Digital Photography Terms

Digital 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 compliled 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.

Digital Zoom — Cropping and magnifying the center part of an image.

JPEG — The predominant format used for image compression in digital cameras, used to make your images easier to store, open, and write to your camera straoge 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.

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.

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.

Summing Up the most common Digital Photography Terms

Of all the digital photography terms, these are the ones that are most common and most most mis-interpreted. Once you know these digital photography terms, you'll be speaking the language of photographers and when you have a question, using these photography 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 exacly 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