – visual degradations that occur as a result of post processing such as halo’s caused by over-sharpening or compressing an image which can result in an increase in digital “noise”.
~B~
BACK-LIGHTING – Light aimed at the subject from behind the subject.
BALANCE – Overall feel or harmony of a scene/photo based on the Compositional elements and their position.
BLOWN HIGHLIGHTS (Hot Spots) – areas of a photo that are so bright they are simply white with little or no detail in them when there should be detail visible.
BOKEH – a Japanese term that is commonly used to describe area in a photo that are out of focus and form a background or foreground. Imagine a flower that is sharply in focus and all the greens from the plants further back in the scene are out of focus and blending together. That blending area is called the Bokeh and contrasts and isolates the flower making it stand out.
BURNING – a post processing technique to darken bright areas often to bring out more detail.
~C~
CATCH-LIGHT – The reflection of a light in the subject’s eyes in a portrait.
CHROMATIC ABERRATION (CA) – is the red, cyan or purple coloured fringing seen where very bright areas of your photo meet dark areas. CA is caused by the way light bends at different frequencies as it passes through a lens. Better lenses are usually better at reducing CA.
CLONING – is a technique in photo editing software that copies part of your photo to another part. It is usually used to eliminate unwanted elements or dust spots etc.
CLOSE-UP – often wrongly called ‘macro’ a close up photo is simply a photo of a single subject (or part of that subject) that fills the frame.
COLOR CAST – a photo is said to have a colour cast when the photo has an overall tendency towards a certain shade of colour that shouldn’t really be there. For instance, if the white balance setting wasn’t accurate at the time of taking the photo then a cast may be captured. Shooting under a normal tungsten house globe may produce a strong yellow cast for example.
COMPOSITION – how you chose to capture the elements in your photo. It is about the things you included and where they are placed in your photo or scene combined with the angle you took the photo.
CONTRAST – is how strong the difference between the lightest and darkest areas in your photo area. Low contrast makes a photo look a bit weak or washed out.
CROPPING – a post processing technique of cutting out some of the outside areas of your photo to exclude things or show something a bit closer. You can sometimes use cropping to move a subject to a different position in the scene to change or strengthen your composition.
CURVES (see also Levels) – is a reference to the lightness and darkness of shades and tones in your photo. A tool in most photo editing software allows you to adjust the levels to get more or less contrast or even selectively adjust a range of levels. Using a curves tool in the software you can more accurately adjust your levels than with a levels tool.
~D~
DEPTH OF FIELD – Depth of field is a measure of how much of a scene (from the front to the back of the photo) is in focus.
DIFFUSER – A piece of opaque plastic that sits over the top of a flash designed to soften (diffuse) the light from the flash and avoid harsh shadows or blown out highlights.
DIGITAL DARKROOM – is a slang term for post processing with software. The term is used because many of the so called ‘cheating’ (some ignorance people make this claim) in processing a digital image is simply the digital equivalent to film photography techniques.
DISTRACTIONS – are elements in your photo that draw the viewer’s eye away from your main subject or reason for taking the photo. A very bright area or spot of light behind a flower is an example. Grass stalks in the foreground of a photo you didn’t see is another example.
DODGING – a post processing technique to selectively lighten certain areas within your photo and reveal more detail.
DUST (on your sensor) – literally this mean you have some dust on your cameras sensor. This has resulted in a small fuzzy spot being visible in brighter areas of your photo. A sensor clean (by someone who knows how to do it properly) may be necessary.
~E~
ELEMENTS – 1) things within your photo like a house, a tree, a rock, a person etc. 2) Each glass lens in your Prime or Zoom Lens. There are often many elements in a lens.
EXIF DATA (Exchangeable Image File Format) – is information which is saved with the photo file about the camera and the settings used to capture the photo.
EXPOSURE – refers to whether your settings for your photo had enough, too much, or not enough light get through to the sensor. An under-exposed photo will have dark areas that lack detail we should be able to see detail in. An over-exposed photo will look a bit washed out and lack detail in areas we should be able to see detail in.
