Photography Lingo By Ashenhurst Photography

Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation between two photographers and have absolutely no clue what they are taking about? When you meet with a photographer for your own professional photography needs here are “some” of the common photography words you may come across with a very brief explanation for each. That way if these words come up in conversation with your photographer you don’t have to ask “What does that mean?” (although we don’t mind if you ask), here they are:

Aperture

Aperture controls a couple of things: it controls the amount of light coming in to the cameras sensor. It also controls the depth of field. The smaller the number your aperture is set to the shallower your depth of field is, as well as the more light that can come into the camera. The smaller the number the open your lens is.

Depth of Field

Depth of field is the amount of depth in a photo that is in focus.

ISO

ISO is the amount of sensitivity your sensor has. Back in the film days this was called ASA and each roll of film was rated a different level. The higher the ISO/ASA rating is (the bigger the number) the more sensitive the sensor/film is allowing you to shoot in darker settings. But also the more noise or grain in the image.

Noise

Noise in high amounts can make an image look grainy and absolute crap. Noise is caused by two things, 1) high ISO (depends on the camera some handle a higher ISO better than others) and 2) raising the exposure of an underexposed image.

Exposure

Exposure is the amount of light coming in to the camera. Under exposing an image results in loss of data in the shadows where it’s just on big black blob. Overexposing an image causes the same thing to happen but in the highlights where an image has white areas with no detail (this is what makes photographing brides in white wedding dresses so difficult).

Long Exposure

Exposure can also mean the length of time a shutter is held open to allow light into the camera in very dark circumstances. In most cases a tripod is necessary.

Tripod

Photography Lingo By Ashenhurst Photography

Shutter Speed

This one is pretty simple, its the speed of the shutter. It can be anywhere from 1/4000 of a second to several minutes long depending on what the photographer is photographing.

Glass

Glass is geek speak for lenses. When somebody says they just bought a long and fast piece of glass what they are really saying is they bought a zoom lens which an aperture around f2.0.  They call it long because the lenses are physically long and fast because they lower aperture allows more light in allowing for a faster shutter speed.

RAW, jpg, jpeg, png, gif, DNG, tiff

These are all different file formats with various advantages and disadvantages. If enough people ask for it in the comment section we might do a blog post just about file formats.

Hopefully the next time you are speaking to a photographer you will be able to decipher what we are saying. If not just ask we won’t bite.