Club meetings are informal. When you attend club meetings and workshops you may hear a number of photography terms and abbreviations. If something is being discussed that you are not sure of, please do not hesitate to ask for clarification or an explanation.
Some of the more common photography terms are below.
Angle of view The Maximum view you will see through a lens expressed by degrees. The longer the focal length of a lens the narrower the Angle of View.
Aperture The lens device that affects the exposure and depth of field. This is by altering a set of blades in the lens thus changing the gap size that the light travels through to the camera sensor. The gap size is indicated by an F number.
Bracketing Taking the same scene at different exposure values. Used to gain a correct exposure, or to combine different parts in Editing to allow full use of extremes of light intensity.
Cropping Using editing software to reduce the dimensions of the image. It is often to remove distracting elements, highlight the subject, or enhance the composition.
Depth of Field Also known as Depth of Focus and DoF. It is the distance between the nearest and furthest points in an image that are acceptably sharp.
DSLR Digital Single Lens Reflex. This is a digital camera where the view finder looks directly through the lens by use of a prism and mirror. Most of this class of camera have mounts to allow the use of different lens types.
Editing Using software to enhance an image. Also called Post Production or In Post.
Exposure This is the combination of the amount of light and the duration it falls onto a sensitive area. The amount of light is controlled by the Aperture, the duration by the Shutter, and the camera Sensor with its ISO value, is the Sensitive area. See Exposure Triangle.
Exposure Triangle The relationship of Aperture, Exposure and ISO.
Fast lenses A lens with a large aperture. This allows more light to enter so enabling photography in darker situations. It can also be used to give a shallow depth of field.
Filters Different types of material placed in the light path to modify its characteristics or behaviour.
Focal Length This is the distance between the optical centre of a lens and the camera sensor when focussed at infinity. Shown on the lens in millimetres.
F number A set of numbers that indicate the aperture setting for a lens.
Graduation The range of tones from white to black in an image and how they relate to one another.
ISO A measure of how sensitive your camera is to light. High ISO values can introduce noticeable digital noise to images.
JPEG Joint Photographic Engineers Group. This is a common digital picture file format allowing easy viewing and printing across many different social media and communication platforms. In a JPEG the digital data of the image is processed and compressed.
Landscape Format A picture that is wider than it is tall.
Lenses (Types) Fisheye, Wide Angle, Standard, Medium Telephoto, Long Telephoto, macro (extreme close up).
Letter Box Format A picture that is much wider than it is tall. A common ratio is 16:9.
Light A set of (electromagnetic) wavelengths of varying intensity and colour. Some are visible to the human eye and some are not. They combine to give white light. Prisms and rainbows show the colour combination.
Mirrorless Camera A development of the DSLR. Often lighter and more compact.
Noise The phenomenon of artefacts introduced into an image by digital interference. This is normally associated with High ISO values.
Pixel Picture element The part on the camera sensor that records the light information. Sensors are made up of many millions of pixels. On a digital screen, pixels receive light information to make up the image for viewing.
Portrait Format A picture that is taller than it is wide.
Post Production Using software to enhance an image. Also known as Editing.
RAW This is a lossless file format for images. All the data captured by the sensor is kept for Editing / Post Production.
Sensor The part of the camera upon which the light entering the camera is captured and converted to digital data.
Shutter The camera device that controls the duration of the exposure.
Stacking Stacking is simply a technique used in photography where you take multiple photographs and merge them. One of the main reasons to do this is to increase how much of the image is in focus.
Stop The relationship between light values expressed as a number with regard to exposure. A Stop, or Stop of Light, is always a ratio. Thus a Stop of Light difference means that there is double the amount of light between the two examples. It does not indicate the intensity of the light examples.
Tonal Range The comparison between intermediate tones of an image going from the lightest to the darkest.
White Balance Different types of light (sunlight, tungsten, florescent tubes) are not the same colour temperature. Your camera can adjust for this automatically, or it can be adjusted via the camera menu for the effect you desire. It can also be adjusted during Editing.