Digital Imaging Language

Are you confused about what the lingo on camera boxes means? Here are some explanations:

Aperture

An iris like diaphragm opening that can expand and contact the lens to let you control the amount of light that passes through it, thus affecting the exposure.

The term ” f-stop” is used interchangeably with aperture, especially among professional photographers  and videographers.

Burst mode - A camera mode that lets you capture several shots consecutively after pressing the shutter only once.

Depth of field - The area that is in focus in front of and beyond the subject of your photo.
Larger aperture (wider opening) will give you blurred background (first image below)
Smaller aperture (smaller opening) will give you sharper background (second image).

Digital Zoom - Magnifies an image digitally by cropping it and filling it the rest with interpolated pixels, thus degrading the quality. Even if the numbers are very impressive, never choose a camera based on digital zoom. With another words the better the optical zoom integrated within the lens, the better the image quality will be.

ISO - For digital cameras, the ISO setting measures the sensitivity to light (similar to how it does it with film). Digital camera ISO settings, such as 200, 400, 1000, etc., should capture photos as if one were using film with such a speed. Lower ISO settings mean you need more light and vise versa. Personally I never thought digital will ever replace the 35 mm film (I’m talking here about 6-7 years ago) when manufacturers were struggling with the digital format. The reason why, was that many time in the past they have tried to replace the 35 mm (with formats like 126, 110, APS, etc.) and the digital photos were very weak and slow progressing. But, within the last dozen years the digital era had exploded and film is in endangered species.

Megapixel - Approximately 1 million pixels. The higher the megapixel count, the higher the resolution and the more you can crop, which means (in general) better quality photos. Now this doesn’t mean you should go out there and buy a Hasselblad Camera that has 50 megapixels (I think the starting price of 27,000.00 should be a good reason not to) so you can have better quality photos. It all depends what are you going to use your photos for, how often do you use your camera, how much you know about taking photos (for SLR cameras) etc.

Memory card - Because digital cameras have very little onboard memory, they need flash memory cards to store more than a dozen or so images. The type of memory card you need depends on the make and model of your camera. Some of the most popular memory cards are Secure Digital(SD Cards), MultiMedia Card, Compact Flash(CF cards), and Sony Memory Sticks.