Photography
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119 free Photography trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
66 free photography trivia questions with answers. Are you a photography enthusiast? This trivia quiz will test your knowledge of photography history, techniques, and iconic photographers. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned pro, see how much you really know about the art and science of photography.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1989 'Tank Man' photographs show a man blocking a column of tanks in which city?
Beijing
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.
Q 02Which 1839 photographic process produced a direct positive on a silver-plated copper sheet?
Daguerreotype
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.
Q 03Which 1841 Fox Talbot process used paper negatives to make multiple prints?
Calotype
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.
Q 04Who is credited with taking the world's first permanent photograph?
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
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.
Q 05What was Frederick Scott Archer's 1851 glass-plate negative method called?
Wet Collodion Process
The Wet Collodion Process was many times faster than earlier methods, yet Archer published it without a patent and died in poverty in 1857.
Q 06Whose photograph 'V-J Day in Times Square' shows a sailor kissing a stranger on 14 August 1945?
Alfred Eisenstaedt
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.
Q 07What term is the distance from a lens's optical centre to the sensor at infinity focus?
Focal Length
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.
Q 08What do photographers call the period shortly after sunrise or before sunset, prized for its light?
Golden Hour
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.
Q 09Which composition guideline places key elements along lines dividing an image into nine equal parts?
Rule of Thirds
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.
Q 10What does 'ISO' primarily control in digital photography?
Sensor's sensitivity to light
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.
Q 11Which type of lens cannot zoom, often giving sharper images and better low-light results than zooms?
Prime lens
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.
Q 12Which German photographer's 'Rhein II' sold for $4.3 million in 2011, then a record price for a photograph?
Andreas Gursky
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.
Q 13Which photo file format gives photographers the most latitude to rescue exposure and colour afterwards?
RAW
Q 21The term 'camera obscura', ancestor of the modern camera, is Latin for what?
Dark chamber
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.
Q 22Which photography giant grew out of a dry-plate business started in Rochester, New York, in 1880?
Kodak
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.
Q 23What colour is the dim 'safelight' photographers use while making black-and-white prints?
Red
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.
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.
Q 14What technique turns car headlights into light trails and waterfalls into silky mist?
Long Exposure
Long exposure gathers light for seconds or even minutes, so anything that moves smears into a streak while everything that stays still remains sharp.
Q 15Which photographer captured the Great Depression image 'Migrant Mother'?
Dorothea Lange
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.
Q 16The Lumière brothers' Autochrome colour process filtered light through dyed grains of what?
Potato starch
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.
Q 17Oskar Barnack built the original Leica around which existing material?
Cinema film
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.
Q 18What is a polarizing filter mainly used for in photography?
Cutting glare and reflections
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.
Q 19What term covers a sensor's ability to capture both bright highlights and dark shadows in one exposure?
Dynamic Range
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.
Q 20The 'Blue Marble' photograph of the fully lit Earth was taken in December 1972 by which mission's crew?
Apollo 17
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.
Q 24Which company's first instant camera went on sale at a Boston department store in November 1948?
Polaroid
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.
Q 25Under the 'sunny 16' rule, at f/16 in bright sun you set the exposure time to what?
The reciprocal of the ISO
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.
Q 26The Brownie box camera, released in 1900 and originally aimed at children, went on sale for how much?
$1
$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.
Q 27Beyond exposure, what creative effect does shutter speed primarily influence in a photo?
Motion Blur
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.
Q 28Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs proved that a galloping horse does what?
Lifts all four hooves at once
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.
Q 29Which nanny's vast hoard of unseen photographs came to light after a 2007 storage-locker auction in Chicago?
Vivian Maier
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.
Q 30What photographic term describes the range of distance that appears acceptably sharp?
Depth of Field
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.