148 Fun Facts About Cameras

In a lens aperture setting such as f/2.8, what does the letter f stand for?

Focal length is the f: the number is the focal length divided by the width of the opening, which is why a smaller f-number means a wider aperture and more light.

Which 11th-century scholar analysed the camera obscura in his Book of Optics?

Ibn al-Haytham wrote his Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) in Cairo between 1011 and 1021, using pinhole images to show by experiment that light travels in straight lines.

Which astronomer's 1604 book contains the earliest known use of the term 'camera obscura'?

Johannes Kepler used the term in his 1604 treatise Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, and went on to argue that the eye works the same way, throwing an upside-down image onto the retina.

Who made the oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera?

Nicéphore Niépce left a bitumen-coated pewter plate in a camera at his window at Le Gras for hours, perhaps days, in about 1827; the picture then dropped out of sight until historians traced it in 1952.

A daguerreotype image was made on a polished sheet of what?

A daguerreotype was made on a silver-plated copper sheet, polished to a mirror and sensitised with iodine fumes; the latent image was then developed over mercury vapour.

What did the French government do with the daguerreotype process on 19 August 1839?

On 19 August 1839 France, which had bought the daguerreotype rights in exchange for state pensions, gave it 'free to the world'; Daguerre separately patented it in England.

Where did George Eastman get the name Kodak?

He made the word up: Eastman said he tried out combinations of letters starting and ending with K, a favourite he called 'a strong, incisive sort of letter'.

Kodak's Brownie box camera of 1900 was named after characters created by which writer?

Palmer Cox's Brownies were mischievous sprites from his popular children's books, a fitting name for a camera aimed at children; more than 150,000 were shipped in its first year.

What was the launch price of the original Kodak Brownie in the United States?

The Brownie sold for $1, with a six-exposure roll of film for 15 cents, a cardboard box camera that put snapshots within reach of children.

Kodak's Instamatic cameras, launched in 1963, made loading easy by using what?

Film cartridges dropped straight in, with nothing to thread: fiddly roll-film loading had kept many people from buying a camera at all, and more than 50 million Instamatics were made by 1970.

Oskar Barnack built the Ur-Leica prototype around which format, borrowed from the movies?

Oskar Barnack's 1914 Ur-Leica ran 35 mm cine stock horizontally, doubling the movie frame to 24×36 mm; the production Leica I went on sale in 1925.

The name Leica is a blend of which two words?

Leitz and camera made Leica: the Wetzlar firm built only microscopes at first, until Ernst Leitz II decided in 1924 to risk producing the small camera his employee Oskar Barnack had designed.

How much did a Leica 0-Series camera fetch, including premium, at a June 2025 auction?

About €7.2 million bought one of the few surviving 1923 prototypes of the first Leica, sold in Wetzlar as the company marked that camera's centenary.

Which 1954 Leica introduced a bayonet lens mount and a combined viewfinder and focusing window?

The M3 came first despite its number: the M2 followed in 1957, and the M3 stayed the best-seller of the line, with over 220,000 made by 1967.

Which German twin-lens reflex, launched in 1929, became the template for later TLRs?

Franke & Heidecke's Rolleiflex took three years to develop and was so widely imitated that most later TLRs owe their layout to it; its ground-glass finder shows the scene flipped left to right.

Which optical component lets an SLR show an upright, laterally correct image in its eye-level viewfinder?

A roof pentaprism turns the picture the right way round: an SLR's mirror alone leaves it flipped left to right, which is all the older waist-level finders could show.

Which camera, unveiled at Leipzig in 1936, is widely credited as the first 35 mm SLR in regular production?

The Kine Exakta, from Ihagee of Dresden, has one rival for the title: the Soviet Sport, designed in 1934-35, whose own launch date is uncertain.

The Nikon F of 1959 was widely adopted by photojournalists covering which war?

Vietnam made the rugged Nikon F the standard press camera, and one famously stopped a bullet aimed at the British war photographer Don McCullin.

Hasselblad cameras are most famous for taking the pictures of which event?

