Decisive moment The split-second when all the elements of a photograph simultaneously come together. The decisive moment is associated with Cartier-Bresson, who described photography as “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second,…
DC This features on the range of Sigma lenses that are designed specifically for use with crop-factor SLRs, and which can’t be used with full-frame models. Sources: Pixabay, NASA,Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar…
Daguerre, Louis Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) was an artist and inventor who devised one of the earliest photographic processes, the daguerreotype, announced in 1839. It was made by coating a silver-plated copper sheet with light-sensitive…
Darkroom A light-tight room for processing and printing Traditional photographs. Negatives are loaded into the processing tank in complete darkness, while a red/orange safelight can be used at the printing stage. Sources: Pixabay, NASA,…
DA Stands for Digital Auto, which features on a range of Pentax lenses that (unlike some earlier ranges) don’t have a manual aperture ring. They have a ‘Quick Shift’ mechanism that enables you…
Byte The standard unit for measuring the memory capacity of digital storage devices. Each byte can have one of 256 different values and is equal to eight bits. Sources: Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield…
Butterfly lighting A technique for lighting portraits achieved by pointing the flash down towards the front of the face and creating a distinctive butterfly-shaped shadow under the nose. A reflector is used to soften…
Burst rate The continuous shooting speed of a digital camera, which enables a sequence of images to be taken in rapid succession, measured in frames per second (fps). The rate can only be sustained for…
Burn tool A tool that can be used to darken parts of an image selectively during digital image manipulation. The tool gets its name (and its hand-shaped icon) from ‘burning- in’, a…
Buffer Temporary memory used by a digital SLR. The size of the buffer in a camera helps dictate the maximum burst rate and the number of shots per burst. Sources: Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield…