Photography

Photography is the art, practice, and process of creating images by recording light, usually with a camera on a light-sensitive medium or electronic sensor.

Camera lens: An optical assembly that focuses light to form an image on a camera’s recording surface. Its focal length and aperture shape the image before it reaches the recording medium.
Camera obscura: An optical device that projects an image of a scene through a small opening onto an opposite surface. This pre-photographic device supplied the projected image that early experimenters sought to preserve.
Composition (visual arts): The arrangement of visual elements within an image or artwork. Framing and placement determine how photographic subjects relate within the image.
Photojournalism: The reporting of news and public events through photographs. It uses photographs as evidence and narrative in journalism.
Painting: The practice of applying pigment to a surface to create images or other visual forms. Unlike photography’s light-recording process, painting constructs images through deliberate marks.
Exposure: The amount of light reaching a camera’s recording medium, determined by aperture, shutter time, and sensitivity. Exposure controls how bright the recorded image becomes and which details remain visible.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce: A French inventor who made the earliest surviving permanent camera photograph in the 1820s. His heliograph established that a camera image could be fixed permanently.
Focal length: The distance that characterizes how strongly a lens converges light, affecting image scale and angle of view. It changes perspective effects and how much of a scene fits in the frame.
Documentary photography: Photography that records people, places, and events to describe social or historical reality. It uses sustained visual records to make subjects and conditions visible.
Photorealism: An art movement that creates paintings or drawings resembling high-resolution photographs. It imitates photography’s appearance without recording light through a camera.

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