Essential Digital Photography Information

Descriptions and terminology can sometimes lead to confusion. When reading the instruction manual for your camera it makes life easier if you know what all the relative words and abbreviations mean.
Here are some of the explanations to the terminology.

Pixels: Pixels is an abbreviated term (Picture Element) that has a numerical value between 0-255. Red, blue and green are the three colour channels in each pixel.

Megapixels: One megapixel equals one million pixels

PPI: PPI Refers to the picture quality, pixels per inch. The higher the PPI, the clearer and better resolution of the picture.

Shutter Speed: Refers to the length of time the camera's aperture is open for light to get inside the camera.

Aperture: The aperture is an opening that allows light into the digital camera's interior where the sensor is situated.

Sensor: The digital strip within the digital camera that receives the light is called the sensor.

Optical Zoom: The magnification and focal length of the lens are altered by adjusting the optical zoom.

Digital Zoom: Digital zoom allows you to blow up the picture image. The downside is the quality of the picture is reduced.

Memory: A digital camera has the capability to store pictures. This is storage space capability is called the memory.

JPEG: The Joint Photo Experts Group devised a compression ratio that reduces the picture size. JPEG describes the compression of a digital image. Unfortunatetly this compression does lead to the quality of the picture being reduced.

This just gives a brief outline to digital photography information with regards to the functions of your camera.

One of the more challenging aspects of digital photography is trying to get the exposure correct. Although with all the digital photography information available, your pictures may not look quite as you would like them. Editing with Photoshop will allow you to make adjustments to your pictures, but it is better to try and get the image right to start with.

You can decide if you want to adjust the exposure yourself, or let the camera decide. Today's digital cameras have a choice of exposure modes, e.g., for landscape or action shots. Whilst these settings are o.k. for most shots the settings in the camera program are factory set and are based on average conditions.

Each occasion that you take pictures is going to be different, i.e., different light and different times of day, therefore it is better to adjust the exposure yourself. You may need to practise and take a few trial shots to get it right.

If you are using the manual modes of your camera there are settings for aperture which determines how large the opening is to allow light through the lens. You can also control the shutter speed, the slower the shutter speed the more light will be allowed in.

When using aperture mode you are controlling the size of the lens opening. To get a sharp focus on one object you will need a small lens opening. Other object in the same shot will not have the same focus quality. A larger aperture opening will allow more objects to be focused, so the camera will adjust the shutter speed accordingly.

If you would like more digital photography information CLICK HERE!