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Anonymous
Now, that I'm done with the tea, here's another.
Aperture: This quantity is pretty much meaningless now, as this is now commonly referred to as "White Balance." Apple named a software editing program to draw more 'old school' film photographers (such as the now deceased Henri Cartier-Bresson) into the digital processing age.
Aperture technically refers to the width of the spectrum to which your sensor or film will respond. Furthermore, aperture is not a discrete quantity, but a point on a set of logarithmic curves that indicate the responsiveness of a given film to near infra-red (NIR) that creates a black and white image. You could think of the scale as an uneven curve with a purely reflective material at one end (with an emissivity of 0.00) and a blackbody (with an emissivity of 1.00) at the other. Interestingly, because of atmospheric refraction, the heat island effect, and reflection from the moon (when present) aperture works the same at night as it does during the day, in most cases. Unless it's cloudy or you are somewhere particularly cold, in which case you'll need to be concerned about your Kniffler pin (shutter mechanism sear).
Now because your camera doesn't need you to compute the NIR emissivity of your subject manually anymore, they (the manufacturers) have replaced this term with the more relevant (and easy to understand) "white balance." White balance, or WB, is the camera making a center-weighted evaluative decision about NIR conditions over the scene and then allowing you to make decision about altering the color response of the planar CMOS/CCD array.
This is why when you adjust the white balance that it alters the color on your viewfinder. Complicated, but not really.
Next up, ISO speed.
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