Photography lingo is the informal language photographers use with each other: words like chimping, fast glass, nifty fifty, blinkies and grip and grin. Almost none of it is in a camera manual, yet you will meet it in every forum thread, video, workshop and wedding crew, and a sentence such as “I chimped, saw blinkies, so I stopped down a third and shot it on the nifty fifty” is unreadable until someone translates it.
This page is that translation, for the slang, nicknames, sayings and shorthand. The technical vocabulary (aperture, ISO, white balance and the rest) has its own plain-English list in the photography terms cheat sheet, and the photography glossary has a full page for each technical term. Here, each slang word gets what it means, where it comes from when that is known, how it is used (including when it is a dig), and a link to the page that teaches the idea underneath it.
How photographer slang works
Most of the slang falls into four kinds, and knowing which kind a word is tells you how to read it.
- Nicknames for gear. Glass, nifty fifty, holy trinity. They are shorthand, and they are usually affectionate.
- Names for habits. Chimping, spray and pray, pixel peeping, GAS. These are almost always a little teasing. Whether the habit is actually bad depends on when you do it, and this page says so for each one.
- Words for light and results. Blown, crushed, tack sharp, bokeh. They describe what is in the picture, and each one points at a real technical idea.
- Working words from jobs. Grip and grin, Uncle Bob, TFP, shoot and burn, flag. They come from newspapers, weddings, studios and film sets, and they tell you something about how that kind of work runs.
Two things trip people up. First, the same word can mean different things in different rooms: “CC” in a forum might mean comments and critique, in an editing chat color correction, and on a license Creative Commons. Second, slang drifts. A word that started as a put-down (chimping) is now said by working professionals about themselves with no shame at all. Read the room, and when a word is unclear, ask. Photographers like explaining their jargon.
Lens and gear slang
Glass. Lenses. “Invest in glass, not bodies” is old advice that still holds up for many people: a good lens often outlives several camera bodies. Camera lenses explained covers the types and what each is for.
Fast glass, fast lens. A lens with a wide maximum aperture, such as f/1.4 or f/1.8. “Fast” has nothing to do with how quickly it focuses: a wide aperture lets in more light, so you can use a faster shutter speed in the same light. A lens that only opens to f/5.6 is called slow. Fast lens vs slow lens covers what you gain and what it costs.
Nifty fifty. A 50mm prime lens, usually f/1.8, small, light and inexpensive. It earned the nickname because it is often the cheapest way to get a fast lens and soft backgrounds. On a full frame camera it is a normal lens; on a crop sensor camera with a 1.5x or 1.6x crop factor it frames like a 75mm or 80mm lens, which suits head and shoulders portraits. The 50mm lens guide goes further.
Think you know your fifty? The 50mm lens quiz checks what the nickname is hiding.
The holy trinity. Three zoom lenses that between them cover almost every focal length a working photographer needs: usually a 14-24mm, a 24-70mm and a 70-200mm, each with a constant f/2.8 aperture. You will also hear “the f/4 trinity” for the lighter, slower versions. See zoom lenses for what constant aperture means.
Kit lens. The zoom sold in a box with a camera body. Kit lenses are usually slow (f/3.5-5.6 is common) and are often sharper than their reputation. The kit lens page says more about them, and variable aperture lenses explains what the two numbers mean.
GAS (gear acquisition syndrome). The urge to buy one more lens, body or bag in the belief it will make the pictures better. Photographers borrowed the term from guitar players. It is said with a grin, usually about oneself. The honest test before buying anything: name a specific photo you could not take with what you have. If buying used, the used gear checklist helps.
Bokeh. From the Japanese boke, meaning blur or haze. It describes the quality of the out-of-focus areas, how smooth or busy they look, not how much blur there is. “Bokeh balls” are the discs that out-of-focus points of light become. Say it “BOH-keh” or “BOH-kay”; both are heard. What is bokeh shows what makes it smooth or harsh.
Slang you hear behind the camera
Wide open. Shooting at the lens’s largest aperture, the smallest f-number it has. On an f/1.8 lens, wide open is f/1.8. Stopping down means closing the aperture to a bigger f-number, which lets in less light and deepens the depth of field. The stop down page covers when and why.
A stop. A doubling or halving of light. “Give it a stop” means make it twice as bright, by any route: one f-number wider, a shutter speed twice as long, or double the ISO. “A third of a stop” is the smallest step most cameras click through. The f-stop page explains why the f-numbers run 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4.
Sunny 16. A rule for exposure without a meter: in bright sun, set f/16 and a shutter speed of 1 over your ISO, so 1/100 at ISO 100 (or the nearest setting, 1/125). The Sunny 16 rule page has the versions for cloud and shade.
Chimping. Checking the screen after every shot. The word was in use among press photographers by 1999; the usual story is that people make little “ooh, ooh” noises at the screen, like a chimpanzee. It was coined as a dig, and chimping during a fleeting moment really does cost pictures. But checking exposure and focus once at the start of a scene is good practice, and plenty of professionals do it without apology. Chimp at the lulls, not at the peak of the action.
