The DSLR jargon cheat sheet v1.

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Designed for new users of (Canon) DSLR cameras. The goal of this sheet is to jump start beginners in their journey into photography and easing their road when talking jargon on the forums.

Abbreviations and terms

100% Crop means you take the full image and cut a rectangle from it and dont resize the result. 2nd curtain sync Flash term for flashing right before the shutter closes which can give light trails after the motion of the subject instead of before it like 1st curtain sync does. AF Auto focus. See also phase detect and contrast detect. 35mm equivalent Signifies that the focal length is converted using the crop factor of a given sensor to be equivalent to 35mm film. When we talk about focal length we say 100mm instead of 160mm for 1.6 crop body. Av Aperture value, the setting for aperture like f/1.4 f/2 f/2.8 f/4 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 f/16 f/22. Each step is called a stop. Each step makes the aperture smaller halving the amount of light. There are 1/3 steps in between. Larger number means less light hitting the sensor. BIF Bird in flight. One of the tougher things to learn but extremely rewarding to do. Check the quick settings table below. Blinkies when overexposing an image, those parts in the camera preview that blinks are considered overexposed. Though in RAW one can have about 1 stop of extra headroom to recover highlights Body camera without a lens. There are body-only packages

for sale, meaning no kitlens is sold in the package.

Bokeh A Japanese term meaning blurred. It refers to the background blurring when focusing on a subject. The quality and smoothness determines the aesthetic blurring effect of a lens. 300mm f/2.8 is considered very good while a mirror lens is considered very bad. The circles that blur produces takes the form of the aperture blades or anything close to the front element of the lens. Donut shaped circles are considered bad, ringless smooth falloff from the center is considered good. Bouncing Flash photography technique reflecting flash light off a ceiling, wall or anything else. On board flash can be redirected using a mirror but an external flash unit often allows for tilting and rotating the head much more conveniently. Bounced flash is known to produce much more pleasing results compared to direct flash because light is bounced off the much larger surface of a wall increasing the area of the light source of the subject softening the light. C&C Comments and Critique. A forum term for users asking or giving constructive comments and critique. CA Chromatic aberration, the effect of light separating in different colors when coming through the lens. Itll cast different sized images in red/cyan and yellow/magenta channels. Its increasingly more apparent from the center to the edge of the frame. CF compact flash memory card (350D and older, xxD and xD cameras) Contrast detect A technology to allow auto focus to be used in combination with live view. Because the mirror and AF sensors are moved out of the light path to allow the light to fall on the sensor theres no phase detect AF possible. CP Circular polarizer. Different from linear in that linear doesnt work with DSLRs as these use a sub mirror that uses linear polarization to reflect part of the light to the focusing screen and pass through the rest to the sensor. A CP cuts glare and reduces the effects of specular highlights saturating the image a great deal at the cost of about 1.5 stops of light. A CP is also used as ND filter Crop factor A full frame sensor is considered the 35mm equivalent in film. The APS-C sensor is smaller and therefore crops a part of the image circle the same lens projects inside the camera compared to a FF sensor. Canon aps-c bodies have a crop factor of 1.6. The equivalent focal length of a 400mm lens is 400x1.6 = 640mm. So a 400mm lens on a crop camera will look like a 640mm on a FF camera. Direct Flash refers to the pointing the flash head directly at the subject without softbox or bouncing off a larger surface creating flat looking, high gloss skin tones and harsh drop shadows behind the subjects and giving subjects red eyes. Because shadows is cast from a near point light source they look harsh or crisp depending on which side of the wall you stand. DOF Depth of field. Depth of field describes how much is sharp in front and behind the point where you focused. See web sites for a dof calculator. DOF is controlled by distance to the subject, focal length, aperture. DOF can be previewed by pressing the DOF preview button. Most standard focusing screens cant preview lenses faster than about f/3.5 because of the construction favoring better brightness over correct depth of field preview in the viewfinder. DPP Digital Photo Pro, a standard raw converter included with any Canon EOS camera. DSLR Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera. The reflex part is the mirror that flips out of the way of the sensor to capture the image. EC exposure compensation used in Av and Tv modes. In M mode you adjust the settings directly while Av and Tv adjust settings according to what the light meter measures and what metering mode you use. EF and EF-s Electro-Focus, this is the type of mount for lenses on the Canon EOS system. EF-s is a subsystem that only works with crop cameras. See crop-factor. EXIF info Information stored by the camera embedded into raw or jpg files. Keeping exif info in-tact before posting an image to illustrate a problem or ask for C&C is important. Some software strip exif info so make sure you are aware if this. Firefox FxIF plugin allows you to right-click/properties and see most important exif info. Irfan view shows much more exif info and exif toolgui shows you just about all that is stored. Extention rings see Macro rings Fast lens A term that describes lenses that allow for fast shutter speeds by giving the user wide apertures. The good light gathering ability allows one to shoot at fast shutter speeds. The popular prime 50mm f/1.8 and popular zoom 18-50mm f/2.8 are such lenses. FEC Flash exposure compensation. Flash can be considered as a separate expose to ambient/available light exposure. Balancing both will give huge creative possibilities. FF1 and BF Front focusing and back focusing. When focusing on a subject the lens/camera combo may exhibit a focusing error and focuses in front of the intended subject or behind it.

FF2 Full Frame, also 35mm (film) equivalent. Filter is a screw on piece in front of a lens. There are numerous diameters. Function of the filter can be but not limited to: CP, UV filter, ND, GND etc. FL Focal length of a lens. Focus & recompose A technique where you half press to allow focus to be accomplished, then recompose, moving to a different composition and fully press the button to take the picture. It is argued to cause focus errors but in practice its only a problem when DOF is very shallow measured in millimeters like macro photography. Focus stacking By shooting a series of photos focusing at different parts and combining them with CombineZP for example you end up with a subject thats sharp from front to back effectively increasing the DOF. FOV Field of view, the angle that the lens covers. Flare The star pattern caused by bright point lights. The smaller the aperture (larger number) the larger the stars. Glass popular way to refer to a lens GND filter Graduated Neutral Density, a filter that transitions from a darkening to transparent area to block out bright skies for example. There are hard and soft gradient filters. HDR High Dynamic Range. A technique to capture a larger range of light in one image file. Also wrongly terming images that have been tonemapped, which often is the next step after creating a HDR image. Handshake When shutter speeds are too slow you get a blur caused by the hand/arm/breathing. A general rule of thumb: 1/(2 x focal length) rule for a target shutter speed for hand holding a camera/lens combo. ie a focal length of 200mm results in 1/(2x200) = 1/400 for minimum shutter speed. Histogram A histogram has a scale from left to right that represents light intensity from dark to light. The Y axis shows how many pixels covers a certain lightness relative to other levels. It can give you a quick indication how exposure is achieved and if you are blowing highlights (histogram hits the right edge with a spike). Its an important tool to understand. IQ Image quality also PQ for picture quality IS Canons term: Image stabilizer, other terms to the similar technology: VR, OS ISO a standard for measuring light sensitivity of film and sensors. The higher the iso value the more sensitive it is. By doubling or halving the sensitivity it doubles or halves the amount of light captured. JPG or JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group. A lossy compression standard that throws away some data/detail that is considered unimportant and unseen by the human eye. Loading and resaving causes jpgs to degrade rapidly (resulting in edge noise and blockiness) and should be seen as a format for the end result. Live view Because of the DSLR light path that is redirected towards the viewfinder and away from the sensor theres normally no image on the display like ordinary p&s cameras do. Live view gives you the option to forego the viewfinder and use the screen to compose the image live. L Lens Luxury Lens. Canons designation for the best quality, especially build and sometimes but not always environmental seals. Lenses can be identified by their red ring around the end of the lens barrel. Lens Hood barrel shaped or flower shaped piece to prevent (sun)light from entering into the lens thats outside the frame. Increases contrast in many situations and protects the front element from damage, body oils etc. Looking space A subject often needs a space to look into like the head of an animal or person. If the subject looks to the right, leave most of the space on the right of the frame for the subject to look in to. This also works for things that move, give it space ot move into. LR Adobe lightroom LV Live view. By flipping up the mirror (blacking out the viewfinder) allows the sensor to be used as a video camera, putting a live feed on the LCD screen. Live view allows you to see the frame at difficult angles and allows you to manually focus with any lens. Macro photography captures subjects at true life size on the sensor. So 1mm in reality projects an image on the sensor of 1mm in size. This is 1:1 or 1x magnification. Macro rings also extension tubes, are rings that can be placed between camera body and lens increasing the distance of the lens to the body. This will allow the lens to focus closer than normal but loses focus to infinity. Typical use is for macro shots. Magnification is calculated thus: (focal length+extension tube)/focal length. MF Manual focus. Manually focusing without aid with new cameras is hard. A split prism focusing screen or using live view zoomed in to 10x makes it possible to MF with fast primes and zooms (f/2.8 or faster) MFD Minimum focus distance. The distance at which you can still acquire focus. MLU Mirror Lock Up. At shutter speeds from 1/30 to 30 seconds the slap of the mirror getting out of the way can cause a lens setup on a tripod to sway, potentially blurring the image. At first full shutter press the mirror is locked up, another press takes the photo. A remote or delay is often used in combination with MLU. mm millimeter, measure for lens focal lengths ie a prime 30mm or zoom range 70-200mm. See 35mm equivalent and crop factor. ND filter Neutral density filter. A filter to cut back light to allow for slow shutter speeds often used to shoot moving water like seashores and waterfalls/rapids. It also allows for usable shutter speeds when using fast lenses like f/1.4 for shallow depth of field shooting in bright sunlight. OOF Out of focus PF Purple fringing. At the sharp edge of something bright (ie sky) to something very dark (ie branch of a tree) can cause purple/blue fringing. Its a bit like CA but it can happen across the entire frame. This can happen with fast lenses like primes (85mm f/1.8 is notorious for this below f/2.8) or cheap zoom lenses like Tamron 70-300mm. Phase detact AF This is the normal fast auto focus system that dslrs use. See wikipedia for more info. Pixel Peeping Viewing an image at 100% magnification (a pixel in the image corresponds to a pixel on-screen, or 1:1) or higher magnification is considered pixel peeping. PP Post processing, editing an image after the fact Prime A lens with a fixed focal length ie it can not zoom in. You have to use what is popularly called foot zoom ie move yourself closer or farther away to frame the subject properly

