Hi, and a very warm welcome to Episode 169 of the Photography Explained podcast. I’m your host, Rick, and in each episode, I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 27 minutes (ish) without the irrelevant details. I’m a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience, which I share with you in my podcast.
Here is the answery bit
OK – this is part 2, and I have decided to make this a three-parter. Well, there is a lot to cover here, so in this episode, I will cover the next 11, and then I will finish part three with the last ones and some more thoughts. So, strap yourselves in for part 2 of me sorting out the world of photography so it makes sense in 2024 and beyond!
You can listen here.
Or keep on reading – entirely up to you.
And again, I will come up with a more sensible alternative for some of these.
- Depth of field
- Glass
- Noise
- HDR
- Hot shoe
- Telephoto
- Standard lens
- Viewfinder
- Street Photography
- Fisheye lens
- Focal length
One of the terms that I dislike the most is depth of field.
Depth of field
Depth of field. What is the field? I am not in a field; what are you on about? How deep is the field? Where is the field?
Shallow depth of field – where is the shallow bit?
You get the point. And for this one, I have the answer.
Simple. I have said this many times before. Depth of field is the depth of sharpness in a photo. So, let’s call it depth of sharpness.
You can control the depth of sharpness in a photo using the aperture, focal length, where you and the subject are, and where other stuff in a photo is.
Clever use of depth of sharpness is such a natural thing to say; clever use of depth of sharpness can significantly improve a photo.
Depth of sharpness, at least that is one term fixed.
Simple. Sorted. I can move on to a term I cannot fix; I just campaign for its immediate and permanent removal.
Glass
I hate this term. Glass is what some people call lenses. Why? They have glass in them, but also other stuff.
I could call my Canon 6D metal alloy.
Or my phone titanium (yes, I have a new iPhone – lucky me!).
Or my house brick.
Glass is glass. And a lens is a lens. End of. What is wrong with the term lens anyway?
It is shorter. Just saying.
Noise
Noise is digital bad stuff. That is what I call it. Noise is silent, which is why I have an argument with this term.
You will find articles where people tell tales of thinking that higher ISOs made digital cameras noisier, as in not to be used in museums. I completely get that; it is a perfectly logical conclusion for the term noise.
Noise is another excellent example of a lousy photography term.
Noise has been defined as a random variation in the image signal. What does that mean? Noise appears as unwelcome grainy, blotchy or speckled areas in a photo.
Noise is commonly caused by high ISO settings (check out the last episode for my ISO rant). Remember that anything other than the native ISO is an amplification of the signal, so it makes sense that the higher the ISO, the more the amplification of the signal, the more noise, or whatever you want to call it.
It is also a problem sometimes in low light and when using a smaller sensor in low light.
I don’t know; for me, the term noise would be used for something sound-related, not random variations in the signal.
Digital bad stuff does it for. Stick to the ISO setting that your camera manufacturer recommended, and it should not be a problem.
HDR – High Dynamic Range.
HDR was a thing done badly in the early days of digital photography. HDR is when you take more than one photo with different exposures and merge them in editing software. It gives more light and dark than you can get in a single digital image capture.
But it is not a high dynamic range. It is a broader, wider, dynamic range. Dynamic range is the range of tones from light to dark.
To give you an idea of what this means in English, my Canon 6D has a dynamic range of about ten stops. The average human has a dynamic range of about 20 stops.
This means that my Canon 6D can capture half the range of brightness that I can see – half of the amount of light. My camera sensor is better than my own eyes.
Auto exposure bracketing does the same thing.
Some say that auto exposure bracketing is the taking of the photos, and HDR is the processing part of things, but this doesn’t make sense.
And getting back to the point, as I have gone on a bit on this one, the term HDR, High Dynamic Range, does not make sense to me.
Hot shoe
The thing on your camera that you put your flash into. Not that you should put your flash onto the hot shoe, as you will probably get lousy lighting. Unless you are smart and have diffusers and other clever stuff.
But don’t put a flashgun in the hot shoe and blast with a bare flash gun as you will get harsh light.
But the hot shoe is neither hot nor a shoe. So why call it a hot shoe? How about a flash mount?
It is well known in photography that you should not use a flashgun with the flash in the hot shoe; grrrr just saying it annoys me, without some kind of diffuser. So why do we have to do that? Flash guns are not cheap, but you have to pay more for something you put on the front of it to diffuse the light.