Blinkies. The highlight warning: on playback, areas with no detail left flash black and white. If the sky is blinking, it is probably blown. The highlight warning page shows how to turn it on and how much to trust it.
Sky blinking every time you shoot into the light? Clipping explains what has actually been lost and when you can get it back.
Spray and pray. Holding the shutter down in a long burst and hoping one frame works. The phrase is borrowed from firearms slang. Shooting bursts is not the problem (sports and wildlife photographers do it on purpose, timed to the action); shooting bursts instead of watching and timing is. See burst mode for using it well.
Keepers and keeper rate. The frames worth keeping, and what share of a shoot they are. A wildlife photographer may be happy with a low keeper rate; a portrait session should have a high one. Sorting keepers from the rest is culling.
Tack sharp, soft, OOF. Tack sharp means the focus point is crisp at full size. Soft means a little blurry, from focus, motion or the lens. OOF is “out of focus”, sometimes on purpose. How to take sharp photos goes through the causes one by one.
Dragging the shutter. Using a slow shutter speed with flash so the flash freezes the subject while the background light has time to register. Without it, flash pictures at night get black backgrounds. See dragging the shutter.
Golden hour, blue hour, magic hour. The low, warm light shortly after sunrise and before sunset, and the cool, even light just before sunrise and after sunset. “Magic hour” is the film industry’s name for the same window. See golden hour photography and blue hour photography.
Zoom with your feet (sneaker zoom). Walking closer or further away instead of turning the zoom ring. It is more than a joke: moving changes the perspective, the relationship of near and far things, and zooming does not.
Slang from the edit
SOOC (straight out of camera). A picture shown as the camera made it, with no editing. A JPEG straight out of camera has still been processed, by the camera, with its own contrast, color and sharpening; a raw file has not. Raw vs JPEG explains the difference.
Pixel peeping. Inspecting photos at 100% or more to judge sharpness and noise. Useful when testing a lens or checking focus; a trap when it replaces looking at the whole picture at the size people will see it. See pixel peeping.
Blown, blown out. Highlights pushed to pure white with no detail. Crushed is the shadow version: shadows pushed to pure black. Both are kinds of clipping, and blown highlights are usually the harder to rescue. Overexposure covers how to avoid them.
Overcooked, crunchy, HDR halos. Words for an edit pushed too far: too much contrast and clarity (crunchy), oversaturated color (overcooked), and bright or dark glows around edges where a tone-mapping tool fought the sky (halos). Over-editing photos shows how to spot it in your own work.
Dodge and burn. Lightening (dodging) and darkening (burning) parts of a picture. The words come from the darkroom, where you held back light from part of the print with a tool on a wire, or gave extra light through a hole in a card. Dodging and burning shows how it is done today.
Dust bunnies. Dark soft spots in the same place on every frame, from dust on the sensor. They show most in plain skies at small apertures like f/16, because the narrow cone of light casts a crisper shadow of the dust. Remove them in editing with spot removal; stop them at the source with sensor cleaning.
PP. Post-processing, the editing done after the shoot. “Heavy PP” is not always a criticism; it depends on the style.
Slang from shoots, sets and clients
Grip and grin. The staged handshake picture at an award, check presentation or ribbon cutting: two people gripping hands and grinning at the camera. It is newspaper and press office slang, and it is usually said with weariness. The fix is to get the required frame fast, then look for a real moment. Event photography covers how.
Uncle Bob. At a wedding, the guest with a big camera who shoots over the hired photographer’s shoulder, pulls the couple’s eyes away and sometimes steps into the aisle. Wedding photographers use the name for any such guest, whoever they are. See wedding photography for how professionals handle the formal photos with a crowd of cameras around.
Second shooter. The second photographer at a wedding or event, covering the angles the lead cannot. See the second shooter guide.
TFP (time for prints, or trade for photos). A shoot where nobody is paid: the model gives their time, the photographer gives the pictures, and both use them in a portfolio. Agree in writing who can use the photos and where, and get a signed model release.
Shoot and burn. A business model where the photographer shoots, does little or no editing, and hands over every file (once burned onto a disc, hence the name). It is usually said about competitors. Photo delivery and client galleries covers how delivery works now.
Flag, gobo, scrim, kicker. Studio and film-set words. A flag is a black panel that blocks light from part of the scene. A gobo is a cut-out placed in front of a light to throw a shaped shadow, like window bars on a wall. A scrim is a sheet of translucent material that softens light, much like a large diffuser. A kicker is a light from behind and to the side that skims the edge of the subject, a kind of rim light.
Catchlight. The small reflection of a light in a subject’s eyes. Portrait photographers say “get the catchlights” the way others say “get it sharp”. See catchlight.
Hearing words like clamshell, loop and Rembrandt on set? Lighting setup diagrams draws each one from above so you can see where the lights go.
Shorthand you will see online
Forums, comment threads and camera menus run on abbreviations. These are the ones you will meet most:
- C&C: Stands for: Comments and critique. What it means in practice: “Please tell me what works and what does not.” See critique forums.
- SOOC: Stands for: Straight out of camera. What it means in practice: No editing after the camera made it.