PS Picture style, Photoshop or post scriptum. CS1..CSx also refers to Photoshop, though its Creative Suite, a suite of applications of which Photoshop is a part. PWL Paint with light can refer to either using a long shutters peed often in minutes in the darkness using a flashlight or torch to illuminate the subject selectively or using a Photoshop technique to retouch an image by selectively darken or brighten certain parts (similar to dodge and burn). RAW is a file format that saves sensor data in a way that can be processed more thoroughly later in a raw converter. It has some great advantages over jpg: higher dynamic range, more bit depth to push more detail out of the sky for example, adjust white balance without reducing image quality and no noise reduction or sharpening allowing you to choose the best tool, choosing a tonal curve more fitting with what you want to convey amongst other things. Examples: CR2, CRW, NEF. Reversing ring A ring with filter threads on two sides, possibly with different diameters to couple two lenses with each front element towards each other. This is used for macro photography. Rule of thirds One of the easiest composition rules of thumb to remember. Use it as a guide rather than a set in stone rule. Divide the frame in 3 by 3 squares and place a subject or shapes around the lines of a square. ie instead of placing a subject bang in the middle, place it off center on one of the third lines. Also see looking space. SD Secure digital memory card (from 450D onward), superseded by SDHC and SDXC with physical smaller sizes but with similar or larger memory capacity. SOOA Sitting On Ones Arse. An art of Zen to combine the relaxational effects of meditation and photography. A general advice for frustrated photographers who seem to fail miserably at photographing wildlife to come to their inner selves and help connect them with nature. Also for those recovering from an illness. Thanks to Drewbie at dpreview for recognizing this was a technique at all. ss shutter speed ie 1/100ss Step up/step down rings To use a larger filter on a smaller

