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You are here: Home / Digital Camera Basics / Digital Photography Terms

Digital Photography Terms

Digital Photography & Camera Terms To Know

When learning to use your new new digital camera it’s also great to know some of the more common digital photography terms and what they mean. I’ve compiled a list of the most common photography terms below:

Automatic Mode — A setting that sets the focus, exposure and white-balance automatically.

Burst Mode or Continuous Capture Mode — a series of pictures taken one after another at quickly timed intervals with one press of the shutter button.

Compression — The process of compacting digital data, images and text by deleting selected information. Compression is important if you want to use your images online or social media, or sending by email. Compression is just like it sounds – it squishes your images but without you being able to see any real difference (most of the time). It can shrink the “weight” or size in MB of your image to make it easier to send on the Internet.

Digital Zoom — Cropping and magnifying the center part of an image. Cropping is the important word – your digital camera automatically crops your image in the camera so the photo looks like it was shot with a telephoto lens. Don’t use digital zoom if at all possible, you just end up with a smaller image with less resolution.

JPEG — The most popular format used for image compression in digital cameras, used to make your images easier to store, open, and write to your camera storage card.

Lag Time or shutter lag — The pause between the time the shutter button is pressed and when the camera actually captures the image.

LCD — (Liquid-Crystal Display) is a small screen on a digital camera for viewing images on the back of the camera.

Lens — A circular and transparent glass or plastic piece that has the function of collecting light and focusing it on the sensor to capture the image.

Megabyte — (MB) Measures 1024 Kilobytes, and refers to the amount of information in a file, or how much information can be contained on a Memory Card, Hard Drive or Disk.

Pixels — Tiny units of color that make up digital pictures. Pixels also measure digital resolution. One million pixels adds up to one mega-pixel.

RGB — Refers to Red, Green, Blue colors used on computers to create all other colors.

Resolution — Camera resolution describes the number of pixels used to create the image, which determines the amount of detail a camera can capture. The more pixels a camera has, the more detail it can register and the larger the picture can be printed.

Storage Card — The removable storage device which holds images taken with the camera, comparable to film, but much smaller. Also called a digital camera memory card…

Viewfinder — The optical “window” to look through to compose the scene. This is where your eye goes when you don’t use live view or the LCD scren to compose your image.

White Balance — White balancing adjusts the camera to compensate for the type of light (daylight, fluorescent, incandescent, etc.,) or lighting conditions in the scene so it will look normal to the human eye.

digital camera terms explained


Summing Up the Most Common Digital Photography Terms

Of all the digital camera terms, these are the ones that are most common and most most mis-interpreted. Once you know these, you’ll be speaking the language of photographers and when you have a question, using these digital camera terms will mean that your question is much more likely to be answered as it is specific and the person trying to help you will understand exactly what you mean.

Asking about that “knob thingey” on the top of the camera, or the “picture thing on the back”, is not a good way to get help!

So, there you have it! The most common digital photography terms that cause the most problem when you’re learning digital photography.

Visit this page for more info about learning digital photography and to see these digital photography terms in action

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