The Apollo Moon landings were shot on Hasselblads because astronaut Wally Schirra, who owned a 500C, persuaded NASA to fly one on his 1962 Mercury mission.

In which country is Hasselblad based?

Hasselblad is based in Gothenburg, Sweden; Victor Hasselblad's company grew from a German aerial camera recovered by the Swedish military in World War II, and the drone maker DJI later took a controlling stake.

The name Canon derives from what?

Canon comes from the bodhisattva Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy: the company's 1934 prototype was named the Kwanon, and the Canon trademark was registered the following year.

Which 1976 Canon was the first SLR to be run by a built-in microcomputer?

The AE-1's microcomputer let Canon cut about 300 parts and automate assembly, so the price fell and it became the first SLR bought by millions of amateurs.

The Argus C3, sold in the United States from 1939 to 1966, was nicknamed what?

The boxy, heavy Argus C3 was nicknamed 'the Brick'; over 2 million were made in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Colin Creevey carries one in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

The Latin phrase camera obscura, the origin of the word camera, means what?

Dark chamber is the literal meaning: the first ones were darkened rooms with a small hole in one wall, and the boxes that shrank the idea kept the first word of the name.

What prompted Edwin Land to invent the instant camera in the 1940s?

His daughter's impatient question came on holiday in Santa Fe: three-year-old Jennifer asked why she couldn't see her picture at once, and Land had the idea worked out within the hour.

How quickly did Polaroid's first instant cameras sell out in 1948?

In a day: Polaroid demonstrated the camera at Boston's Jordan Marsh store on 26 November 1948, the day after Thanksgiving, and shoppers bought every one of the few dozen it had brought.

What did Edwin Land's company first sell, before cameras?

Polarised sunglasses came first: 'Polaroid' was the trademark of Edwin Land's glare-cutting plastic sheet, and the company founded on it in 1937 sold no camera until 1948.

Which 1972 Polaroid was the first to eject the print automatically, with no tab to pull?

The SX-70 made its debut when Edwin Land pulled one, folded flat, from his suit pocket at Polaroid's 1972 annual meeting and shot five pictures in ten seconds.

How much was Kodak ordered to pay Polaroid in 1990 for infringing its instant-camera patents?

About $900 million: the award was far below the $12 billion Polaroid had sought, and the courts had already forced Kodak to stop making instant cameras in 1986.

Edwin Land, who went on to hold 535 patents, dropped out of which university after his first year?

Harvard lost him after his freshman year and he never took a degree, yet colleagues and the press called him Dr. Land for the rest of his career.

Which company beat Kodak to the modern disposable camera in 1986?

Fujifilm launched it in Japan in 1986 as Utsurun-Desu, 'It takes pictures'; Kodak answered a year later with the Fling.

Who built the first self-contained digital camera at Kodak in 1975?

Steven Sasson's toaster-sized prototype went no further at the time, as Kodak's executives were reluctant to move away from film; in 2009 Barack Obama gave him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

How long did Kodak's 1975 digital prototype take to record one 0.01-megapixel image to tape?

23 seconds went on writing each black-and-white frame to an ordinary cassette tape; to see the picture, the tape then had to be played back through a separate unit onto a TV set.

Boyle and Smith won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing which sensor at Bell Labs?

The charge-coupled device began as a memory idea: Boyle and Smith were working on computer storage in 1969 when they saw that their parcels of electric charge could also record light.

Which 1988 model is regarded as the first fully digital camera to record images to a memory card?

The FUJIX DS-1P, shown at Photokina in 1988, held up to ten photographs on a 2 MB memory card but never reached the shops; the DS-X of 1989 became the first fully digital camera on sale.

Sony's 1981 Mavica prototype, the first electronic still video camera, recorded its pictures on what?

A 2-inch magnetic floppy disk, the Mavipak, held 50 analogue stills for viewing on a television, which is how the camera got its name: Mavica is short for Magnetic Video Camera.

What was the first commercially marketed mirrorless camera, released in Japan in October 2008?

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 swapped the SLR's mirror and prism for an electronic viewfinder, so lenses for its new mount could sit closer to the sensor and be smaller and lighter.