I am no expert in flash, but I got so fed up with this a long time ago that I got rid of all my flashguns and stuck with natural light or the lights in and around buildings. I am lucky that the light source that I use is the one that forms part of the building design. Very handy…
Flashgun. Hmmmmm.
The term does not make sense, nor does putting the thing where the flash mount is.
Telephoto
I could be some time with this one.
Wide angle lens. That makes sense. A lens that gives you a wide angle of view. So, telephoto lens.
Telephoto. What does that mean?
Well, you will find this definition in many places – “a telephoto lens is a lens which is shorter than the focal length”. Now, I did not know that. I didn’t. And knowing that is not going to change anything.
You will find many references to a telephoto lens with a longer focal length that gives a magnified image and a narrow field of view. I am ok with that.
Telephoto comes from telephotography, which is a technique for photographing distant objects.
So, whilst the term makes sense, put it with standard lens and wide-angle lens, and it does not make that much sense.
No, I do not have an answer to a better term for this one, just an ongoing frustration.
Let’s try standard lens.
Standard lens
Let’s take a 50mm focal length. This is a standard focal length, similar to how we humans see the world. A lens with a 50mm focal length is also called a standard lens.
Last word on lenses. Standard lens. It is OK. Standard view would be better. Standard angle doesn’t work for me. So, if we go to a wide-angle lens, would this be better as a wide-view lens?
Then, we could make the telephoto lens narrow view, and we are sorted.
- Fish eye could be ultra-wide view – this works for me.
- Standard view
- Wide view
- Narrow view
It is all about the relative views for me and not the numbers. And if we did this, we could ditch focal length altogether. I will come on to focal length. If you want complicated, this is it.
Viewfinder
It used to be called a lens when we had twin-lens cameras. You looked through one lens and took a photo with the other. Then, when the mirror was introduced, the single-lens reflex camera was born.
So, where did the term viewfinder come from?
No idea. The finder bit bothers me – it just does not make any sense. And with the evolution of digital photography, we now have the electronic viewfinder or EVF. Viewfinder does not make sense, but we have brought it with us into 2023 and beyond for some reason.
But this one does not make me angry; it just doesn’t make sense.
Street photography
I hate this term. Do you have to be on a street? What about a road? An avenue? A crescent. A drive? I know I am being pedantic here, but street photography?
Street photography is the photographing of everyday events in public places.
I have nothing against street photography; it is just an odd term.
Fisheye lens
A fisheye lens has a field of view of 100 to 180 degrees. A standard lens, by comparison, has a field of view of about 40 degrees.
A fish eye has a field of view of up to 360 degrees. It depends on the fish. The term was first used to try to recreate the view of a fish with a camera. And that makes sense.
You can get fisheye lenses, which have a 180-degree field of view, and you can get fish eye lenses with a 170-degree field of view.
But I guess they are creating what a fish sees. Thinking about it, how can we possibly know what a fish sees?
And hats off to the person who had the creative thought to try to replicate how a fish sees – that is some serious tangential thinking, which I love.
OK, I might have to let this one go…. On reflection, no, I am not.
Focal length
Get comfy. This is a bad one.
How does the term focal length get turned into an actual dimension? And what does that dimension mean? I do not know what the numbers mean, and I have a camera lens right next to me as I write this.
Well, this is what it means. Remember, this is with a full-frame camera, so there is more work to do for any other type of camera.
Wikipedia – “The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light; it is the inverse of the system’s optical power.”
Nikon – “The focal length of a lens is determined when the lens is focused at infinity.”
Adobe – “The lens’s focal length is the optical distance (usually measured in mm) from the point where the light meets inside the lens to the camera’s sensor”.
Ok – does this help us when we are taking photos?
Not really, no.
If you have a 70-200mm zoom lens, are you thinking of the numbers or just looking through the viewfinder and using the focal length that looks the best?
If the focal length was replaced with a scale that went from, oh, I don’t know, 0-10, where 0 was 0mm, and 10 was 1000mm, would this work just as well?
Or how about if it had two numbers, field of view and magnification?
The way I use focal length is this – I use a 17-40mm lens. I start at 17mm. If I need to zoom in a bit, I do. And do I care what the number is? No, I do not. I don’t know the focal length; I only care about what is in the photo.
I don’t know the answer, but focal length does not do it for me. It is the actual numbers and what they are that bothers me.
And then we go to, say, a cropped sensor camera, and you have to apply a crop factor to the focal length. (I will come on to crop factor next episode; sorry, I ran out of time in this one).
