L Archives - Page 2 of 2

Light Tent

What Is a Light Tent and How Is It Used When Taking Photographs? A light tent is a translucent fabric tent which diffuses incoming light, any objects placed within the tent will not exhibit surface reflection. If you have ever wanted to take a photograph of a highly reflective object without capturing any reflections from the object’s surface then a light tent would help you to achieve the image you require. Light tents are often used when photographing jewellery or precious stones for product catalogues. Using macrophotography techniques along with a light tent can produce extremely detailed images without distracting surface …

Light Trail

What Is a Light Trail When Talking About Taking Photographs? The term ‘light trail’ refers to the phenomenon caused by photographing a moving source of light using an exposure setting which is to slow to freeze it in place. The result is a point of light with a trail stretching from its final position within the image to its point of origin. One example of a light trail is the ‘star trails’ captured when taking a long exposure of the night sky in astrophotography. Light trails give an image a sense of speed and movement and require the use of …

Live View

What Is Live View and How Is It Used When Taking Photographs? When talking about digital cameras the term ‘live view’ refers to a mode which allows a photographer to view the photographic sensor output in almost realtime on the camera’s LCD screen. In live view mode the photographer sees what the lens is seeing, including the effects of any changes in exposure settings. In DSLR’s live view requires the camera’s mirror to be lifted, this can limit autofocus functionality in cameras with dedicated phase detection autofocus sensors. This is overcome to some extent in cameras that use dual pixel …

Long Exposure

What Is Long Exposure Photography? In what you might term ‘regular photography’, with your camera in an automatic or semi-automatic exposure mode, you’re likely working with a shutter speed of somewhere between 1/60 of a second and 1/4000 of a second. These kind of shutter speeds tend to cover most normal situations, from bright sunlight at midday, to occasional indoor shooting. Long exposure photography is when we are using a much longer shutter speed, and it’s usually used as a specific technique to achieve a certain effect. There’s no defined transition point at which a shutter speed becomes slow enough …

Lossless

What Does Lossless Mean When Talking About Image Editing? The term ‘lossless’ refers to a form of non-destructive compression which can be applied to a digital file so that it takes up less space than it would in its original format. This allows for more images to be stored on a storage medium. The advantage of lossless compression, and where it gets it’s name from, is that no data is lost during compression. This is particularly important when storing digital photographs as they contain a lot of data which is required to render them correctly. One example of a form …

Lossy

What Does Lossy Mean? Lossy is the opposite of lossless and it means that when a digital image is compressed, some of the image’s data and detail is lost. JPEGs are a type of lossy compression, and whilst we can control how much a JPEG is compressed by when we save it, there is always a loss. Sometimes the loss is imperceptible if we use high quality settings, but it’s there! Additional Reading What Is A JPEG? What Does Lossless Mean? Example JPEG save screen that allows the choice of how lossy we want the image saving process to …

Low Key

What Does Low Key Mean When Talking About Taking Photos? Have you ever heard a photographer describe a photograph as being ‘low key’ and wondered exactly what they meant? When talking about photographs a low key picture is a picture which contains a lot of shadows and darker tones, and therefore very little in the way of highlights and visible detail. Low key images often appear dark and brooding with an almost palpable sense of menace, but can also be extremely powerful. Low key images also often leave a lot of detail hidden in the shadows, allowing the viewers imagination to …

Low Pass Filter

What Is a Low Pass Filter and How Is It Used in Photography? A low pass filter, also known as an ‘anti-aliasing’ filter or a ‘blur filter’ is a filter used by camera manufacturers to combat the effects of moiré in photographs. Moiré is caused when a a scene contains closely spaced repeating patterns, camera manufacturers combat this phenomenon by limiting the amount of light that is allowed into the camera, thus reducing the detail recorded in the resulting photograph. A low pass filter allows low frequencies of light to enter the camera, whilst limiting the amount of high frequency light …

LR

What Does LR Stand For In Photography? LR is an abbreviation for Adobe Lightroom, a powerful image organization and editing software. You may also see it referred to as LR5, LR6 and so on, depending on which version of the software they are using. Lightroom allows you to import and organize your images, then process them with Adobe’s Camera Raw Engine from Photoshop, and export the files to galleries or custom printed books. It’s available as a standalone piece of software, or as part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud photography package for about $10/month including Photoshop CC as well. If you …