Which company released the first colour camera phone, the Visual Phone VP-210, in 1999?

Kyocera put the Visual Phone on sale in Japan in May 1999; Sharp's J-SH04 followed as the first phone sold with a network service for mailing photos, the idea that made camera phones take off.

Philippe Kahn sent the first photos shared from a mobile phone in June 1997 to mark what occasion?

The birth of his daughter: at the hospital, while his wife was in labour, Kahn wired a digital camera to his mobile phone and sent the pictures to a server running at his home.

GoPro founder Nick Woodman got the idea for his cameras on a 2002 trip doing what?

Surfing in Australia in 2002, Woodman strapped a camera to his palm with a rubber band to shoot his own rides, then raised early funds selling bead-and-shell accessories from his VW van.

What did Kodak file for in January 2012?

Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 19 January 2012, having struggled with the shift to digital, and emerged some twenty months later as a much smaller company.

Which Kodak film, retired in 2009, shares its name with a Paul Simon hit?

Kodachrome needed processing so complex that by 2010 a single lab, Dwayne's Photo in Kansas, was the last in the world still developing it.

A pinhole camera's lack of a lens gives it what optical property?

An essentially infinite depth of field comes with nothing to focus, so near and far are equally sharp; the price is light, with exposures that can run from seconds to hours.

What are the two main types of mechanical shutter in still cameras?

Leaf and focal-plane shutters differ in where they sit: a leaf shutter's blades open inside the lens, while a focal-plane shutter's curtains run just in front of the film, so one shutter can serve every lens.

On a twin-lens reflex camera, one lens takes the picture; what does the other do?

The second lens serves as the viewfinder, throwing its image up onto a focusing screen; because the two lenses sit slightly apart, close-ups come out framed a little differently from the view.

Which camera type, with separate viewing and imaging systems, was historically the choice of photojournalists?

A rangefinder camera focuses by aligning two images in a separate window and needs no mirror box, so it is quiet and compact, which suited street and news photographers for decades.

Which camera, in serial production from 1948, was the first SLR with an instant-return mirror?

The Hungarian Duflex, designed by Jenő Dulovits, let its mirror spring back after each shot so the finder no longer stayed black, a fix Japanese makers turned into the SLR standard in the 1950s.

Which 1957 camera combined eye-level viewing with a thumb wind lever, setting the SLR template?

The Asahi Pentax was the first SLR with a right-hand, single-stroke wind lever, and it sold so well that Asahi Optical eventually renamed itself after the camera.

What does a camera's bulb (B) setting do?

On the bulb (B) setting the camera keeps the shutter open while the release is held; the name survives from the rubber air bulbs that once squeezed pneumatic shutter releases.

Which Eastman company tagline entered the language to describe a personal event worth photographing?

'Kodak moment' came to mean any occasion worth a photograph; the irony is that the company built the first digital camera in 1975, then struggled once photography went digital.

GoPro's first camera, sold in 2004, recorded on what?

35 mm film went into the first GoPro, which was not digital at all; digital still and video models followed, and within a decade the company had floated on the Nasdaq.

Who invented the gelatin dry plate in 1871, finally rivalling the wet-plate process?

Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, went looking for a dry plate because the ether fumes of the wet collodion process were harming his health, and published his gelatin emulsion in 1871.

Which physicist shared a 1936 US patent for a camera that set its own exposure with an electric eye?

Albert Einstein and Gustav Bucky patented the 'light intensity self-adjusting camera'; fittingly, Einstein's Nobel Prize had been for explaining the photoelectric effect that such a light cell relies on.

Where did the 1963 Topcon RE Super meter light from?

Through the lens, a first for an SLR: Topcon put the meter cell behind fine slits cut in the mirror's surface, so it measured the very light heading for the film, whatever lens was fitted.

The 1991 Kodak DCS digital SLR was built around which film camera body?

A stock Nikon F3 took the 1.3-megapixel sensor where its film would run, but the pictures went down a cable to a separate storage unit the photographer carried on a shoulder strap.

