Photosmudger

This would probably be as good a time as any to talk about color space. I’m not going to go into much detail, as this is supposed to

File Formats Most cameraphones, and most compacts, don’t give you a choice of file formats – just jpeg. Pretty much everyone is familiar with these – you’ll have

The Kelvin scale. Geeky moment – this scale represents what colour a certain metal (don’t know which one, I’m not that geeky) goes when heated to a certain

Release modes and your cameras buffer. How to trigger the shutter isn’t a big topic, but it still needs covering. Obviously, you generally trigger the shutter by pressing

Autofocus problems Most autofocus systems work by detecting contrast in things, so they’ll struggle when faced with featureless things – a blue sky, a plain wall etc. You’ll

Depth of Field OK, this seems like a good place to talk about of depth of field in more depth (pardon the pun) It’s quite a hard topic

Focusing and Autofocus Focusing an image is pretty important if you don’t want to look like a complete idiot – a bit of blur is acceptable now and

Maximum Aperture As a rule, the larger the maximum aperture of your lens, the better. A lens with a large maximum aperture, say f1.4 or f2.8 is often

Wide angle, Normal, and Telephoto Lenses with a short focal length (e.g. 18 – 35mm) with a wide field of view, are known as wide angle lenses, ones

Focal Length The first thing you’ll notice about lenses are their focal lengths. In physics terms, this means how far the lens comes into focus from the image