- OOF: Stands for: Out of focus. What it means in practice: Blurred by focus, sometimes on purpose (“OOF background”).
- PP: Stands for: Post-processing. What it means in practice: Editing.
- IQ: Stands for: Image quality. What it means in practice: A loose word for sharpness, noise and color together.
- DOF: Stands for: Depth of field. What it means in practice: How much of the scene, near to far, looks sharp.
- BBF: Stands for: Back button focus. What it means in practice: Focus moved off the shutter button. See back button focus.
- OCF: Stands for: Off-camera flash. What it means in practice: A flash fired away from the camera. See off-camera flash.
- BIF: Stands for: Birds in flight. What it means in practice: A subject category, and a test of autofocus.
- FF: Stands for: Full frame. What it means in practice: A sensor the size of a 35mm film frame. See full frame vs crop sensor.
- ND: Stands for: Neutral density. What it means in practice: A grey filter that cuts light. See ND filter.
- EXIF: Stands for: Exchangeable image file format. What it means in practice: The settings saved inside the file. See EXIF data.
Photographers also have names for themselves: photog (common and neutral), shutterbug (an enthusiast, a little old fashioned), and tog, which some photographers use happily and others dislike. If in doubt, say photographer.
Sayings that carry real advice
A few phrases get repeated because they compress a whole way of working into a line.
- “f/8 and be there.” Usually credited to Weegee, the New York press photographer, though nobody has pinned down exactly when he said it. The meaning: set something reliable and spend your attention on being in the right place. f/8 gives enough depth of field to forgive small focus errors with the lenses press photographers carried.
- “The decisive moment.” The English title of Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s 1952 book. It names the instant when the shape of a scene and its meaning come together, and it is why street photographers talk about waiting rather than hunting. Zone focusing is one way they get ready for it.
- “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Attributed to Robert Capa. Photographers quote it to mean get physically closer, and also closer to your subject’s life.
Common mistakes with photography slang
- Thinking bokeh means a lot of blur. It means the quality of the blur. Two lenses at the same aperture can give the same amount of blur with very different bokeh.
- Thinking a fast lens focuses fast. Fast means a wide maximum aperture. Focus speed is a separate thing.
- Mixing up stopping down and opening up. Stopping down means a smaller opening and a bigger f-number, so f/2.8 to f/8. “Open up” is the opposite.
- Believing the lens does the “compression”. The flattened look people call telephoto compression comes from standing far away; a long lens just frames it tightly. The Try this section below lets you see it for yourself.
- Taking SOOC to mean unprocessed. Every JPEG has been processed by the camera. SOOC means unedited by a person, nothing more.
- Treating every put-down as a rule. Chimping, bursts and pixel peeping are all fine at the right moment. The slang mocks the habit, not the tool.
Try this: earn five slang words in ten minutes
The fastest way to own these words is to make the thing each one names. Take a camera or phone outside, find one subject with sky behind it (a tree, a lamp post, a person who agrees), and work through this list in ten minutes:
- Wide open. Set your smallest f-number, or your phone’s portrait mode, and shoot the subject close up.
- Stopped down. Same frame at f/8 or f/11. Compare the backgrounds: that is the depth of field difference, and the look of the blur in the first frame is the bokeh.
- Blinkies. Turn on the highlight warning, play the frames back, and see whether the sky blinks. Shoot again a stop darker and check.
- Zoom with your feet. Fill the frame with the subject twice: once by zooming from where you stand, once by walking closer at a wide setting. Compare how big the background looks.
- Chimp once, on purpose. Check the first frame of each step for exposure and focus, then shoot the rest without looking.
How to judge it: lay the frames side by side and, for each pair, say in one sentence what changed and why, using the word. If you can explain why the background shrank when you walked closer, and why the second sky stopped blinking, the words are yours.
Wondering why the background looked smaller when you walked closer and bigger when you zoomed? Lens compression explains what distance does that zoom cannot.
Photography lingo FAQ
What is the difference between photography lingo and photography terms?
Terms are the formal vocabulary in manuals and courses: aperture, ISO, exposure compensation. Lingo is what photographers actually say to each other, often a nickname or joke built on top of a term, like fast glass for a wide-aperture lens. The terms cheat sheet covers the formal side.
Why is it called chimping?
The usual explanation is the “ooh, ooh” noises photographers make while looking at the back of the camera, which people likened to a chimpanzee. Press photographers were using the word by 1999, and nobody is credited with coining it.
Is “tog” an insult?
Not by design. It is a shortening of photographer, used widely in some countries and forums. Some photographers find it grating, so in a professional setting “photographer” is the safe choice.
What does GAS mean in photography?
Gear acquisition syndrome: the pull to keep buying equipment in the hope it will improve your pictures. The term came over from musicians. Most photographers who use it are joking about themselves.
What does “grip and grin” mean?
It is the posed handshake photo at an award or event, with both people smiling at the camera. Publications still need it, so event photographers take it quickly and then look for more natural pictures of the same people.
Where can I look up a word that is not on this page?
For technical words, the photography glossary has a page for each one. For slang, ask: in a forum or on a shoot, someone will almost always explain, and you will probably learn the story behind the word too.