Which company launched the QV-10 in 1995, the first consumer digital camera with a rear LCD screen?

Casio was known for calculators and watches, yet its QV-10 set the pattern for every digital camera since: a screen on the back to frame the shot and check it straight away.

Which 1999 digital SLR broke Kodak's hold on the professional market?

The Nikon D1 took the lenses press photographers already owned and handled like their film bodies, so newsrooms could switch without starting again.

Nikon's Nikonos underwater camera began as a French design conceived by which diving pioneer?

Jacques Cousteau conceived it and the Belgian engineer Jean de Wouters designed it; it was first sold in France as the Calypso, before Nikon took the design over and relaunched it in 1963.

The world's first webcam, set up at Cambridge in 1991, watched what?

The Trojan Room camera let Cambridge researchers check whether the coffee pot was full before walking over; it stayed online until 2001 and the pot sold on eBay for £3,350.

Which 2007 phone launched with a 2-megapixel camera and no video recording?

The original iPhone trailed its rivals as a camera: several phones that year carried 5 megapixels, and video recording only arrived with the 3GS in 2009.

Which phone maker put a 41-megapixel sensor in its 2012 808 PureView?

Nokia used the 41 megapixels for oversampling rather than giant pictures: the phone merged pixels into cleaner, sharper shots and could zoom without losing detail.

Which computer company launched the QuickTake consumer digital camera in 1994?

Apple's first QuickTake was really a Kodak design, built by Kodak's partner Chinon; the line lasted three years, and Time later ranked it among the 100 most influential gadgets since 1923.

Ring's video doorbell was launched in 2013 as a crowdfunded startup under what name?

Doorbot left the TV show Shark Tank in 2013 without a deal; renamed Ring the next year, the company was bought by Amazon in 2018 for more than $1 billion.

How many Hasselblad camera bodies did astronauts leave on the lunar surface to save weight?

12 Hasselblad bodies were abandoned on the lunar surface across the six landings to save weight for rock samples; only the film magazines came home.

Pentax's all-manual K1000 became the standard camera for whom?

Photography students were told to buy one because it did nothing for them: beginners had to set everything by hand and so learn exposure, which kept it on sale from 1976 to 1997.

Which home-movie film format did Kodak launch in 1965?

Super 8 fitted a bigger picture on the same 8 mm strip by shrinking the sprocket holes along its edge; a rival format, Single-8, arrived the same year.

RED Digital Cinema founder Jim Jannard had earlier founded which company?

Jim Jannard started Oakley in 1975 selling motorcycle parts from his car at motocross events, naming it after his dog; RED followed in 2005, out of his interest in digital photography.

How did Henri Cartier-Bresson make his Leica less conspicuous?

He painted its shiny parts black because people who notice a camera stiffen and pose; unnoticed, Cartier-Bresson could catch them as they really behaved.

Which Japanese brand of self-developing film, launched in 1998, outlasted Polaroid's own film production?

Instax arrived in 1998 with the Mini 10; when Polaroid gave up making film a decade later, it took a group of enthusiasts, the Impossible Project, to restart supplies for old Polaroid cameras.

Which 2013 model was the first full-frame mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera?

The Sony α7 used the mount Sony had built for its small NEX cameras, and it had the field almost to itself for five years before Canon and Nikon answered in 2018.

Fox Talbot's 1841 calotype process recorded its negative on what material?

The calotype's negative was a sheet of writing paper sensitised with silver iodide, from which many positive prints could be made; Talbot's patent slowed its adoption in England.

Which 2008 model beat Canon's EOS 5D Mark II to become the first DSLR to record video?

The Nikon D90 was announced just three weeks ahead with 720p video; the Canon answered with full HD, and the 2010 season finale of the TV drama House was shot entirely on it.

Which 1985 camera was the first SLR with built-in autofocus and motorised film advance?

The Minolta Maxxum 7000 put both the focus sensor and the focus motor in the body, so its lenses could be smaller and cheaper than rivals' motorised ones; Canon answered in 1987 with its EOS system.

Lomography takes its name from an optical works in which Soviet city?

