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RAW files are like unprocessed film. The raw processing software you use to edit them is like the film developer.

Nikon lens names contain a bewildering array of acronyms and numbers. This is what they mean and how to make sense of them.

This is the brightness range the camera can capture before starting to lose detail in bright areas (like the sky) and dense, dark shadows. Generally, the larger the camera’s sensor, the better its dynamic range. RAW files capture a slightly wider dynamic range than JPEGs.

Cameras usually offer a range of picture ‘styles’ such as ‘Standard’, for neutral results, ‘Vivid’ for richer colors, ‘Portrait’ for gentler tones and more. These are applied to JPEG images saved by the camera. If you shoot RAW files you can choose the picture style later on.

Most cameras use dedicated rechargeable lithium-ion cells, but some accessories like external flashguns, battery grips and hotshoe mounted LED panels use regular AA cells instead.

Cameras with interchangeable lenses do not have sealed interiors and the sensors can pick up spots of dust. These can be removed in software using spot removal tools – you dab on the dust spot and the software uses nearby pixels to cover it up. It’s like cloning but easier, because you can leave the software to ‘heal’ the spot automatically.

Video jargon can quickly get complicated, and can seem even worse to stills photographers who’ve learned a whole lexicon of photography concepts and terms and now have to do the same with the very different world of video. But the video basics are comparatively simple and easily learned, and the rest can follow from that. […]

The key specs here are the size, measured across the diagonal, and the resolution, measured in thousands of dots. For example, you might get a 3-inch LCD with 921k (921,000) dots.

This is the part on the top of the tripod that allows you to move the camera and then lock it in position. You can get ball heads, which allow free movement in all directions but not much precision, or three-way heads which are slower to use but enable you to move the camera in one axis at a time.

These are optical flaws produced by camera lenses and which are largely unavoidable except in the most expensive lens designs. They include distortion, chromatic aberration (color fringing), vignetting (corner shading) and edge softness.

The mechanism that controls the length of the exposure. On some smaller cameras this may be in the lens (a ‘leaf’ or ‘in-lens’ shutter), but on DSLRs and mirrorless cameras with interchangeable lenses, it’s a ‘focal plane’ shutter directly in front of the sensor.

This is the adjustable hole in the lens diaphragm that controls how much light passes through the lens and is used to adjust the exposure. Aperture setting values are the same across all cameras and lenses, and here’s a part of the series: f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11 – though the theoretical aperture range is much wider than any single lens can manage. The maximum aperture – how wide the lens opening can go – is a big selling point because wider apertures let more light through. The lens aperture also has an effect of depth of field, or the near-to-far sharpness in the picture, and the number of aperture blades is a selling point because it affects the way the lens’s ‘bokeh’.

The near-to-far sharpness in a picture. If both foreground and distant objects are sharp, there’s lots of depth of field. If only the subject is sharp and the foreground and background are blurred, it’s shallow.

A relatively recent design that takes interchangeable lenses, just like a DSLR, but doesn’t use an internal mirror for its viewing system –if you take off the lens you see the sensor itself. Mirrorless cameras allow a shorter lens-to-sensor distance and full time live view.

This setting increases the camera sensor’s sensitivity to light. Each ISO step doubles the sensitivity, so it’s easy to use ISO as another exposure control alongside shutter speed and lens aperture. The more you increase the ISO, though, the more the image quality degrades.

Random ‘speckling’ in an image caused by variations in the light levels captured by the photosites on the sensor. Noise is worse with the smaller photosites on small sensors and at higher ISO settings generally. You can get ‘chroma’ (colored) noise and ‘luminance’ noise (general ‘grittiness’) the same color as the background.

Almost all cameras use removable memory cards to store photos and video. A few smaller devices use fixed in-built memory instead, but these are relatively rare. Memory card types Memory cards come in many different types, though many have slowly been phased out and others are very specialised. The most common type is the SD/SDHC/SDXC […]

Three-legged camera support that doesn’t really need much more explanation, except to say that they vary considerably in cost, size and rigidity, and that some come with tripod heads while others require you to buy them separately.

Sometimes the ambient light level is too low for successful for photography, or it’s the ‘wrong’ kind of light. This is where photographers turn to flash (or ‘strobe’, if you’re in the US). Flash works by emitting a very short, very powerful burst of light. Energy is stored in a capacitor in the flash head […]

These are designed specifically for holding camera gear, with a padded interior separated into compartments with padded dividers which you can usually rearrange to suit your kit.

Lenses are always identified by their focal length. It’s not just a physical measurement, it’s an indication of the type of lens it is, for example, a wideangle lens, standard lens, telephoto and so on. In other words, the focal length of the lens gives you an indication of its angle of view. Or at […]

The lens is a fundamental part of any camera. It’s what creates the image on the camera sensor (or film). Some cameras have a fixed, non-removable lens while others offer interchangeable lenses. Your choice of lens has a major impact on the appearance of your pictures, including the lens’s focal length (angle of view) and its aperture setting (which you may or may not be able to adjust).

