- Aperture
- The opening in a lens that controls how much light passes through — written as an f-number like f/2.8.
- Bokeh
- The quality of the blur in the out-of-focus areas of a photo, usually seen in the background.
- ISO
- How strongly the camera amplifies light — higher ISO brightens the image but adds visible grain.
- Exposure
- How light or dark a photo is, set by the combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.
- Focal Length
- A measurement in millimeters describing a lens's field of view — shorter numbers see wider, longer numbers zoom in.
- Depth of Field
- How much of a scene, front to back, appears sharply in focus.
- Shutter Speed
- How long the camera's sensor is exposed to light — fast speeds freeze motion, slow speeds blur it.
- Dynamic Range
- The gap a camera can capture between the darkest shadows and the brightest highlights in one shot.
- White Balance
- A setting that corrects color casts so whites look white under different light sources.
- RAW
- An unprocessed image file that keeps all the sensor data, giving far more room to edit than a JPEG.
- JPEG
- A compressed, camera-processed image file — smaller and ready to share, but with less editing room than RAW.
- EV (Exposure Value)
- A number representing a specific combination of aperture and shutter speed for a given brightness.
- Stops
- A doubling or halving of light — moving one stop brighter or darker is a standard unit photographers think in.
- Golden Hour
- The period shortly after sunrise or before sunset, when sunlight is soft, warm, and low in the sky.
- Rembrandt Lighting
- A portrait lighting pattern that leaves a small triangle of light on the shadow-side cheek.
- Rule of Thirds
- A composition guide that divides the frame into a 3×3 grid, placing subjects along the lines or intersections.
- Focal Plane
- The flat plane inside the camera, at the sensor, where the image is actually formed and focus is measured from.
- Crop Factor
- A multiplier describing how a sensor smaller than full-frame narrows a lens's effective field of view.