LOMO stands for Leningrad Optical-Mechanical Association; its LC-A compact inspired a group of Viennese students to found the Lomographic Society in 1992.

The lo-fi Holga medium-format camera first appeared in 1982 where?

Lee Ting-mo designed the plastic Holga in Hong Kong in 1982 as a cheap 120-film camera for the Chinese market; its light leaks and vignetting made it a cult object.

Kodak's tiny 1982 Disc negatives gave prints what flaw?

Heavy grain was the price of a pocket-flat camera: to keep it thin, Kodak put fifteen frames on a rotating disc of film, each so small that even an ordinary print had to enlarge it many times.

Kodak sold film for the 1996 APS format under which brand?

Advantix was Kodak's name, while Nexia, Futura and Centuria belonged to three rival makers; the format they shared was short-lived, and Kodak stopped making APS cameras in 2004.

Which digital sensor format has a crop factor of 2?

Four Thirds sensors have about half the diagonal of a 35 mm frame, so a lens half as long gives the same view, which keeps telephoto lenses compact.

The first photograph to show a person, taken by Daguerre in Paris, is believed to show a man doing what?

Having his boots shined kept him still through an exposure of several minutes, while the carriages and walkers on the busy Boulevard du Temple moved too fast to register.

Which company bought Flip Video maker Pure Digital in 2009, then killed it in 2011?

Cisco paid $590 million in stock for Pure Digital in 2009, then shut the Flip line in April 2011, saying it would exit parts of its consumer business.

The Gatso speed camera grew from a device built by Maurice Gatsonides, a champion of what?

Maurice Gatsonides, a rally driving champion who won the 1953 Monte Carlo Rally, built the device to time his own cornering; Britain's first successful Gatso deployment was on Twickenham Bridge in 1992.

The Lumières' 1895 Cinématographe combined a camera, a projector and what?

A film printer made the box a three-in-one; at about 7 kg it was easy to carry and set up anywhere, and in March 1895 it gave what was probably the first show of projected film.

Which November 1977 compact was the first mass-produced autofocus camera?

The Konica C35 AF took an existing point-and-shoot, the C35 Automatic, and gave it a lens that focused by itself; autofocus SLRs with the motor in the body took until 1985.

The 1959 Olympus Pen was Japan's first camera of which kind?

The Olympus Pen was Japan's first half-frame camera: frames half the usual width fitted 72 pictures on a 36-exposure roll, which made Yoshihisa Maitani's design both tiny and cheap to run.

Nikon was founded in 1917 under a name meaning what in English?

Nippon Kōgaku Kōgyō, literally Japan Optical Industries, was formed in 1917 from three optical makers and only renamed itself Nikon Corporation after its cameras in 1988.

The Bayer filter mosaic on most digital camera sensors has twice as many cells of which colour?

Green gets half the cells because the human eye judges brightness mostly from green light; Bryce Bayer patented the pattern in 1976.

The CMOS active-pixel sensor was developed in 1993 at which NASA centre?

A Jet Propulsion Laboratory team including Eric Fossum built its CMOS sensor in 1993; needing far less power than the older sensor type, CMOS chips were outselling it by the mid-2000s.

Lytro's 2012 camera let users refocus shots after the fact using what technology?

Lytro's light field capture recorded the direction as well as the intensity of incoming light through a microlens array, so focus could be chosen afterwards; founder Ren Ng developed it at Stanford.

The original Minox subminiature camera was manufactured from 1937 in which country?

Latvia's VEF works in Riga made the Minox from 1937 to 1943; Walter Zapp, who developed it while living in Estonia, meant it as a camera for everyone, but its size made it notorious as a spy camera.

New York crime photographer Weegee was famous for using which press camera?

Weegee kept his 4x5 Speed Graphic preset at f/16 and 1/200 of a second, focused at ten feet with a flashbulb fitted, so he could shoot the moment he reached a scene.

Which Kodak slide film returned in 2018, five years after being discontinued?

Ektachrome, on sale from 1946, could be developed by photographers themselves, which the intricate processing of its more famous stablemate ruled out; Kodak brought the 35 mm version back in September 2018.

