Photography Glossary

Is a system consisting of two lenses to reduce chromatic aberrations.

With Active D-Lighting, Nikon uses a trick to expand the dynamic range of JPG files. The image is underexposed and the depths are lightened. Please note that this can cause image errors and halos.

Camera for analogue photography that records images on photographic film, such as slide film.

The angle of view indicates the angle that can still be recorded with a lens. Wide-angle lenses record a larger angle of the subject than longer focal lengths.

The aperture or lens diaphragm is a mechanical device consisting of blades that regulates the amount of incident light and influences the depth of field. A small f-number means a large opening of the aperture and thus a lot of light hitting the sensor. This results in a shallower depth of field in the image.

On SLR cameras, the f-stop button activates the f-stop function. Since the aperture is fully open, regardless of the setting. As a result, the viewfinder image is brighter than at the set aperture. Only when the shutter is released does the aperture close to the previously set value.

Aperture priority is a semi-automatic exposure programme in which the photographer preselects the aperture and the camera then immediately determines the appropriate exposure time using the light meter and the set ISO value.

Architectural photography deals with the photography of buildings and other architecturally valuable objects.

Autofocus (abbreviation: AF) refers to the automatic focusing of the camera. It measures the distance to the subject and controls the lens motor so that the desired object is in focus.

Available light photography means taking pictures using only the light that is already present in a scene, such as daylight, street lamps or candlelight, without a flash or additional lighting. It often requires a large aperture, a higher ISO value or a longer exposure time.

Accessory that allows the use of 2 batteries, improves the feel and often has an additional shutter release for pictures in portrait format.

Designation for the (manufacturer-specific) connection point between camera and lens.

Blue hour is the light atmosphere that prevails immediately after the sun has set and envelops the surroundings in a special light. The remaining light of the sun is reflected by the atmosphere and therefore appears blue.

Used in photography to denote areas of blur before and after the depth of field produced by the lens. The blur is produced by blur circles. Their quality is related to the processing and construction of the aperture.

The bouncer is an attachment for an external flash to produce a softer light.

Bracketing is the automatic exposure bracketing that the camera can take to provide multiple images with different exposure results.

Noise is generally understood to mean disturbances in the image, which usually occur when images are taken with low lighting. As a result, evenly coloured areas appear differently bright, which is often only more noticeable when the image is converted to a greyscale image.

This is also called the raw format converter. With the Camera RAW Converter, image processing software can open the RAW format (raw format or digital negative) and then process it.

Chromatic aberration is also known as colour fringing. These are colour errors which are caused by the lenses.

Background: The light is composed of different wavelengths.

The resulting typical colour fringes are caused by the different refractive power of the lenses.

Colour fringes usually manifest themselves as purple or green colour fringes in dark or light areas of the photos.

Colour balance refers to the distribution of colours in the image, which are only in balance when no colour cast is visible.

Colour balance is therefore only given when all colours are almost equally saturated.

A colour cast is an unwanted tint that affects the entire image, for example a blue, green, magenta or orange shift. It can be caused by the light source, an incorrect white balance or filters that are not colour-neutral. Strong ND filters of lower quality in particular often add a noticeable colour cast.

A slight colour cast can be corrected with white balance or in post-processing, but it is easier to avoid it from the start by using colour-neutral filters.

The colour depth describes with how many bits the colour information of a pixel has been stored. If an image is stored with 8 bits, 256 colour levels can be represented. With 24 bits, there are 16.7 million colours. This very realistic colour representation is also called True Colour. In particular, colour gradients appear more gradual if an image has a lower colour depth.

Contrast is the difference between the lightest and darkest areas of an image. This is used to calculate the contrast range. An image looks more vivid the higher the contrast ratio is.

However, if the contrast ratio is low, the colours often appear dull and the image dull.

The crop factor describes the ratio of the image sensor used to the 35mm format.

Think of it this way: The image projected through the lens onto the sensor surface is always the same size.

For example, if you have an FX sensor (35mm format or full frame), you take a large section of it.