So, with a Canon cropped sensor camera, you have to multiply the focal length by the crop factor, so 50mm becomes 80mm. Simple right?
Well, no, it is more complicated.
The focal length has not changed; the effective focal length has changed. The focal length is a fixed dimension within the lens, so the crop factor is applied to what reaches the sensor. Hence the term effective focal length.
And this is part of the problem with focal length. It makes sense in a relative way; the smaller the number, the wider the field of view, etc, but we have crop factors to throw into the mix, making it even more complicated.
Here is the talky bit
If you search these terms on the internet, you can find lots of information on them, and lots of that information conflicts and confuses. And that is part of the problem.
I have done quite a bit of research for these three episodes and have been very surprised by some of the information out there.
And suppose you are a beginner taking photos with a phone and trying to get into photography. In that case, all this info must make photography appear much more complicated than it is, much more complicated than it needs to be for sure. And that starts with buying a new camera, mirrorless cameras, digital single lens reflex cameras, full-frame cameras, micro four thirds cameras, and cropped sensor cameras.
What chance do people stand? Then, you have interchangeable lenses, wide-angle lenses, standard lenses, and telephoto lenses.
Then, we move seamlessly to the exposure triangle, aspect ratio, white balance, large aperture, wide aperture, small aperture, fast shutter speeds, slower shutter speed. And very quickly, it can seem overwhelming.
Yes, a lot of these terms have evolved from analogue days, but if we want photography to survive and thrive in the age of the camera phone, we need to do better.
Blimey, listen to me here!
Depth of field is a great example of a bad term that confuses. And it doesn’t need to.
What if I use my phone to take photos and not a camera?
You take photos, and that is that. Simple. I know many photographic options exist on phones, but you don’t have to use any of them. And you certainly don’t have all those camera settings, dials, buttons, and wheels. You don’t have to worry about manual mode, raw files, chromatic aberration, exposure time, or anything else.
I have just got a new iPhone 15 Pro. I am fortunate to be able to afford one. And I have just started taking photos. I use the default camera app. And take photos. I have deliberately not done any research or installed any fancy apps (ok, well, I have a few, but I have had them for ages). No, this is a conscious, deliberate thing that I am trialling.
Take photos by pressing the shutter or, more accurately, touching the phone screen.
What if I use a film camera?
Same as the last episode. Same as with digital. But more straightforward. In some ways, it’s better.
I still need to get my film camera.
What do I do?
Keep on banging on about this stuff. I know I do. That is what I do. But it’s all good stuff, right?
I use the things that I need to get the best photos that I can. Composition and image quality are my priorities. In episode 166, I told you how I do this, in the cunningly titled, How I Use This Complicated Photography Stuff To Take Photos.
Professional photographers have learned all this stuff, so we don’t need to think about it too much, and that is fine – it is people wanting to get into photography that worries me.
Some thoughts from the last episode
Well, it was the first 11 of these things.
Next episode
The last stupid photography terms. And then my plan for the future of photography. I am getting a bit worried about that one, as I haven’t written it yet!
Stupid Photography Terms That Don’t Make Sense Part 3
Ask me a question.
If you have a question you would like me to answer, the best way is to head over to the podcast website – photographyexplainedpodcast.com/start, where you can find out what to do. And feel free to say hi. It would be lovely to hear from you.
I am done.
This episode was brought to you by, erm, a cheese and pickle sandwich and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps washed down with an ice-cold Diet Pepsi before I settled in my homemade, acoustically cushioned recording emporium.
I’ve been Rick McEvoy; thanks again very much for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast (it says here) and for giving me 27 ish minutes of your valuable time. I reckon this episode will be about 25 minutes long after I have edited out the mistakes and other bad stuff.
Take care, and stay safe.
Cheers from me, Rick
OK – that was the podcast episode.
Want to know more?
Head over to the Start page on the Photography Explained Podcast website to find out more.
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Let me know if there is a photography thing that you want me to explain and I will add it to my list. Just head over to the This is my list of things to explain page of this website to see what is on there already.
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And finally a little bit about me
Finally, yes this paragraph is all about me – check out my Rick McEvoy Photography website to find out more about me and my architectural, construction, real estate and travel photography work. I also write about general photography stuff, all in plain English without the irrelevant detail.
Thank you
Thanks for listening to my podcast (if you did) and reading this blog post (which I assume you have done as you are reading this).
Cheers from me Rick