What name did Olympus's camera business take after its sale to an investment fund, completed in 2021?

OM Digital Solutions took over the cameras in January 2021 under the fund Japan Industrial Partners, and newer models carry the name OM System where Olympus used to be.

Which 2002 camera beat Canon's EOS-1Ds to market as the first full-frame DSLR?

The Contax N Digital, announced in 2000 and repeatedly delayed, reached shops in spring 2002, months ahead of Canon, yet it was withdrawn from sale within a year.

The Soviet FED camera, a Leica copy, took its initials from which person?

FED stands for Felix Dzerzhinsky (Felix Edmundovich), founder of the Soviet secret police; the camera was mass-produced from 1934 by a children's labour commune in Kharkiv named after him.

Which type of ultra-wide lens shows a whole hemisphere at once, bending straight lines into curves?

A fisheye lens can take in 180 degrees or more; its first practical job, in the 1920s, was photographing the whole sky at once so that meteorologists could study clouds.

How much was Anatol Josepho paid in 1927 for his Photomaton photo-booth invention?

$1 million, plus future royalties, bought the Photomaton rights in 1927; Josepho at once announced that he would put half of it into a trust for charity.

Joseph Petzval's fast lens of 1840 made which kind of photograph practical?

Portraits had meant sitting rigid for minutes; Petzval's lens, built by Voigtländer, gathered so much more light that a sitting could be over in less than a minute.

The Zenit SLR line was launched in 1952 by KMZ, based in which town near Moscow?

KMZ, the Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works, made the first Zenit in 1952 by taking the finder housing off its Zorki compact and fitting a mirror, a ground-glass screen and a prism in its place.

In DSLR, the name for a reflex camera with a digital sensor, which words do S and L stand for?

Single-lens means the photographer looks through the very lens that takes the picture. A mirror bounces its light up to the eyepiece, then swings clear for the exposure.

Which ape-inspired slang word describes checking each photo on a DSLR's screen right after taking it?

Chimping mocks the excited ooh-ooh noises photographers make over their own shots. A USA Today photographer first wrote about the word in 1999, though he said he had not coined it.

Which DSLR file type keeps all the sensor's data for later editing, earning the nickname digital negative?

Raw files are so named because the camera has not yet processed them. That leaves the photographer free to rework colour and brightness long after the shot was taken.

What is the usual name for the inexpensive starter zoom that comes bundled with a DSLR body?

Kit lens is the term because body and optic are sold together as a kit. Makers price it at the bottom of their range so that it adds little to the cost.

The Olympus E-1 was the first DSLR with a built-in vibrating filter designed to shake what off its sensor?

Dust gets in whenever a DSLR's lens is changed. Olympus's Supersonic Wave Filter shook the sensor clean every time the camera started up.

On the memory cards found in most consumer DSLRs, phones and laptops, what do the letters SD stand for?

Secure Digital launched in 1999 with a logo recycled from the Super Density Disc, a shelved DVD precursor that two of its backers had worked on.

Which type of camera looks like a small DSLR but has a fixed, non-interchangeable zoom lens?

Bridge cameras earned the name by filling the gap between simple compacts and interchangeable-lens models. Many pack such long zooms that they are also called superzooms.

Which DSLR feature, absent from early models, lets a photographer compose on the rear screen?

Live view first appeared on a DSLR with the fixed-lens Olympus E-10 in 2000. It is prized underwater, where a waterproof housing keeps the eye from the eyepiece.

Which autofocus method do DSLRs typically use, comparing pairs of images split from the light?

Phase detection is quicker than the contrast method found in compacts. On most DSLRs it stops working once the rear screen takes over framing, and focusing slows down.

By viewing through the taking lens, a DSLR avoids which framing error that spoils close-ups?

Parallax arises when a viewing window sits beside or above the lens and sees a slightly different scene. A DSLR's eyepiece never gives that off-axis view.

On a DSLR, pressing which control halfway down makes the camera focus before the picture is taken?

The shutter button works in two stages: a half press focuses the lens, and in continuous focus the camera keeps tracking the subject until the full press.

