119 Fun Facts About Photography

The 1989 'Tank Man' photographs show a man blocking a column of tanks in which city?

Beijing: the day after troops cleared Tiananmen Square, a man carrying shopping bags stepped in front of the lead tank and kept shifting to block it; he has never been identified.

Which 1839 photographic process produced a direct positive on a silver-plated copper sheet?

The daguerreotype spread quickly because the French state bought the secret, paying Louis Daguerre a pension, and published the process for anyone to use in August 1839.

Which 1841 Fox Talbot process used paper negatives to make multiple prints?

Calotype prints never spread as widely as they might have, because Talbot patented the process in England and beyond; Scots, outside the patent's reach, took it up freely.

Who is credited with taking the world's first permanent photograph?

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce coated a pewter plate with bitumen, which hardens in light, and left it facing his window; the exposure took at least eight hours, and perhaps several days.

What was Frederick Scott Archer's 1851 glass-plate negative method called?

The Wet Collodion Process was many times faster than earlier methods, yet Archer published it without a patent and died in poverty in 1857.

Whose photograph 'V-J Day in Times Square' shows a sailor kissing a stranger on 14 August 1945?

Alfred Eisenstaedt, on assignment for Life with a Leica, said he saw a sailor running down the street grabbing every girl in sight and clicked the moment he kissed the nurse.

What term is the distance from a lens's optical centre to the sensor at infinity focus?

Focal length determines how much of a scene is captured and how magnified objects appear. Shorter focal lengths provide a wider angle of view, while longer focal lengths offer a narrower view and greater magnification.

What do photographers call the period shortly after sunrise or before sunset, prized for its light?

Golden Hour light is redder and softer because the low sun's rays cross more of the atmosphere, which scatters out the blue and dims the direct glare, while the shallow angle stretches the shadows.

Which composition guideline places key elements along lines dividing an image into nine equal parts?

The Rule of Thirds was named in 1797 by John Thomas Smith in a book on rural scenery; he meant it for landscape painting, some thirty years before the first photograph.

What does 'ISO' primarily control in digital photography?

Sensor's sensitivity to light: raising the ISO lets you shoot in dimmer conditions, but the picture gets noisier, the digital cousin of film grain.

Which type of lens cannot zoom, often giving sharper images and better low-light results than zooms?

A prime lens is built for a single angle of view, so its optics can be simpler than a zoom's: the result is often a sharper, lighter lens that gathers more light.

Which German photographer's 'Rhein II' sold for $4.3 million in 2011, then a record price for a photograph?

Andreas Gursky digitally removed dog walkers and a factory from the riverbank to leave bare bands of grass, water and sky; the price stood as the record until a Man Ray print passed it in 2022.

Which photo file format gives photographers the most latitude to rescue exposure and colour afterwards?

RAW files keep 12 or 14 bits of unprocessed sensor data per colour channel, against 8 in a JPEG, so a washed-out sky or murky shadow can often be rescued in editing.

What technique turns car headlights into light trails and waterfalls into silky mist?

Long exposure gathers light for seconds or even minutes, so anything that moves smears into a streak while everything that stays still remains sharp.

Which photographer captured the Great Depression image 'Migrant Mother'?

Dorothea Lange sent the 1936 pictures to a San Francisco newspaper, and within days the government shipped 20,000 pounds of food to the pea-pickers' camp; by then the family had moved on.

The Lumière brothers' Autochrome colour process filtered light through dyed grains of what?

Potato starch: dyed grains too small to see worked as tiny colour filters. Sold from 1907, the plates were so slow to react that hand-held snapshots were impractical.

Oskar Barnack built the original Leica around which existing material?

Cinema film: Barnack ran 35 mm movie stock sideways through the camera, doubling the movie frame to 24 x 36 mm, the '35 mm' format that later became the standard for small cameras.

What is a polarizing filter mainly used for in photography?

Cutting glare and reflections: light bouncing off water, glass or wet leaves is polarized, so the filter can block it as it is rotated, which also darkens blue skies and enriches colours.

