AF

What does it mean when a camera or lens has the letters AF on the side of it? Click through to find out in our photography dictionary.

AL

What Does AL Mean In Photography? AL is an abbreviation of Aspherical Lens and is often used by the manufacturer, Pentax.  Please see the aspherical lens definition page for more details.   Additional Reading What Is An Aspherical Lens? What Does DO Mean On A Canon Lens? Pentax Lens Terminology And Abbreviations  

ASP

ASP Lens Definition ASP is an abbreviation for Aspherical Lens and is used by the manufacturer Sigma, to denote lenses which contain an aspherical lens element.  Please see the aspherical lens definition page for more details on this optical type.   Additional Reading What Is An Aspherical Lens?   Sigma 14mm f/2.8 ASP

ASPH

ASPH Lens Definition ASPH is an abbreviation of Aspherical Lens and is used by the manufacturer, Leica to denote lenses that contain an aspherical lens element.  Please see the aspherical lens definition page for more details on this optical type.

BBF

What is the meaning of BBF when people are talking about photography and camera autofocus settings?

CFWA

CFWA stands for Close Focus Wide Angle, and it typically used to describe a technique that is popular with underwater photographers. The idea is to use a lens that allows extremely close focusing, but still shoot with a relatively wide angle in order to take in the surrounding underwater landscape. Popular lenses for this technique would be the Canon 8-15 fisheye, the Nikkor 8-15 fisheye or the Tokina 10-17. In the example CFWA photo at the top of the page, you can see from the image’s edge distortion that the photo was taken with a fisheye lens. The central coral …

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CN-E

What Is A Canon CN-E Lens? When Canon launched the Cinema EOS camera line for professional video applications, they needed a lens lineup to compliment the cameras.  Cinema lens are designed quite differently to stills camera lenses, so the Canon CN-E lens lineup was born to cater to that market.  Canon’s CN-E prime lenses are available with an EF mount, whilst the CN-E zoom lenses are available in either EF or PL mount.  The biggest visual difference between EF and CN-E lenses, is that the cinema lenses have gearing around them that allows the focus and aperture to be easily and …

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DAM

What Does DAM Mean? DAM stands for Digital Asset Management and in relation to photography, it describes everything we do with our image files from the moment we begin to download them from the memory card or camera. DAM encompasses: What file format we choose to store images in Where we store our images How we back up our images How we ingest the images from the memory card How we append metadata to our images, like keywords and scene descriptions What software we use to manage our images and metadata How we decide to distribute our images File naming …

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DO

What Is A DO Lens? The DO lettering seen on some Canon lenses stands for Diffractive Optics.  You can spot a DO lens by the bright green ring around the front of the lens barrel, in a similar way to the red rings seen around Canon’s L-Series lenses.  All lenses consists of a number of smaller glass elements within the lens barrel and Diffractive Optics is a technology that allows them to use considerably less optical elements in a lens design.  They do this by bending the light much more with DO lens elements than they typically do with regular …

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EF-M

What Is An EF-M Lens? With the launch of the Canon EOS M mirrorless system in 2013, came the EF-M mount.  A mount that allowed Canon engineers to create a smaller line of lenses that complimented the smaller body size of the EOS M series mirrorless cameras with APS-C sensors. There is an EF to EF-M adapter which allows you to use EF or EF-S lenses on an EF-M mount camera, and still maintain full electronic control and autofocus. There is not, however, an RF to EF-M adapter, so it’s not possible to use EF-M lenses at all on Canon’s …

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