5 Digital Photography Terms To Improve Your Understanding of Photography

Digital photography terms can be confusing at first. If you have no background in photography you may not understand some of the jargon used on photographic websites or by other photographers. Understanding the language used when talking about digital photography will help put you on the fast track to understanding your camera and how to use it. Then you'll be on the road to becoming a better photographer.

Megapixels

Are the tiny dots that make up a digital image. A digital picture is made up of many dots called pixels. There are one million pixels in a megapixel. When you look for a digital camera you often see the number megapixels in an image produced by that camera prominently displayed with the camera information. It is commonly thought that a higher number of megapixels denotes a better picture quality. That's not always the case.

Noise

Is a term used to described the amount of distortion in an image. This distortion is caused by a build-up of electrical charge on the sensor or by a fast shutter speed.

Aperture

Refers to the size of the opening of the lens. Like your pupil expands and contracts, the opening in your lens can open or close to allow more or less light into the camera. The aperture number is denoted by an f-stop number. For example, you may see numbers like f/16 or f/3.5. The higher the aperture number is the smaller the opening in the lens. The lower the number is the larger the opening in the lens.

ISO

Numbers are used to determine how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light. In the days of film photography this number was used to describe the speed of film you used. As with film photography, the higher the ISO you use the more noise or grain will appear in the photograph. The most common ISO numbers are 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and 3200. The higher the ISO the more sensitive the senor is to light. It's best to use the lowest ISO you can for image clarity unless you are trying to take a picture with lots of noise.

JPEG

Is a lossy compression mechanism used by your camera to store images in a small file. Lossy compression means that some image quality is lost in the compression process. Though there are better types of files that can be used for image storage this is the most commonly used.

                                                                                                                                by Lovelyn Bettison