The smaller DX sensor takes a smaller section from the same image circle.

As a result, the resulting DX images look as if they were zoomed in.

This is the so-called crop factor. For Nikon this is 1.5x, for Canon 1.6x.

This means that a lens with a focal length of 50mm corresponds to a focal length of about 75mm on the DX sensor.

The area in which a subject is sharply imaged is called the depth of field. Images can be made more vivid with depth of field, for example by keeping the background out of focus with a large aperture. This makes the depth of field range very shallow.

Diffraction blur is the loss of sharpness caused, for example, in photographs by the diffraction of light at strongly closed apertures. This can sometimes occur as early as f22.

Lenses of all cameras are more or less prone to distortion. Straight lines are shown slightly bent at the edge of the image. Squares become cushions, and other effects can occur. Image processing programs can correct these distortions.

Equipment or photographic equipment is the photographic accessories that a photographer needs to take pictures. It includes, but is not limited to, cameras, lenses, tripods, flashes, filters, and sometimes other assistive devices.

Translated, this abbreviation means "Exchangeable Image File Format". The Exif data is used to add further information to the digital images in order to make them available to other users.

Examples include aperture, exposure time, shooting date, camera type or focal length.

With an exposure series, instead of taking a single shot, you take several shots of the same subject by deliberately increasing or decreasing the exposure values. The best exposed image can then be selected on the computer or merged into an HDR.

Corrects the exposure meter in automatic modes (A/Av/P/Tv/S) to produce brighter or darker images. Mostly available via the +/- button.

Usually measures the exposure through the lens. The light meter calculates the light reflected from the subject and is tuned to an average grey value. In SLR cameras, it is usually coupled to the autofocus. The relationship to the rest of the subject then determines the exposure meter mode.

The exposure time or shutter speed determines how long the image sensor or negative is exposed to light. The longer, the brighter the image.

An eyecup is a padded or rubberised, usually shell-shaped attachment that can be placed on the viewfinder, and in rare cases on the display of professional digital cameras.

F-stop refers to the reduction or closing of the aperture in order to expand the range of depth of field of an image.

Fill-in flash is the process of brightening shadow areas with a flash.

The filter thread is the thread at the front of a lens onto which screw-in filters, adapter rings or lens hoods are attached. Its size is given as the filter diameter in millimetres.

You can usually find the filter diameter printed on the front of the lens or on the lens barrel, marked with the ⌀ symbol (for example ⌀77). It is often also printed on the inside of the lens cap. A filter must have the same diameter as the filter thread, or be attached with a step-up or step-down ring.

Flash adapters are used to attach third-party flash units to cameras with different flash sockets.

The use of a flash cable provides a connection from the camera to an external flash.

The flash number indicates the power of a flash in combination with a 50mm lens. This provides an approximate estimate of how far the flash output will reach. Depending on the focal length used, the results will vary.

The flash shoe, also called the hot shoe, is the mounting device on top of a camera for attaching an external flash or other accessories.

Focal length is the distance that parallel rays of a subject are focused to a point behind the lens. It is the distance between the centre of the lens and the image sensor. Focal length is measured and specified in millimetres (mm). Lenses are sorted or categorised based on focal length. For example, there are wide-angle, normal and telephoto lenses. The larger the focal length for the same size sensor, the more the subject is magnified and the angle of view is reduced at the same time. This is the reason why telephoto lenses need a longer focal length.

The image chip is built into digital cameras and is also called CCD or CMOS, depending on its construction. It is responsible for creating a digital image from the light entering the camera.

Image storage comes in the form of all kinds of data carriers, such as memory cards, hard disks, CDs or DVDs.

Image noise occurs primarily in very dark areas of an image or under very poor lighting conditions.

The image sensor is the recording medium in digital cameras. It is equipped with millions of tiny photocells that are sensitive to light. Image sensors come in a wide variety of sizes.

With the technical procedure of the optical image stabiliser, it is nowadays possible to minimise to a certain extent the risk of camera shake when exposure times are too long.