EXPOSURE COMPENSATION – is a setting in your DSLR camera that allows you to force the camera to make an adjustment for the scenes brightness when in some of the more automatic modes like Aperture priority.
EXPOSURE SETTING – The aperture and shutter speed combination used to expose the film in a camera.
EXTENDER (Tele Converter) – is a lens that fits between your usual lenses and the camera to extend the focal length of your lens. If the Tele-converter is a 2x then your 18-55mm lens becomes a 36-110mm and so on.
~F~
F-STOP – number values derived from a formula to show how wide an aperture is being used. A low f-stop denotes a wide aperture (lets in more light) and a high f-stop denotes a small aperture (lets in less light).
FAST LENS – A lens that has an aperture that opens very wide (at or under about f2.8), making it able to gather more light than a slower lens at its widest aperture. This allows faster shutter speeds in lower light conditions.
FILL FLASH – flash used to remove or lessen unwanted shadows from a subject. This is best used so that the flash does not dominate the lighting in the photo but simply lessens or removes the shadows.
FILTERS – 1) an accessory for a lens that is used to aid or enhance your photo. For example a Polarizing Filter removes reflection and brightness in a sky or water and aids in allowing the colours to be more vivid than without it’s use. 2) features in a software program that change the appearance of your photo with a few easy steps.
FLASH FALLOFF – dark area in a photo created by the light from a flash only lighting up part of the image.
FLASH UNIT – simply refers to an external flash for your camera.
FOCAL LENGTH - Focal length is the distance between the focal point of a lens and the sensor when the lens is focused at infinity. It is expressed in millimeters (mm). A zoom lens can adjust it’s focal length to various lengths. A Prime (or Fixed Focal Length) lens has only one focal length and cannot be zoomed.
~H~
HDR – stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to the difference in the brightest and the darkest areas in a photo/scene.
HDR MERGE – is a technique used to deal with HDR. Using software for HDR Merging a photographer can blend several photos together that were taken especially for the task, and end up with a single photo that shows more detail in both light and dark areas than would have been possible with a single photo.
HIGH KEY – is a photo that mainly has light tones and which is relatively free of mid-tones or shadows.
HOT SHOE – is the special slot on the top of a camera that can accept camera accessories, a flash for example.
HOT SPOTS (Blown Highlights) - areas of a photo that are so bright they are simply white with little or no detail in them when there should be detail visible.
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ISO – how sensitive the image sensor is to light. By making the sensor more sensitive to light, photos can be shot with higher shutter speeds and/or in lower light.
~J~
JUXTAPOSITION – is when you clearly have two elements in a photo that are contrasting to one another in some way, and also usually placed near enough to one another within your photo that it creates an obvious comparison.
~L~
LAYER MASK – in post processing terms it refers to a feature in photo editing software that adds a layer to your photo to allow you to accomplish more complicated tasks without actually adjusting the photo itself. Only when saving or merging the layers together is the photo affected.
LEADING LINES – are elements in your photo that create some sort of line that entices the viewers eye to follow them into the photo and rest on another element. A path or stream might serve as a leading line to a building or sunset.
LEVELS (see also Curves) – is a reference to the lightness and darkness of shades and tones in your photo. A tool in most photo editing software allows you to adjust the levels to get more or less contrast or even selectively adjust a range of levels.
LIGHT PAINTING - is when the photographer lights a dark scene using a handheld flashlight or other small light source while the shutter remains open during a time exposure. The light is usually added using brushing type strokes of the light across elements they want to highlight.
LONG or TIME EXPOSURE – is a photo taken using several seconds or longer of shutter speed.
LOW KEY – Describes a mostly dark photo, with few highlights.
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MACRO – means the ability for a camera (or lens) to focus so near to the subject that it is captured life size on the image sensor. Close Up photos are often wrongly described as ‘macro.’
