Project Educate: Photography ABCs [Part Five]

R

is for

Rear Curtain Sync

Rear curtain sync is one of the standard flash synchronization modes, or points at which the flash fires. In rear curtain sync, the camera coincides the firing of the flash with the moment at which the shutter begins to close. With a relatively slow exposure and moving subject, this creates a look of a trail of blur, with a sharply-focused subject at the end.

S

is for

Single Lens Reflex

Single lens reflex, or SLR, cameras are a topic that most of you are probably familiar with, but it's still one that I'm approached about often by people wondering what exactly it means.

In a single lens reflex camera, the image you see through the viewfinder is the same as the one the sensor is receiving from the lens; light comes in through the lens, and is bounced to the viewfinder by a pentaprism or mirrors. Obviously, they're meant for taking pictures with the camera at eye level, since you need the camera on your face to focus and frame the shot accurately. The advantage of an SLR over a viewfinder camera - where you're seeing through a second lens - is that SLRs lend themselves more readily to interchangeable lenses and zoom lenses (since a viewfinder would need to also be changed to correct for focal length), and don't have parallax errors - differences in the relative placement of two objects as the distance or focus changes.

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T

is for

Twin Lens Reflex

If you don't want the long exposure of a pinhole camera and can't afford a 12mm-lensed film camera like a Voigtlander Bessa-L, but still don't want to focus a camera at eye-level for fear of making your subject uneasy, a TLR - twin lens reflex camera is right for you! The fact that they look retro-badass doesn't hurt their popularity either.

A TLR camera has two lenses - one to take the photo with and one to focus with. The lenses are vertically arranged and coupled, meaning that when you focus the top lens it also focuses the bottom lens that exposes the film. Instead of a viewfinder behind the camera, TLRs usually have a pop-up hood with light through the top lens being sent to it by a mirror, allowing you to frame and focus while holding the camera at waist-level.

U

is for

Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet radiation is not visible to the naked eye, but it can cause defects in photos - particularly haze on distantly-focused images and bluish tint on images taken at high altitudes. UV filters fix those skews, and are fairly cheap and very common - a lot of photographers keep one on their lens just to protect the optical glass from scratches.

Thumbs unrelated, but purple.

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