What term covers a sensor's ability to capture both bright highlights and dark shadows in one exposure?

Dynamic range is the span from the darkest to the brightest tone a sensor can record in one shot; aim at a bright window from a dim room and the view burns out to white or the room sinks to black.

The 'Blue Marble' photograph of the fully lit Earth was taken in December 1972 by which mission's crew?

Apollo 17 was about five hours into its flight when the crew saw the whole sunlit disc; NASA credits all three astronauts, though later research points to Harrison Schmitt as the one holding the camera.

The term 'camera obscura', ancestor of the modern camera, is Latin for what?

Dark chamber: the first ones were darkened rooms where a small hole in one wall projected the scene outside, and the modern word 'camera' is simply short for the name.

Which photography giant grew out of a dry-plate business started in Rochester, New York, in 1880?

Kodak grew from George Eastman's dry-plate workshop; he had found the older outfit of tent, chemicals and tanks 'a pack-horse load', and plates sold ready to use did away with all of it.

What colour is the dim 'safelight' photographers use while making black-and-white prints?

Red: black-and-white paper reacts to blue and green light but hardly at all to red, so a printer can watch the image appear without fogging it.

Which company's first instant camera went on sale at a Boston department store in November 1948?

Polaroid's camera began with a holiday question: founder Edwin Land's young daughter asked why she couldn't see a photo he had just taken, and within the hour he had worked out the idea.

Under the 'sunny 16' rule, at f/16 in bright sun you set the exposure time to what?

The reciprocal of the ISO: at ISO 100 that means f/16 at about 1/100 s. The rule lets a photographer set a daylight exposure with no light meter at all.

The Brownie box camera, released in 1900 and originally aimed at children, went on sale for how much?

$1: the price put a camera within almost anyone's reach and turned the snapshot into a mass habit; its maker named it after Palmer Cox's cartoon sprites to appeal to children.

Beyond exposure, what creative effect does shutter speed primarily influence in a photo?

Motion blur: a fast shutter freezes a runner in mid-stride, while a slow one lets movement smear across the frame, an effect photographers often use on purpose to suggest speed.

Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs proved that a galloping horse does what?

Lifts all four hooves at once: Leland Stanford hired Muybridge to settle the question, and the frames showed the legs gathered under the body in mid-air, not stretched out as painters had long shown.

Which nanny's vast hoard of unseen photographs came to light after a 2007 storage-locker auction in Chicago?

Vivian Maier took more than 100,000 pictures in her spare time and kept them to herself; collector John Maloof bought a box of her negatives in 2007 and put them online in 2009, months after her death.

What photographic term describes the range of distance that appears acceptably sharp?

Depth of field shrinks as the subject gets closer, which is why a photo of a nearby face can show sharp eyes and soft ears while a distant skyline is crisp from front to back.

The 'exposure triangle' in photography refers to the interplay of which three camera settings?

Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO: change one and another must move the opposite way to keep the same brightness, which is why halving the shutter time calls for a wider opening or a higher ISO.

News agencies such as AP forbid their photographers from doing what to a picture?

Adding or removing objects is the line agencies will not cross: in 2006 Reuters withdrew every picture by a freelancer who had added extra smoke to a photo of Beirut.

Which famous author championed the Cottingley Fairies photographs as genuine?

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the coldly logical Sherlock Holmes, vouched for the photographs in The Strand in 1920; decades later the two cousins admitted the fairies were cardboard cutouts.

What is the main purpose of a neutral density (ND) filter?

To cut incoming light: the grey glass dims every colour equally, like sunglasses for the lens, so a photographer can keep the shutter open far longer in bright sun.

Which photographer shot the Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono, hours before his death?

Annie Leibovitz had been asked for a picture of Lennon alone, but he insisted that Yoko share the cover; the magazine ran the photograph the next month in its tribute issue to him.

The Cromemco Cyclops, the first commercially sold digital camera, debuted in 1975 in which magazine?