Which part of a Nikon DSLR was carried over, never abandoned, from the company's 1959 F film camera?

The lens mount survived the arrival of autofocus, when most rivals started afresh. More than 400 different Nikkor lenses fit it, the largest system of its kind.

Which memory card format, first made by SanDisk, became the long-running standard in professional DSLRs?

CompactFlash outlived early rivals such as SmartMedia to become one of the most successful card formats, holding on longest in the professional market.

Which sensor format, named after a 1990s film system, sits inside many consumer DSLRs?

APS-C takes its C from the Classic frame of Advanced Photo System film. Being smaller than a 35 mm frame, it crops the view and seems to magnify every lens.

Which sensor readout method, scanning line by line, makes DSLR video of fast pans wobble like jelly?

Rolling shutter exposes different parts of the frame at different moments. Fast subjects skew as a result, and a spinning propeller bends into curved blades.

Which metadata standard stamps each DSLR photo file with the camera model, settings and date?

Exif tags log the aperture, exposure time and, on GPS-equipped cameras, the exact spot where each picture was taken.

Which device fires a DSLR's shutter automatically every few seconds to build a time-lapse?

Intervalometer timing is also used in aerial photography, spacing exposures along a flight path so that overlapping frames give a 3D view.

Which Japanese company, known for copiers and printers, took over the Pentax DSLR business from Hoya?

Ricoh bought the Pentax camera arm from Hoya in 2011. Hoya kept Pentax's medical endoscope business for itself.

Nikon calls its full-frame DSLR sensors FX; which two letters name its smaller, cropped sensors?

DX sensors measure roughly 24 by 16 mm, less than half the area of the FX chips that match a 35 mm film frame.

Which lens maker's first DSLR introduced the Foveon sensor, which reads full colour at every pixel?

Sigma used the three-layer Foveon chip in every DSLR it made, and ended up owning the company that designed it.

Which camera setting controls how sensitive the sensor is to light, at the cost of noisier pictures when raised?

ISO is named after the International Organization for Standardization, whose film-speed ratings carried over to digital cameras. Raising it allows shorter exposures.

Which exposure setting decides whether a waterfall looks frozen in mid-air or blurred into mist?

Shutter speed is the length of time the sensor or film is exposed to light. Running water turns into a pale, fog-like blur once that time passes about half a second.

Which camera setting is matched to a scene's lighting in order to remove unwanted colour casts?

White balance adjusts every colour until a white object, such as a wall, looks white rather than tinted. Cameras can set it automatically, by preset or from a custom reading.

Which camera function delays the shot by a few seconds so that the photographer can get into the picture?

Self-timer delays usually run from 2 to 10 seconds. It also serves as a tripod trick, letting the wobble from the photographer's touch die away before the exposure.

Which camera flash function fires a burst of light just before the shot so that people's pupils contract?

Red-eye reduction works because the glow is flash light rebounding off the blood-rich back of the eye, and a smaller pupil lets less of it return.

Which camera function counteracts shaky hands, allowing far longer handheld exposures than usual?

Image stabilisation can allow handheld exposures 4 to 30 times longer than normal, so a shot that needed 1/125 second may work at 1/8.

Which graph on a camera's screen plots a photo's tones from dark on the left to light on the right?

Histogram bars piled against either edge are a warning. Detail has been lost to blacked-out shadows on the left or blown-out highlights on the right.

Which camera function overrides the light meter to make a shot deliberately brighter or darker?

Exposure compensation exists because meters assume an average scene. A subject much lighter or darker than a middle tone fools them, so the photographer dials in a correction.

Which camera function takes several shots in a row at different exposures, often for an HDR image?

Bracketing hedges a tricky exposure by shooting darker and brighter versions, often three in all. Some cameras then fuse them into a single high-dynamic-range picture.

Canon and Pentax mark shutter priority as Tv on the mode dial; what do the letters Tv stand for?

Time value mode lets the photographer choose how long the shutter stays open while the camera picks the aperture. Nikon and Sony simply mark the same mode S.

