Digital Photography Technology

Photo Terms is everything that has to do with cameras, photography, and everything related. Photography is the art, hobby, or profession of taking photographs and all the many Photo Terms that are associated with this new technology. A camera is a devise for taking photographs that by letting light from an image fall briefly onto sensitized film or sensor, usually by means of a shutter and lens mechanism. A camera is also a devise that converts images into electrical signals for video recording or digital storage.

Now that digital has taken over the photography industry, there is a whole new vocabulary of photo terms used to define photography.

Digital Camera Megapixels is one of the new words describing the size of the sensor in the camera. The size of the sensor, which is rated in mega pixels, is partially what determines the resolution of the image, which in return determines the size of the print that can be made. Software also plays an important part in the resolution of the image.

ISO film speed is another term which has been around for some time. In the film days, every roll of film had an ISO value which defined the speed of the film. In digital cameras, the ISO is adjustable. It keeps from having to stock film with different ISO speeds.

White balance is very important as it keeps white in an image white, and all other colors looking natural when taking pictures outdoors except when taking pictures in shade or early in the morning and late afternoon. It is easier to correct it in the camera if possible, although it can be corrected later with the appropriate software in the computer.

JPG is a format found it all cameras. The name stands for JPEG or Joint Photographics Experts Group. This format compresses the image in a way that can not be seen. It does loose information, and the higher the compression, the higher the loss becomes. It supports 16 million colors, gray scale continuous tone, and complex graphics. It is one of the image formats supported on the WEB. When a higher compression is used, more pictures can be taken on a given memory card, but it loses to ability to print large prints.

The GIF format is short for Graphic Interchange Format, which is also supported by the WEB. This is a lossless format, supporting 256 colors, and is ideal for black and white drawings, images, and very small letters. Transparency is supported by GIF, where a background color is transparent and lows the WEB to show through. GIF supports animation.

PNG which is another format and stands for Portable Network Graphics, is also supported on the WEB, but not by some browsers. This format is also lossless, but has 5% to 25% more compression that GIF. It also supports transparency, but controls the degree of transparency, also known as opacity Animation is not supported.

Camera RAW is the basic format of the digital camera. This is the image that comes from the sensor, and is either converted to one of several JPG formats, or with a minimum of processing to the RAW format.

All low end cameras convert to the JPG format, as it’s the most common format and used exclusively for personal e-mail and by all consumer photo printing companies.

The RAW image format contains practically all the information that is collected by the sensor, and it can never be changed. Once the RAW image is downloaded to the computer, it goes to a RAW converter and processed. There are a variety of adjustments can be made before being converted to any of the numerous RGB formats that have been discussed on this page.

Photography Metadata is information embedded on the file of every photo taken which shows a variety of data as to how the picture was taken. It can not be deleted and stays with the file forever.