Not all digital cameras have viewfinders. Digital cameras and smartphones have LCD screens for composing photos, and it’s only on higher end cameras that you get a viewfinder too. But they are worth having. Sometimes it’s difficult to see an LCD display properly in the bright glare of daylight, and sometimes it just feels more […]

Practically all cameras have automatic focusing systems where they can check the focus at different points around the frame and then adjust the lens’s focus so that that point in the scene is precisely in focus. You can let the camera choose the autofocus (AF) point automatically or select it yourself (manual AF point selection). The autofocus system will either operate once only before you take the shot (single-shot AF mode) or constantly if you’re using the camera’s continuous shooting (burst) mode (continuous AF mode).

Digital cameras come in a multitude of different types and sizes, and some of the jargon can be quite unhelpful. For example, ‘compact’ cameras aren’t necessarily compact and the real difference is that they have non-removable lenses. DSLRs and CSCs are both examples of interchangeable lens cameras, or ILCs, and these are differentiated by their design, sensor size and intended market. Most novices start off with a compact camera, move up to a DSLR or CSC when they become enthusiasts and then upgrade to a full-frame or medium format camera if they turn professional.

Camera shake is blur caused by camera movement during the exposure. It happens with indoor shots or outdoor shots in poor lighting or at night, when the low light levels mean the camera uses a longer exposure and hence a slower shutter speed. The slower the shutter speed, the more likely it is the camera will move, even slightly, while the picture is being taken.

In this mode the camera keeps taking pictures for as long as you hold down the shutter release button. The speed it can take them is the continuous shooting speed, which is quoted in frames per second (fps), and the number the camera can take is determined by the size of the image files, the quality setting (JPEG or RAW) and by the camera’s internal memory buffer capacity.

Exposure is the science (and the art) of making sure the sensor gets exactly the right quantity of light to produce a good image. Exposure is adjusted using shutter speed (the length of the exposure), lens aperture (how much light is passed through) and ISO (the sensitivity setting of the camera). Camera’s have light meters to estimate the correct exposure setting but it’s sometimes necessary to override this with manual adjustments.

This can mean the filters you attach to the front of the lens to change the appearance of the picture, or software filters that do the same thing on your computer.

This the picture’s proportions as width versus height. DSLR sensors have a 3:2 ratio, so that photographs are 3 units wide to 2 units high. Most compact camera sensors have a slightly squarer 4:3 aspect ratio. It doesn’t matter what the units are – the ratio stays the same, so a photo could measure 3 inches by 2 inches or 6 meters by 4 meters and still have the same 3:2 aspect ratio. You can shoot in different aspect ratios by cropping the sensor area. HD video is shot in a wider 16:9 ratio.

There are two main things to look for in sensors: the sensor size and the resolution, in megapixels. It’s more important to get a bigger sensor than to get more megapixels.

This is the physical connection between a lens and the body of a DSLR or mirrorless camera. It consists of a twist-lock bayonet mount and electrical connectors. The lens mount is specific to a camera brand – you have to make sure you get lenses in the right fitting for your camera.

Just about all digital cameras have a mode dial which you use it to set the exposure mode, such as full auto, program auto exposure, scene modes, movie mode and so on. More advanced cameras add PASM modes – Program AE, Aperture-priority, Shutter-priority and Manual.

The whole topic of color management can get pretty dry and technical, but stick with it because there’s information here that’s useful and puts lots of other things in context. Color management is essentially all about making sure you get the colors you expected when you capture photos, view them on a screen, edit them, display them on other screens or get them printed.

‘Bits’ are the basic building blocks of digital data, and the more bits of information used in digital images, the subtler the colors and tonal transitions. Bits and pixels are related, in that the greater the ‘bit-depth’ used to create a pixel, the better the quality of the color/tone information in that pixel. Digital cameras typically capture 10, 12 or 14 bits of data for each pixel, and this is then processed down to produce regular JPEG photos (8 bits) or converted into high-quality 16-bit TIFF files.

An adjustment made by the camera to neutralize color shifts in the lighting. Digital cameras offer an auto white balance option where they choose the correction, or you can select manual white balance ‘presets’ when you want to control the camera’s color rendition yourself. White balance adjustments are made using ‘color temperature’ and ‘tint’.

This is the physical size of the sensor, which is independent of the number of megapixels it has. Bigger sensors capture more light and produce sharper, clearer images with less noise. In fact sensor size is the single most important factor these days in a camera’s picture quality – megapixels are mostly secondary.

Digital cameras usually use multi-pattern/multi-segment light metering, but they also offer other ‘metering modes’ – center-weighted metering (simpler) and spot metering (more precise). The camera will have a button or a menu option for changing the metering mode.

Image stabilisation is a mechanism that counteracts camera movement during the exposure. Lens-based stabilizers use a moving lens element, while sensor-based stabilizers move the sensor itself. Image stabilizers are used to get sharper telephoto shots and low-light shots without camera shake.