Popular Electronics ran it as a cover project in February 1975; its sensor was a modified 1-kilobit memory chip, and Cromemco then sold it as a peripheral for the Altair 8800.

Sir John Herschel's 1842 cyanotype process was later used to copy what?

Architects' plans: the cyanotype's cheap white-on-blue copies of technical drawings were the original 'blueprints', and the word stuck long after other copying methods took over.

Robert Cornelius's 1839 photograph, taken behind his family's Philadelphia store, is often called the first what?

Selfie: Cornelius set up his camera, uncovered the lens and hurried round into the frame, then sat as still as he could for his own picture.

The 1932 photo 'Lunch atop a Skyscraper' was taken during construction of which New York landmark?

Rockefeller Center: the eleven ironworkers were real, but the picture was staged on a beam of the RCA Building as a publicity stunt for the new tower, and nobody knows for certain who took it.

A lens sold as a '50' or a '200' takes that number from a measurement in which unit?

Millimeters: the figure measures how far behind the lens distant light comes to a focus, so a small number gives a wide view and a big one a telescope-like reach.

Which American photographer is renowned for black-and-white landscapes of Yosemite and the American West?

Ansel Adams used his pictures as lobbying tools: his 1938 book of Sierra Nevada photographs was part of the campaign that made Kings Canyon a national park in 1940.

Steve McCurry's 1984 photograph 'Afghan Girl' was taken in a refugee camp in which country?

Pakistan: McCurry never learned her name at the Nasir Bagh camp; a National Geographic team traced Sharbat Gula in 2002 and confirmed the match by comparing the iris patterns of her eyes.

Which Japanese camera maker produces the EOS line of cameras?

Canon launched EOS in 1987 around a new all-electronic lens mount, a clean break that left its older FD lenses unable to fit the new cameras.

Which photography genre specializes in extreme close-ups of small subjects?

Macro photography leaves so thin a zone in focus that an insect's eye can be sharp while its wings blur, so photographers often blend many shots focused at different distances.

Steven Sasson's 1975 prototype, the first self-contained digital camera, stored images on what?

Cassette tape: each 100 x 100 pixel image took 23 seconds to record, and to see it the tape went into a separate playback unit that rebuilt the picture on a TV set.

In 1858, the French photographer Nadar became the first person to take photographs from what?

A balloon: Nadar went up over Paris in 1858 with his chemicals on board, because the glass plates of the day had to be developed within minutes of being exposed.

Which camera setting corrects for the colour of the light so greys look neutral instead of orange or blue?

White balance does for the camera what the brain does unnoticed: we see a sheet of paper as white by candle or in shade, but a sensor records the orange or blue cast unless it is corrected.

What does the acronym DSLR stand for in the context of cameras?

Digital Single-Lens Reflex: a mirror behind the lens reflects the image up to an optical viewfinder and flips out of the way during exposure, so the photographer sees exactly what the lens sees.

What is the technique of shooting the same scene several times at different exposure settings called?

Bracketing is insurance against a wrong guess: one frame is taken as metered, one darker and one brighter, and the photographer keeps the best or blends them later.

Which photographer popularized the concept of 'the decisive moment'?

Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1952 book was called 'Images à la sauvette', roughly 'images on the sly'; the phrase the world remembers was the title of its English-language edition.

Which photographers' cooperative was founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, David Seymour and George Rodger?

Magnum Photos was set up so that photographers, not the magazines that printed their work, would hold the copyright to their pictures; its members still own and run the agency.

What is the term for the aesthetic quality of blur in an image's out-of-focus areas?

Bokeh is the Japanese 'boke', meaning blur or haze; an American magazine editor added the 'h' in 1997 because readers kept rhyming the word with 'joke'.

What is a photograph's orientation called when it is taller than it is wide?

Portrait orientation is taller than it is wide, named for the traditional framing of a person; the wider-than-tall format is called landscape, after scenic views.

Who appears in a late-1830s view of a Paris boulevard thought to be the first photograph of a person?

