If you are planning to buy a digital camera or you have just bought a new digital camera, you might have had the experience of dealers and professionals and friends and total strangers confusing you with different terminologies with respect to digital photography. As the technology advances, matters might turn worse! But help is just a click away. Just go through some good web sites to get a hang of some of the basic photography jargon and you will find it easier to talk photography. Some of the jargon is clarified below:

• ISO: this is a term used to measure the light sensitivity factor of your camera’s sensor. ISO actually represents the International Standards Organization. A range of about 100 to 400 is fairly good enough for most digital cameras. Higher-end cameras give you a wider range, this helps when you are shooting at night. But lower ISO number is quite ok for sharp pictures at daytime.

• Focal length: this term seems familiar but most of us do not know what exactly it means. Focal length of the camera tells you what level of subject magnification your camera lens is capable of. Shorter focal lengths are used when you need a wider angle to shoot. It is actually the span between the focal plane of your camera and the lens and is usually measured in mm.

• Optical zoom: you might have come across terms like 3x or 4x optical zoom. Your camera lens focuses the image on to your camera’s digital sensor. You might need to zoom at times for far away subjects. To vary the focal length as per the requirement, you need the optical zoom option. Zoom in and out for getting the picture you want. Do not confuse this term with digital zoom. The latter is used to increase the pixel size in the middle of the image automatically. But the edge pixels are lost and this is similar to the crop feature on your picture manager on the PC.

• Exposure bracketing: this feature is commonly automatic in most modern and high-end digital cameras and is recommended by professional photographers. To get the perfect picture, you might have to experiment with different levels of exposure. This feature helps you to take multiple and successive shots of a subject at different levels of exposure. You could then decide which picture looks good.