~N~
NEUTRAL DENSITY FILTER (and Graduated ND Filter) – is a filter for a lens that darkens the scene to allow for slower shutter speeds. A graduated ND filter is not a solid shade but gradually fades to normal optic glass allowing the photographer to darken brighter areas of the scene and therefore capturing detail in both dark and light areas.
NOISE – In digital photography terminology, noise is the digital equivalent of film grain. It shows up on digital photographs as small coloured blotches or spots, usually in the darker areas of an image.
Higher ISO settings usually produce more noise.
~P~
PHOTOG – slang for photographer.
PHOTO SLAVE (Slave Unit) – is a light-sensitive device that is built in or attached to an electronic flash unit (usually placed away from the camera to add a different angle of light on a subject), and triggers the extra flash when the flash on the camera fires.
PIXEL – A small dot in a digital photo image. Thousands of pixels make up a digital photograph.
POLARIZING FILTER – is a filter for a lens that works like polarized sunglasses in that it blocks out reflections and darkening blue skies. Most are adjustable by turning a ring on the filter.
POST PROCESSING – means adjusting your digital photos using image editing software – Photoshop, for example. In the days of film photography much of the same processing work was done in the darkroom. Not simply developing the photos, but also correcting colour casts, burning and dodging, adjusting the contrast etc.
PRIME LENS – The opposite of a zoom lens, prime lenses have one fixed focal length so cannot be zoomed in or out.
~R~
RAW – refers to the RAW image quality settings in a DSLR camera. RAW files are an alternative to the usual jpeg (jpg) files. RAW files are larger because they contain more information in them which allows the photographer more leeway and possibilities when post processing the photo. RAW files are the actual data taken directly from a digital camera’s image sensor. They have not been processed by the camera at all like the jpeg files often are depending on the settings you use in your camera’s menu. This means RAW files are the purest image file possible in digital photography and are the equivalent of a digital negative in film photography.
~S~
SATURATION – is how much colour strength (how strong and vivid the colour is) you have in your photo. To de-saturate means to lessen the colours strength.
SHUTTER PRIORITY – is a mode in most DSLR cameras that allows you to choose the shutter speed and allow the camera to choose the aperture setting it thinks is best.
STOPPING DOWN & UP – is reducing the aperture size by adjusting the f-stop to a higher number. For example if someone wants you to stop down ‘1 stop’ from f5.6 then they want you to use f8.0. Obviously to stop up you go the other way.
STROBE – is usually used to describe an electronic flash unit, including studio specific units. In more correct terms a strobe is a an intermittently-flashing, extremely-short duration, bright light source. Some better flash units have this function built in and this feature is called ‘stroboscopic’ or ‘multi-strobe.’
~T~
TELE-CONVERTER (Extender) – is a lens that fits between your usual lenses and the camera to extend the focal length of your lens. If the Tele-converter is a 2x then your 18-55mm lens becomes a 36-110mm and so on.
TEXTURE – refers to small, visual elements within another element in your photo. The rough surface of pavers have texture and in or using the right light you can make that texture stand out.
TONAL RANGE – is the various shades of gray in your B&W photo between solid black and absolute white.
TREATMENT – is often used to describe that the photographer has used software filters and features to enhance a photo.
~V~
VIGNETTING – is the appearance of dark, graduated areas protruding from the corners of your photo into towards the center. This can be intentional or accidental for various reasons.
VISUAL WEIGHT – is a reference to how much a certain element in your photo demands attention from the viewer’s eye. If your main subject has a strong visual weight then that’s usually good. If a small bright spot, for instance, is drawing your eye away from your main subject then that spot has too much visual weight and is a distraction.
~W~
WHITE BALANCE – is the term used to describe whether the colour temperature of your photo is correct. If the colour is off then a colour cast is created and it affects how the colours look. Pure whites, for instance don’t look pure white. If the cast is bluish then the whites will also look slightly bluish. White Balance settings in your camera can help prevent this and the balance can be corrected later in post processing if needed as well.