A man getting a shoeshine, it seems: the busy boulevard looks empty because the plate needed minutes to register anything, so only he and the bootblack stood still long enough to appear.

Which on-screen tool charts how an image's tones are spread from dark shadows to bright highlights?

Histogram: shadows pile up at the left of the graph and highlights at the right, so a spike jammed against either edge warns that detail has been lost to pure black or pure white.

Which photography genre needs flash at midday because its setting filters out warm colours?

Underwater photography: water soaks up the long wavelengths of sunlight first, so even a short way down everything looks blue-green until a flash at close range brings the lost colours back.

Which Associated Press photographer took 'Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima' in February 1945?

Joe Rosenthal's photo, taken on 23 February 1945, won the Pulitzer Prize the same year, and the flag shown was actually the second one raised on Mount Suribachi that day.

Which photographer, later Georgia O'Keeffe's husband, founded the Photo-Secession to champion photography as fine art?

Alfred Stieglitz hung photographs like paintings at his New York gallery 291, and used the same rooms to introduce American audiences to Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne.

On most cameras, what does pressing the shutter button halfway down do?

Focuses the lens: the half-press also sets the exposure, so a photographer can focus on a face, keep the button held and reframe the shot before pressing all the way.

What is selectively lightening or darkening parts of an image to control local exposure called?

Dodging and burning started with paper prints: the printer shaded one area with a card to keep it light and gave another extra light to darken it, moves that editing software still imitates.

What is the main job of a lens hood?

Blocking stray light: sun striking the front glass from the side bounces around inside the lens as flare, and the petal-shaped cut-outs keep the hood itself out of the picture's corners.

Which genre captures unposed moments of strangers going about everyday life in public places?

Street photography came into its own with small hand cameras such as the 1925 Leica, which let photographers move through a crowd and catch fleeting moments.

What image defect shows as purple or green fringes along high-contrast edges?

Chromatic aberration occurs because a lens bends each wavelength slightly differently, so the colours of light do not all come to a focus at the same point and the mismatch shows where dark meets bright.

Which photography genre relies on equatorial tracking mounts?

Astrophotography: the mount turns the camera against the Earth's rotation, so stars stay sharp points instead of smearing into streaks as the sky wheels overhead.

Which metadata standard stores a photo's camera settings, time and GPS position inside the image file?

EXIF, short for Exchangeable image file format, is written into the image file itself: in 2012 the location tag in a magazine's photo showed that John McAfee, then on the run, was in Guatemala.

How does the scene outside appear when a camera obscura projects it through its small hole?

Upside down: light rays cross as they pass through the hole, so the top of the scene lands at the bottom, in full colour; a Chinese Mohist text described the effect more than 2,000 years ago.

Which physicist presented what is regarded as the first colour photograph, of a tartan ribbon, in 1861?

James Clerk Maxwell had photographer Thomas Sutton shoot the ribbon three times through different colour filters, then projected the three images together: the method behind nearly all later colour photography.

Which type of image sensor, invented at Bell Labs in 1969, later won its creators a Nobel Prize?

CCD: Willard Boyle and George Smith sketched the charge-coupled device on a blackboard while trying to build a better electronic memory, with no thought of pictures; it won them the 2009 physics Nobel.

A 1992 image often called the first photo on the web showed what at CERN?

A parody pop group: Les Horribles Cernettes were lab staff who sang doo-wop about physics, and Tim Berners-Lee asked for their picture to publish on his new World Wide Web.

The word 'paparazzi' comes from a news photographer character in which 1960 Federico Fellini film?

La Dolce Vita features Paparazzo, a news photographer played by Walter Santesso. His surname became the worldwide word for photographers who chase celebrities.

Charles O'Rear's photo 'Bliss', a green California hillside, became the default wallpaper of which operating system?

Windows XP put it on so many screens that Microsoft and journalists have speculated it may be the most viewed photograph in history. O'Rear took it near the Napa–Sonoma county line in 1996.

