Advantage of Digital Photography

When you take a digital photo, your camera automatically sets parameters of the photo session. This is one advantage of digital photography. Both amateur and professional photographers often need to analyze the quality of images depending on parameters they were taken with. An instructor often shows his students the difference in the quality of images taken using various aperture and time of exposure values. A digital camera, as a rule, records the following metadata: date and time of taking the image, lens aperture, exposure time, ISO, flash energy, focal length, and so on. The format of this record is called EXIF.

EXIF Format

EXIF (Exchangeable Image File format) is a standard that allows including additional data within image and audio files. These data are technical parameters, authorship, comments, etc. The EXIF standard was developed for the purpose of improvement of color reproduction of images when printing them out on printers. The first version of the EXIF format was created by JEIDA (Japan Electronic Industry Development Association) in 1995. The EXIF standard is very flexible. It allows, for instance, saving local coordinates obtained from a GPS receiver. The EXIF standard can be extended. As a rule, photo cameras add information specific only to that type of camera. Most modern digital cameras save parameters in the image files.