Interpolation adds image content. This allows transitions to be created between neighbouring pixels and the optical resolution is artificially increased.

However, the supposedly higher resolution means that image sharpness suffers.

The JPEG file format is often used as a recording format in digital cameras. However, it is a lossy compression format, so while the size of the file is reduced, detail and colour fidelity suffer somewhat. When images in JPEG format are opened and resaved multiple times, there is further loss of quality as the colour fringing caused by the compression increases.

It is recommended to always save in RAW format when shooting.

If image patterns of different resolution are superimposed, colour interference often occurs, also called Moiré effect.

Small patterns then become long stripes.

Motion blur is caused by movements with longer exposure times. The intensity depends on the speed of the object and the exposure time.

An ND filter is a camera accessory that reduces the amount of light entering the lens, allowing for creative control over exposure settings.

With an optical zoom, lens elements inside the lens move to change the focal length. This enlarges the subject without any loss of image quality.

A digital zoom, on the other hand, merely enlarges a section of the image. It works in the same way as the magnifying glass in an image editing program and can significantly reduce image quality.

A print is the image of a slide film, negative film or image file in paper form, which are usually made in photo laboratories.

If you use the RAW format to capture images in the camera, the recording data of the sensor is saved unprocessed and without losses.

Due to the larger amount of data and colour depth, these recordings allow later image post-processing on a large scale.

The range of distance within which an image can be sharply focused is referred to as the capture range.

With release priority, the camera takes the picture even if it was not possible to focus on the subject. The opposite is focus priority, where the shutter is only released once the subject is in focus.

The reproduction ratio, or magnification, indicates the size at which an object is imaged on the sensor compared to its real size. At a ratio of 1:1, as with true macro lenses, the object appears on the sensor at life size.

Resolution is not only crucial when printing images. It describes the level of detail of the camera and, depending on the medium in which the resolution is used, uses, for example, the mass of pixels, pixels per inch (dpi) or line pairs per millimetre (lpmm). For digital cameras, the value of pixels is often given as the resolution. Printed products are measured in dpi.

Shutter priority is a semi-automatic exposure programme in which the photographer preselects the exposure time and the camera then determines the appropriate aperture using the light meter and the set ISO value. It is useful for freezing fast movement or deliberately creating motion blur.

This refers to the amount of time that elapses between pressing the shutter button and taking the picture.

Step rings are adapter rings that let you use filters with a different diameter than the filter thread of your lens.

A step-up ring attaches a larger filter to a lens with a smaller filter thread, for example a 77mm filter on a 67mm lens. A step-down ring does the opposite and attaches a smaller filter to a larger lens, which can cause vignetting.

A practical tip: buy your filters in the size of your largest lens and use step-up rings for all smaller lenses. This way, one set of filters fits your entire kit.

A stop is the unit used to measure changes in exposure. One stop more means twice as much light, one stop less means half as much light. Stops apply equally to aperture, exposure time and ISO.

The strength of ND filters is also given in stops. An ND8 filter reduces the light by 3 stops, an ND64 by 6 stops and an ND1000 by about 10 stops. With an ND1000, an exposure time of 1/30 s therefore becomes about 30 seconds.

Vignetting is the darkening of the corners of an image. Optical vignetting is caused by the design of the lens and usually appears as a soft darkening, which can easily be corrected in post-processing.

Mechanical vignetting occurs when something physically blocks the light at the edge of the image, such as a lens hood, a thick filter frame, several stacked filters or a step-down ring. This creates hard dark corners, especially with wide-angle lenses, that can only be removed by cropping. Slim filter frames and filter holder systems help to avoid it.

White balance is used to match the colour of the image taken by the camera to the colour temperature of the ambient light. The aim is to reproduce colours more realistically.

Without white balance, which is often done automatically in digital cameras, the image can look fake.

The zoom ratio describes the ratio between the longest and the shortest focal length of a zoom lens. For example, a 24–120mm lens has a zoom ratio of 5x.