Arthur Sasse's 1951 photograph shows which scientist sticking out his tongue after his own 72nd birthday party?

Albert Einstein liked the cheeky picture so much that he asked for nine prints for his own use. Sasse caught it as the physicist left a celebration at the Princeton Club.

German apothecary Julius Neubronner patented a miniature timer camera in 1908 to be strapped to which birds?

Pigeons already delivered medicines for Neubronner, so he harnessed tiny cameras to them for aerial views. The patent office rejected the idea as impossible until he produced photographs the birds had taken.

Yousuf Karsh snatched Winston Churchill's cigar to get the scowl in 'The Roaring Lion', taken in which capital in 1941?

Ottawa was hosting Churchill, who had just addressed Canada's parliament and refused to put the cigar down. Karsh apologised, plucked it away and caught the glare that followed.

Sepia, the warm brown tone of many antique photographs, takes its name from the ink of which sea creature?

Cuttlefish of the genus Sepia carry the rich brown ink that painters once used as a pigment. Sepia toning turns the silver in a print into silver sulfide, which gives the same warm colour.

Alberto Korda's 1960 photo 'Guerrillero Heroico', seen on countless T-shirts, shows which revolutionary?

Che Guevara was at a Havana memorial for victims of the La Coubre ship explosion when Korda caught his expression. Korda never asked for royalties as the image spread around the world.

Which newspaper published the 1934 'Surgeon's Photograph' of the Loch Ness Monster, later exposed as a toy submarine?

The Daily Mail bought the picture, credited to a London gynaecologist. Decades later the 'monster' proved to be a model head on a toy submarine, built to get revenge on the paper for ridiculing a hunter.

Which photo-sharing app, launched in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, did Facebook buy for about $1 billion?

Instagram grew out of Burbn, a check-in app the pair built in San Francisco. It spread so quickly that Facebook bought it in April 2012, only eighteen months after launch.

Which camera maker built the modified cameras that astronauts used to photograph the first Moon landing?

Hasselblad, a Swedish firm from Gothenburg, supplied them. The camera bodies stayed behind on the lunar surface, because crews brought only the film magazines back to Earth.

Which technique captures frames far less often than they are played back, so clouds race and flowers bloom in seconds?

Time-lapse squeezes hours into seconds of playback. Percy Smith pioneered it for nature films in 1910 with his silent film The Birth of a Flower.

Why do cameras in red-eye reduction mode fire small pre-flashes just before the main flash?

To shrink the pupils: a narrower pupil lets less flash bounce back from the blood-rich layer behind the retina. Moving the flash further from the lens helps too.

Which word, coined for Robert Barker's 360-degree paintings in the 18th century, now names an extra-wide photograph?

Panorama joins the Greek words for 'all' and 'view'. Barker showed his giant paintings on the inside of a cylinder, so viewers standing in the middle could turn through the whole horizon.

Which ultra-wide lens type, first used by 1920s meteorologists to capture the whole sky, curves straight lines?

Fisheye lenses can take in a full hemisphere. Physicist Robert W. Wood coined the name in 1906, picturing how a fish sees the world above from beneath the water.

Which word for a dark, backlit outline comes from the surname of an 18th-century French finance minister?

Silhouette recalls Étienne de Silhouette, whose austere economies in 1759 made his name a byword for anything done cheaply, including cut-paper profiles. Photographers get the effect by shooting against the light.

The word 'pixel', the smallest unit of a digital image, is a shortened blend of which two words?

Picture element was squeezed into 'pix' plus 'el', and the word pixel first appeared in print in 1965. 'Pix' had been Variety magazine's headline shorthand for pictures since the 1930s.

The JPEG image format, a standard for digital photos since 1992, is named after which committee?

Joint Photographic Experts Group is the committee that created the standard in 1992. Its lossy compression discards detail the eye barely misses, which keeps photo files small.

Which now-standard camera feature first reached the mass market in 1977 in a simple Konica point-and-shoot?

