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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 …

Masking

What Is Masking and How Is It Used When Editing Photos? When talking about editing and processing images the term ‘masking’ refers to the practice of using a mask to protect a specific area of an image, just as you would use masking tape when painting your house. Masking an area of an image protects that area from being altered by changes made to the rest of the image. Using masks in image editing allows you to preserve portions of an image that you are satisfied with whilst simultaneously altering aspects of the rest of the image such as overall …

Maximum Aperture

What Does Maximum Aperture Mean When Talking about Photography? When talking about photography and more specifically photographic lenses, the term ‘maximum aperture’ describes the widest hole that can be formed by the aperture blades within a lens. At it’s maximum aperture a lens will allow a lot of light to enter the camera, therefore allowing the use of faster shutter speeds when capturing images; Lenses with large maximum apertures, for example f/1.4 are therefore often referred to as ‘fast lenses’. The trade off when using a lens’ maximum aperture is that images will be softer and have a very narrow …

MB

What Is an MB and How Is It Used in Photography? The acronym MB stands for ‘megabyte’ and refers to a unit of measurement used to describe the size of a digital file. One MB is comprised of 1,024,000 bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes of digital information. When a picture is captured on a digital camera the resulting file must be stored on the cameras memory; Depending of the resolution of the captured image, and the file format used to encode it, an image will take up a certain number of MB on the cameras memory. Dividing the total size of …

Megabyte

What Is a Megabyte and How Is It Used in Photography? the term ‘megabyte’ or MB refers to a unit of measurement used to describe the size of a digital file. One megabyte is comprised of 1,024,000 bytes, or 1,024 kilobytes of digital information. When a picture is captured on a digital camera the resulting file must be stored on the cameras memory; Depending of the resolution of the captured image, and the file format used to encode it, an image will take up a certain number of megabytes on the cameras memory. Dividing the total size of a camera’s …

Metadata

What Does the Term Metadata Mean When Talking About Photography? Metadata when related to digital photography refers to a set of data that describes an individual image file. Metadata is stored when an image is taken and can contain information on where and when an image was captured, specific exposure information, and even information related to image ownership and copyright. The amount of metadata captured alongside an image can be defined within a cameras settings allowing a photographer to taylor the metadata recorded to their specific needs. In post processing and image storage metadata can be used to filter and …

Metering

What Is Metering and How Is It Used in Cameras? When talking about cameras and taking photographs ‘metering’ describes the process a camera uses to automatically determine the correct exposure settings for a capturing a photograph. Incoming light is read or ‘metered’ by the camera’s onboard software and exposure settings are calculated based on the read values. A camera can usually be set to one of three of metering methods; Matrix Metering, Spot metering and Center-weighted metering. Each will produce a different exposure so selecting the appropriate metering method for a given scene is extremely important when considering how you want …

Micro Lenses

What Are Micro Lenses When Talking About Photography? When you think about a digital camera you probably imagine a body mounted with a single lens, the truth however is that a modern camera actually uses many (sometimes tens of millions!) of tiny lenses called Micro Lenses to help the camera sensor capture light. Micro lenses are normally mounted on top of the light-gathering portion of pixels on the camera sensor to direct light onto the individual pixels. They can also be angled along the edges of a camera sensor in order to capture and redirect light back into the sensor’s …

Midtone

What Does Midtone Mean When Talking About Photographs? When talking about photographs and photography there are three areas of ‘tone’ within the total range of color in an image, The Highlights contain the brightest tones, the Shadows contain the darkest, and the midtones contain everything in between. In general terms the midtones usually account for the middle 50% of the total tonal depth of an image (25%-75%), with highlights and shadows accounting for the 25% each each end of the tonal range. Altering the balance between the three tonal areas of an image can have a dramatic impact on the overall …

Minimum Aperture

What Does Minimum Aperture Mean When Talking About Cameras and Lenses? The term ‘minimum aperture’ refers to the smallest possible hole that can be formed by the aperture blades in a photographic lens. Generally at it’s minimum aperture a lens will produce extremely sharp images with a wide depth of field, but will allow a much reduced amount of light to strike the photographic medium. A lens with an minimum aperture of f/64 for example would produce extremely sharp images with a very wide depth of field. The minimum aperture of a lens is usually listed in the lens’ specifications …