T Archives - Shutter Muse

T (Time)

What Is T (Time) Mode and How Is It Used in Photography? T (Time) mode, if available on a camera allows a photographer to expose images for long periods of time by pressing the shutter button once to open the shutter, and again to close the shutter. T (Time) is an alternative to Bulb mode in which the shutter button must remain depressed for exposure to continue. T (Time) mode is extremely useful for capturing images in low light conditions, for example in Astrophotography where extremely long exposures are required to capture the light from far away stars. T (Time) …

Teleconverter

What Is A Teleconverter? A teleconverter is an optical accessory lens that is mounted between the camera body and a regular lens. It has the effect of increasing the focal length of the lens, but also simultaneously decreases the maximum aperture of the lens. The most common focal length multipliers for teleconverters (sometimes called extenders), are 1.4x and 2x, although Nikon also makes a 1.7x version as well. Not all lenses are physically capable of accepting a teleconverter, due to the protruding optical element that actually reaches inside the regular lens. Most long lenses can accept them, most wide angle …

Test Shots

What Is a Test Shot and How Is It Used in Photography? In photography a ‘Test Shot’ or series of test shots refer to photographs that are taken at the beginning of a photoshoot to determine the correct exposure, depth of field, and lighting levels required to capture a specific pre-determined set of final images. Often if a model is to feature in the final image or images then a stand-in will be used for test-shots (usually an assistant) so that a scene can be set without having to pay a model. Once test shots have been captured the photographer …

Texture

What Does Texture Mean When Talking About Photography? When talking about photography texture refers to the visual quality of the surface of an object, revealed through variances in shape, tone and color depth. Texture brings life and vibrance to images that would otherwise appear flat and uninspiring. Capturing high levels of detail is extremely important when attempting to capture lifelike textures making exposure choices critical. Underexpose and texture will be lost in shadow and blurring, overexpose and it will be lost in blown highlights and lack of dynamic range. The texture of an object, as seen through the lens of …

TFT

What Is a TFT LCD Screen and What Is It Used for in Photography? when talking about cameras TFT refers to a ‘Thin-Film-Transistor’ liquid-crystal display. TFT display technology allows for the construction of high-resolution LCD display screens with excellent contrast performance. TFT displayed are favoured by camera manufacturers because they allow a cameras LCD display to show high resolution, color accurate reproductions of captured images. This allows photographers to make accurate judgements of their work on the fly, without having to upload images to a device with a higher quality display. TFT displays aren’t just limited to cameras, they are …

Thumbnail Index

What Is a Thumbnail Index and how Is It used in Photography? A thumbnail index is an index of images comprised of thumbnails; reduced size versions of images designed to give you an ‘at a glance’ idea of an images contents. Thumbnail indexes usually replace text indexes in cameras and image editing software because of the practicality of searching visually when working with photographs. Thumbnail indexes will often contain a small amount of metadata which can be used alongside the thumbnails to quickly identify images in libraries that can sometimes contain hundreds of thousands of individual images. Thumbnail indexes can …

Tilt-Shift Lens

What Exactly Is a Tilt-shift Lens? A tilt-shift lens allows a photographer to alter the angle between the focal plane and the camera sensor. This adjustment allows compensation for the Keystone effect, which causes parallel lines in an image to converge if the camera is not perfectly level. Tilt-shift lenses can also be used to increase depth of field at wide apertures, and are extremely popular with landscape and architectural photographers. The nature of the design of tilt-shift lenses makes the implementation of autofocus mechanisms far too complicated to be practical therefore all current tilt-shift lenses are manual focus only …

Tonal Range

What Do We Mean by ‘Tonal Range’ When Talking AboutPhotographs and Photography? In photography, the term ‘Tonal Range’ also sometimes referred to as ‘Dynamic Range’ is used to describe he quality of color and tone within an image, ranging from the darkest to brightest area and everything in between. In digital photography the tonal range of an image is dependant on the dynamic range of the sensor capturing the image. It should be noted however that it is not difficult to capture a full tonal range of black to white, the challenge comes in representing the tones in between which …

Tone

What Do We Mean by ‘Tone’ Hen Talking About Photographs and Photography? When talking about photography the term tone refers to the overall range of lightness and darkness, and color variation within an image. Also often referd to as ‘value’ the tone of an image can have a drastic effect on how an image ‘feels’; Images containing many dark tones often appear dramatic and sad while images featuring light tones appear happy and vibrant. juxtaposition between image subject and tone can be used to create jarring and powerful images. The difference between the lightest and darkest tones within an image …

Tone Map

What Is a Tone Map and How Is Is Used When Editing Photographs? When editing photographs applying a tone map means that you are changing the RGB value for pixels of a certain color or ‘tone’ within an image. Take for example a pixel with the RGB value 0,0,225 or blue; If you were to alter or ‘re-map’ the tone of the blue channel to produce a pixel with the values 0,0,180 and applied this map to all of the pixels with the value 0,0,225 within the image, you have tone mapped the image, drastically altering it’s appearance. Tone mapping …