Autofocus arrived with the Konica C35 AF, which set the lens distance by itself. A year later Polaroid's SX-70 Sonar OneStep brought the feature to an SLR.

What is the metal bracket on top of a camera that both holds and electrically fires an external flash unit called?

Hot shoe brackets have a central contact that completes a circuit to fire the flash. The older version with no electrical contact, used simply to hold accessories, is known as a cold shoe.

The flash tube in a camera's electronic flash is a sealed glass tube usually filled with which noble gas?

Xenon gives an extremely intense, full-spectrum white light for a very short time when a high-voltage pulse ionises the gas.

Which image-editing program, created by brothers Thomas and John Knoll in 1987, became a verb for retouching photos?

Photoshop grew from a program Thomas Knoll wrote as a PhD student, called Display. John, who worked at Industrial Light & Magic, urged him to expand it, and Adobe released version 1.0 in 1990.

Steve McCurry's photograph 'Afghan Girl' became famous as the June 1985 cover of which magazine?

National Geographic ran the picture without knowing the girl's name. A team from the magazine finally traced her in 2002 and identified her as Sharbat Gula.

Which American entrepreneur founded Kodak and popularised roll film with a camera sold pre-loaded for 100 pictures?

George Eastman patented the Kodak camera in 1888. Owners mailed the whole camera to Rochester with $10, and it came back with their prints and a fresh roll of film.

Which colour film, invented by two professional musicians and launched in 1935, inspired a 1973 Paul Simon song?

Kodachrome was devised by Leopold Godowsky Jr. and Leopold Mannes, who were trained scientists as well as musicians. Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah was later named after the film.

Which Dutch painter's name is given to a studio lighting pattern with a small lit triangle on the shadowed cheek?

Rembrandt often lit faces this way in his paintings. Film director Cecil B. DeMille is credited with first using the term in 1915, after borrowing spotlights from a Los Angeles opera house.

The word 'photography', put together from two Greek roots in the 1830s, literally means what?

Drawing with light joins the Greek phōs and graphé. Astronomer John Herschel is credited with coining the English word in 1839, though Hercules Florence in Brazil had used 'photographia' years earlier.

Before flashbulbs, photographers lit dark scenes by igniting a powder or ribbon of which bright-burning metal?

Magnesium burns with a light much like daylight, as Bunsen and Roscoe showed in 1859. Flash powder, a mix of the powdered metal and potassium chlorate, was introduced by two German inventors in 1887.

Which New York studio photographer sent teams with mobile darkrooms to document the American Civil War at his own cost?

Mathew Brady won President Lincoln's permission in 1861 on condition that he finance the project himself. He spent over $100,000 on more than 10,000 plates, went bankrupt and died in debt.

Despite the name, a tintype photograph of the American Civil War era was made on a thin lacquered sheet of which metal?

Iron gave the process its other name, ferrotype. Because the lacquered plate needed no drying, a customer could be handed the finished picture only a few minutes after sitting for it.

Which photographer's picture of Montana's Fort Peck Dam filled the cover of the first issue of Life magazine in 1936?

Margaret Bourke-White shot it for the debut issue of 23 November 1936. She went on to cover the Second World War and documented the liberation of Buchenwald with Patton's Third Army.

Roads, fences and rivers that draw a viewer's eye through a photograph toward a subject are known as what?

Leading lines work because a line directs the viewer's eye along its length. Even patterns in frosted glass can serve, as long as they pull the gaze into the picture.

Which optical trick are tourists using when they pose to 'hold up' the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a photograph?

Forced perspective makes something look nearer, farther, larger or smaller than it is. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films used it to make the hobbits appear much smaller than the other characters.

Which principle of design names the part of a picture that first catches the viewer's attention?

Emphasis is usually created by making one area differ from its surroundings in size, colour, texture or shape. A single red umbrella in a grey crowd does the job at a glance.

On a three-by-three composition grid, where does the classic guideline put a landscape's horizon?