Before opening the back of most 35 mm cameras at the end of a roll, what must the photographer do first?

Rewind the film and it goes back inside its light-tight metal cassette, the same canister that lets a 35 mm camera be loaded in daylight.

More sensitive films use larger silver crystals, which give photos more of which visible speckled texture?

Grain is the price of speed. Larger crystals catch light more readily but show up as a coarser, sand-like texture in the finished picture.

What is the term for two pictures superimposed on one frame, as happens when a camera's roll is not wound on?

Double exposure is also done on purpose, as an artistic effect that creates ghostly figures or adds people to a scene they were never in.

Which nickname is given to compact film cameras that handle focus and exposure automatically for the user?

Point-and-shoot cameras were built for simple operation, with autofocus or focus-free lenses, automatic exposure and a built-in flash.

The checkerboard of bare-metal and black squares on a 35 mm cassette lets a camera automatically read what?

The film speed is encoded as a conductive pattern on the cassette, and the first compact cameras able to read it reached shops in 1984.

Which rule of thumb lets film photographers estimate a daylight exposure when they have no light meter?

Sunny 16 says that in bright sun you set f/16 and an exposure time that matches the film's rating: 1/125 second for a roll rated 125.

Which darkroom chemical, used as the final step, makes a developed film image permanent and safe in light?

Fixer dissolves the silver halide that the developer left untouched. Without it the film would go on darkening the moment it met daylight.

Which brand, founded in Vienna as a maker of scientific instruments, is the oldest name in cameras?

Voigtländer began in 1756, long before photography existed, and by 1840 was building an all-metal daguerreotype camera.

Which method of planning exposure and development did Ansel Adams and Fred Archer formulate?

The Zone System was worked out at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. Adams insisted it was no invention of his, only a codification of known principles.

What is the name for a single print showing every frame of a roll at its actual size, used to choose shots?

Contact sheet prints are made by laying the negatives straight onto the printing material with no enlarger, so each picture comes out the size of the film frame.

Which ultra-wide lens, first put to work studying cloud formations, produces a bulging hemispherical image?

Fisheye lenses were named for the way a fish sees a whole hemisphere from beneath the water, and meteorologists first called them whole-sky lenses.

Which type of lens do wildlife and sports photographers use to make distant subjects fill the frame?

Telephoto strictly names a design trick: an extra group of elements gives a long reach from a barrel that is physically much shorter.

The adjustable ring of blades that sets a lens's aperture shares its name with which part of the eye?

The iris of a lens works just like the eye's. Its blades are the diaphragm, while the hole they leave, the aperture, plays the part of the pupil.

What name do photographers and filmmakers give a lens that cannot zoom, whatever its angle of view?

Prime lenses trade versatility for quality. They are often sharper, lighter and smaller than zooms, with wider maximum apertures that help in dim light.

Which food-inspired nickname do photographers give a lens with a very flat, thin barrel?

Pancake lenses can be so slim because their simple optical designs need little correction, and so fewer glass elements.

Which word, borrowed from Japanese, describes the quality of the out-of-focus blur that a lens produces?

Bokeh comes from a Japanese word meaning blur or haze. The final h was popularised in the late 1990s by a magazine editor to steer English speakers to the right pronunciation.

Which lens, used by architectural photographers, can make a real city look like a miniature model?

Tilt-shift lenses fake a miniature by tilting the plane of focus so that only a thin strip of the scene stays sharp, as it would in a close-up of a model.

On a film set, which crew member adjusts the lens during a take to keep moving actors sharp?

The focus puller, officially the first assistant camera, also moves sharpness from one subject to another in mid-shot, a move called racking focus.

Which type of cinema lens squeezes a widescreen image sideways to fit a narrower frame or sensor?

Anamorphic lenses use cylindrical glass to compress the picture horizontally, and a matching projector lens stretches it back out to full width.

Stanley Kubrick used ultra-fast Zeiss lenses built for NASA to shoot which of his films by candlelight?

Barry Lyndon needed glass first ordered by NASA: only ten of the f/0.7 lenses were ever made, and Kubrick bought three of them.