If you’re in the pursuit of being a professional photographer, it helps to know the correct terms for different things.
As a part of our broader initiative to make the world’s best dictionary for photo and video professionals, we wanted to write an article about the basic photography terms to start with.
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Most Common Photography Terms
These are the most common photography terms that you should know:
Exposure & Settings
Aperture: The opening in a lens through which light enters the camera; controls depth of field and exposure.
Blur: The unfocused or soft areas in an image, often caused by movement or shallow depth of field.
Composition: The structure and arrangement/framing of elements in a photo to create a balanced and visually appealing image.
Crop: The act of trimming or cropping the edges of an image to improve composition or focus on a specific area.
Depth of Field: The range of distance in a photo that appears sharp and in focus.
Focal Length: The distance between the lens and the image sensor, determining how zoomed in or wide an image is.
F Stop: A setting that controls aperture size; lower numbers mean a wider aperture and more light let in the lens.
ISO: A camera setting that controls how sensitive the sensor is to light; higher ISO values can brighten images but may add noise.
Shutter Speed: The amount of time the camera’s shutter remains open to let in light; faster speeds freeze motion, while slower speeds blur it.
Focusing: Adjusting the lens to make the subject appear sharp in the image. You can use manual or automatic focus.
AF / Auto Focus: A camera system that automatically adjusts focus to ensure the subject is sharp. Different cameras have different auto focusing settings and functions.
Camera Types
Crop Sensor: A camera sensor smaller than full-frame, resulting in a narrower field of view.
Full Frame: A camera sensor the same size as a 35mm film frame, offering a wider field of view.
DSLR: Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera; uses a mirror mechanism to reflect the image into the viewfinder.
Mirrorless: A camera without a mirror mechanism; uses an electronic viewfinder or screen to display the image. More and more modern cameras are mirrorless these days.
Point-and-Shoot: A compact, easy-to-use camera with a fixed lens, designed for casual photography.
Lenses
Prime Lens: A lens with a fixed focal length, offering sharper images but no zoom capability.
Telephoto Lens: A lens designed for shooting distant subjects, with a long focal length for magnification.
Wide Angle Lens: A lens with a short focal length, capturing a wide field of view.
Zoom Lens: A lens with variable focal lengths, allowing the photographer to zoom in and out without changing lenses.
Filetypes
Raw: An uncompressed image file format that retains all data captured by the camera sensor, allowing for more detailed editing.
JPEG: A compressed image file format that reduces file size while losing some image quality.
TIFF: A high-quality image file format that is lossless and often used in professional photography for editing and printing.
Other Photography, Video, and Filmmaking Terms
What other terms are we missing? Help us in making the best dictionary for photo and video terms in the world! Leave a comment below to let us know what we should add.