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…
Brightness range This is the difference between the brightness of the brightest part of the subject and the brightness of the darkest part of the subject. Also known as Subject Brightness Range (SBR). Sources: …
Bridge camera A camera that bridges the gap between compacts and D-SLRs. They are similar in appearance and handling to small D-SLRs, but they have a fixed, usually ‘super zoom’ lens, with some models offering…
A system for increasing the chances of getting the correct exposure by taking a sequence of pictures with a slightly different exposure setting for each. Sources: Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School
Bounding box In Photoshop, a rectangular border around a selected part of an image that can be dragged to transform, rotate, scale or move. Sources: Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield Lamar High School
Bounce flash The indirect flash-lighting technique, where the flashgun is angled to bounce off a wall, ceiling, or another reflector. This scatters the illumination, creating a softer lighting effect. Sources: Pixabay, Wikipedia, Susan Wingfield…
Bokeh Derived from the Japanese word for ‘blur’, this term is used to describe the aesthetic quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas of a picture, or the lens creating them. Smooth, circular out-of-focus highlights are a…