On an upper or lower line, the horizon hands most of the frame to either land or sky. The guideline exists partly to stop a horizon from appearing to cut the picture in half.

What are colour pairs such as blue and orange, which sit opposite each other on the traditional colour wheel, called?

Complementary pairs give each other the strongest contrast, as Isaac Newton declared of his colour circle in 1704. That is why an orange jacket leaps out against a blue sea.

On a three-by-three composition grid, which position is said to give a subject the most tension, energy and interest?

Where gridlines cross, a subject sits off-centre at one of four points. The grid itself is thought to be a simplification of the golden ratio.

Which composition technique surrounds a subject with an archway, doorway or branches to hold the viewer's focus?

Framing echoes an old painters' device called repoussoir, in which objects placed at the sides of the foreground lead the eye onto the subject. It can also add a sense of depth.

What do artists call the empty area around and between subjects, sometimes expressed by the Japanese word 'ma'?

Negative space is usually a quiet background that draws attention to the main subject. Sometimes it takes over, when the gap around a figure forms the more interesting shape.

In composition, which impression are strong horizontal lines, such as a flat horizon over water, said to give?

Calm and tranquility come with horizontals, along with a feeling of space. Strong vertical lines suggest height and grandeur instead, while lines turned almost to the diagonal produce tension.

The golden spiral that photographers overlay on a scene is approximated using which mathematician's number sequence?

Fibonacci numbers grow so that the ratio between neighbours closes in on the golden ratio. A spiral drawn through squares of those sizes becomes the curving overlay used in composition.

What name is given to the spot where parallel lines, such as railway tracks, appear to converge in the distance?

Vanishing point is a term from perspective drawing. A scene whose parallels run straight away from the viewer has only one, which is why that arrangement is called one-point perspective.

Which technique keeps one plane of a scene sharp and lets the rest blur, pulling the eye to a chosen subject?

Shallow focus is the opposite of deep focus, where the whole image is sharp. Jean Renoir used it in The Rules of the Game to keep a husband entering in the background only hinted at.

Which term describes placing two contrasting elements side by side in one frame, such as a cottage beside a skyscraper?

Juxtaposition invites a viewer to compare the pair and notice what is alike or different, which is why it suits pictures about old and new, rich and poor, or large and small.

Which term describes a photo whose halves differ yet carry equal visual weight, like a boulder offset by a boat?

Asymmetrical balance lets the two sides of a design differ while still looking balanced. Radial designs, by contrast, arrange their elements around a central point, like the petals of a flower.

What do photographers and film-makers call the space left in front of a moving subject, such as a racing car?

Lead room gives the subject somewhere to go, because a viewer expects to see a little of what lies ahead. For a person looking off to one side, the same gap is nicknamed nose room.

What is the apparent leaning-in of tall buildings called when a camera is tilted upward to fit them in the frame?

Keystone effect is named for the wedge-shaped stone at the top of an arch, because a square comes out looking like a trapezoid. Architectural photographers correct it with special lenses or in editing software.

Which Gestalt term for telling a subject from its surroundings is shown by Edgar Rubin's faces-or-vase drawing?

Figure–ground perception flips in Rubin's drawing: the eye settles on a vase or on two faces and alternates between them, an effect known as multistable perception.

Which composition guide divides the frame with one corner-to-corner diagonal and two lines meeting it at right angles?

Golden triangle composition suits scenes with strong diagonal lines. The three lines carve the frame into four triangles of two sizes, and the main elements are placed inside them.

Which English engraver first put a name to composition's famous three-by-three grid guideline in a 1797 book?

John Thomas Smith coined the phrase in Remarks on Rural Scenery, expanding on Sir Joshua Reynolds's thoughts about balancing dark and light in a painting. Photography itself was still four decades away.

Which action-camera company did Nick Woodman start after a 2002 surfing trip left him without good close-up photos?

GoPro took its name from Woodman and his surfing friends' dream of 'going pro', then the only way to be filmed on the water. The company was first registered as Woodman Labs.