Glossary

Aperture - In optics or photography, an aperture is a hole or an opening in a lens through which light travels.

Bokeh - In photography, bokeh (Japanese origins) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—”good” and “bad” bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

Golden Hour -  is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day, when a specific photographic effect is achieved due to the quality of the light.

Shutter Speed - In photography, shutter speed is a common term used to discuss exposure time, the effective length of time a camera's shutter is open. The total exposure is proportional to this exposure time, or duration of light reaching the film or image sensor.

Vignetting - In photography and optics is a reduction of an image's brightness or saturation at the periphery compared to the image center. The word vignette, from the same root as vine, originally referred to a decorative border in a book. Later, the word came to be used for a photographic portrait which is clear in the center, and fades off at the edges. A similar effect occurs when filming projected images or movies off a projection screen.

White Balance - In photography and image processing, color balance is the global adjustment of the intensities of the colors (typically red, green, and blue primary colors). An important goal of this adjustment is to render specific colors – particularly neutral colors – correctly; hence, the general method is sometimes called gray balance, neutral balance, or white balance. Color balance changes the overall mixture of colors in an image and is used for color correction; generalized versions of color balance are used to get colors other than neutrals to also appear correct or pleasing.  Simply, it is the correction of colors in photography to closely match to what is being captured.  A good camera should have accurate white balance correction.