threaded lens you can use step up rings to save you from buying a filter for every different lens diameter.
Stopping down Often means closing the aperture a stop, which cuts the amount of light falling on the sensor by half. See Av. TC teleconverter comes in 1.4 or 2.0 factors of cropping. Because they stretch a smaller part of the lens across the sensor it looses 1 or 2 stops of light respectively. If the effective aperture drops beyond f/5.6 AF is turned off on non xD bodies. This can be circumvented by using 3rd party TCs or by taping pins. Typical use is to increase a telelens reach. Some wide angle lenses are unsuitable as the back element can hit the TC causing damage. Tone mapping A technique often mistakenly called HDR that maps a larger dynamic range into something viewable on a regular monitor or for print. Tone mapping handles the differences of lightness and darkness and reinterprets them getting often a more even and pleasing effect. Tv Time value, shutter speed ie 1/100ss. Double the speed halves the amount of light falling on the sensor. USM1 or HSM ultrasonic motor. Fast and silent motors for driving the auto focus. USM can also refer to unsharpen mask, a technique for sharpen ony detailed parts of an image. USM2 UnSharpen Mask. A sharpening algorithm used by Photoshop and other software to sharpen an image using a mask to prevent sharpening detail below a certain threshold. USM 300, 0.3, 0 is generally accepted level of sharpening for print. 100, 0.3, 0 is often used for on screen display. 40, 40, 0 is often used to remove haze. UV filter Ultra Violet filter was used in film days as film reacts to UV and makes shadows very blue. In the digital age this is hardly a problem as the sensor filters out most UV anyway. UV filters are used for lens front element protection though only the most expensive multi coated have the lowest impact on image quality. Low budget UV filters can cause distracting patterns in bokeh, cause AF errors, cause internal reflections of bright light sources and reduce contrast. It is recommended to use them to seal off weather resistant lenses in wet conditions, shooting where sea spray or wind blown sand is expected. VF view finder Vignetting The darkening or brightening of the corners either by pp effect or by lens shortcoming. Workflow in context with photography its the process of everything from taking a picture to final print/end product. More restrictingly it refers to a post processing application that possibly handles downloading photos, numbering them, categorizes them using keywords, post processing/retouching, resizing/cropping and the final output as file or print. Lightroom is a typical workflow tool while Photoshop is more a small part of a workflow its more like a frame for frame editing/retouching application. WB White balance. The average color temperature of the mix of the light source(s). Zoomlens lens that can change the focal length and are indicated as a range ie 10-22mm (ultra wide), 18-55mm (crop camera normal/walk around zoom), 24-70mm (FF normal/walk around zoom), 100-400mm (long tele zoom), 18-270mm (super zoom). Websites for handy tools, tips, forums for photography: www.dofmaster.com for calculating depth of field. www.dpreview.com good quality lens and camera reviews, nice forum. www.photozone.de good quality lens reviews. www.fredmiranda.com User reviews to be taken with a grain of salt, but good for being aware of possible shortcomings of lenses. Nice forum. www.photosig.com Nice photo C&C site (giving and taking) www.sterlingtek.com Good cheap camera batteries. www.diamondbackbatt.com Good cheap camera batteries http://www.dryreading.com/camera/index.html Virtual camera demo to illustrate the effects of shutter speed, aperture and iso. Created by Imqqmi - imqqmi@yahoo.com. Copying is permitted for personal use only. This document may not be commercially used, sold or otherwise. Download latest version from: http://www.jmbfoto.nl/dslrcheatsheet.pdf Last edit: 31-03-2010 (d-m-y)