Beginners in digital photography should familiarize themselves with the terminologies on digital cameras in order to produce good and quality images. It is not enough to use the basic menu on the camera if one wants to level up his knowledge and skills in using a digital camera. What’s good about this career or hobby is that one can easily learn it with just a little extra effort to do so.
Here are some common terms you should know about:
Automatic Mode — automatic setting of the focus, exposure and white-balance
Burst Mode or Continuous Capture Mode — this mode allows you to take a series of pictures one after another at quickly timed intervals by just one press on the shutter button.
Compression — the process of compressing or reducing an image file, digital data, and text by deleting selected information.
Digital Zoom — this is done by cropping and magnifying the center part of an image to at least 50%
JPEG — short for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This is the most common used file format for image compression in digital cameras
Lag Time — the gap between the time the shutter button is pushed and when the digital camera in reality captures the image
LCD — short for Liquid-Crystal Display. This is a small screen similar to a TV but on a digital camera used 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 — refers to the unit of data storage capacity of a Memory Card, Hard Drive or Disk.
Pixels — tiny units of color that make up an image
RGB — refers to Red, Green, Blue colors used on computers to create all other colors.
Resolution — digital camera resolution expresses the number of pixels used to create the image, which determines the amount of detail a camera can capture. Resolution is seen on the sharpness and details of the image.
Storage Card — or also called digital camera memory card, this is used as a storage device of all images taken with the digital camera.
Viewfinder — where you look through to compose the view.
White Balance — used to adjust the digital camera to compensate for the type of light or lighting conditions in the scene
