Aperture
The adjustable opening inside your lens that controls how much light reaches the camera's sensor, measured in f-stops (f/1.8, f/4, f/16...). A smaller f-number means a wider opening — more light, and a shallower depth of field.
Read more about camera settingsShutter Speed
The length of time your camera's sensor is exposed to light, measured in fractions of a second. Fast shutter speeds freeze motion; slow ones introduce motion blur.
Read more about camera settingsISO
A setting that controls how sensitive your camera's sensor is to light. Lower ISO (100-200) gives the cleanest image; higher ISO lets you shoot in darker conditions at the cost of visible noise.
Read more about camera settingsExposure Triangle
The relationship between aperture, shutter speed and ISO — the three settings that together determine how bright or dark an image turns out, and the foundation of manual camera control.
See the Certificate in PhotographyDepth of Field
The range of distance in an image that appears in sharp focus. A shallow depth of field (wide aperture) blurs the background behind a subject; a deep depth of field (narrow aperture) keeps a whole scene sharp.
Composition
The arrangement of visual elements within your frame — what you include, where you place your subject, and how you guide the viewer's eye through the image.
Read our composition guideRule of Thirds
A composition guideline that divides the frame into nine equal sections with two horizontal and two vertical lines — placing a subject along those lines or at their intersections tends to feel more natural than dead centre.
Read our composition guideLeading Lines
Roads, fences, rivers or other elements in a scene that naturally draw the viewer's eye toward the subject or through the frame, adding a sense of depth.
Read our composition guideGolden Hour
The 30-60 minutes after sunrise and before sunset, when the sun sits low and its light turns warm, directional and soft — widely considered the most flattering natural light for both portraits and landscapes.
Read our natural light guideWhite Balance
The setting that tells your camera what colour temperature the light source is, so whites render as true white rather than tinted orange (warm light) or blue (cool light).
Read our natural light guideRAW
An unprocessed image file format that captures all the data your camera's sensor records, giving far more flexibility to adjust exposure, white balance and colour afterwards than a compressed JPEG allows.
Focal Length
A measurement (in millimetres) of how much a lens magnifies a scene and how wide a field of view it captures. Shorter focal lengths (16-35mm) suit wide landscapes; longer ones (100-400mm) suit distant subjects like wildlife.
See the Wildlife Photography CourseBokeh
The aesthetic quality of the out-of-focus areas of an image, most often the soft, blurred background behind a subject shot at a wide aperture.
See the Portrait Photography CourseMetering
How your camera measures the brightness of a scene to recommend exposure settings. Different metering modes (evaluative, centre-weighted, spot) read light from different parts of the frame, which matters most in high-contrast scenes.
Frequency Separation
A retouching technique in Photoshop that separates an image into a texture layer and a colour/tone layer, letting you smooth skin tone without losing natural skin texture.
Read our portrait retouching guideReady to put these into practice with proper feedback on your own images?
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