A quick, plain-language reference to the terms used across New England Light. No jargon for its own sake — just what each word means and why it matters to a picture.
Exposure
- Aperture
- The adjustable opening in the lens, measured in f-numbers (f/2.8, f/8, f/16). A wide aperture (small f-number) lets in more light and gives a shallow depth of field; a narrow aperture (large f-number) gives more front-to-back sharpness.
- Shutter speed
- How long the sensor or film is exposed to light, measured in fractions of a second. Fast speeds freeze motion; slow speeds blur it — the silk of a long-exposure waterfall, or camera shake if handheld too long.
- ISO
- The sensitivity of the sensor or film to light. Low ISO gives the cleanest image; high ISO lets you shoot in dim conditions at the cost of more visible grain or noise.
- Exposure triangle
- The interdependence of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Change one and you must usually adjust another to keep the same brightness.
- Dynamic range
- The span of brightness, from deepest shadow to brightest highlight, that a camera can record in one frame. Scenes exceeding it force a choice about what to keep.
Optics and focus
- Focal length
- The lens's angle of view, in millimetres. Short focal lengths (wide-angle) take in more; long focal lengths (telephoto) magnify and compress. Around 50mm on a full frame approximates natural human perspective.
- Depth of field
- How much of the scene, front to back, is acceptably sharp. Controlled mainly by aperture, focal length and distance.
- Prime lens
- A lens of a single fixed focal length. Primes are often sharper and brighter than zooms and encourage a photographer to move rather than zoom.
- Bokeh
- The visual quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image, especially background highlights rendered as soft discs.
Light
- Golden hour
- The period shortly after sunrise and before sunset when sunlight is low, warm and soft — prized for landscapes and portraits.
- Blue hour
- The twilight period before sunrise and after sunset when light is cool, even and gentle.
- Hard and soft light
- Hard light (small or direct source) casts sharp-edged shadows; soft light (large or diffused source) casts gradual ones. Soft light flatters; hard light dramatises.
- Backlight
- Light coming from behind the subject toward the camera, used for rim light, silhouette and atmosphere.
Craft and workflow
- Decisive moment
- The instant when the elements of a scene align into their most expressive arrangement — a phrase associated with documentary photography.
- Rule of thirds
- A compositional guide placing key elements a third of the way into the frame rather than dead centre.
- Exposing to the right
- Biasing a digital exposure toward the brighter end (without clipping highlights) to capture the cleanest possible shadow detail.
- Contact sheet
- A single sheet showing small versions of every frame from a roll or shoot, used to review and select the strongest images.
- RAW
- A minimally processed image file preserving the maximum data from the sensor, giving the most latitude when editing exposure and colour.
For these terms in practice, read the field guide to light and composition. A deeper history of the medium's vocabulary is maintained by encyclopaedic sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.