APERTURE
Aperture is an opening in the camera that can be adjusted to control the amount of light that gets in, and it changes an images depth of field. For instance, an aperture of F-22 is a small aperture, which lets the least amount of light in. This allows a sharp depth of field, allowing you to see the background of an image in great detail. Another example is an aperture of F-5, which is a very wide aperture, which lets in lots of light. This results in a shallow depth of field, meaning the foreground will be in focus and the background will be blurry. This effect is also known as bokeh.
WHITE BALANCE
White balance is the process of removing unrealistic color casts, so that objects which appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. It basically means getting the "true whites" of a photograph.
ISO
In digital photography, ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor/the camera's sensitivity to light. The same principles apply as in film photography – the lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. Higher ISO settings are generally used in darker situations to get faster shutter speeds.
SAIGON EXECUTION
TAKEN BY EDDIE ADAMS
Photographer Eddie Adams was on the streets of Saigon on February 1, 1968, two days after the forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong set off the Tet offensive and swarmed into dozens of South Vietnamese cities. As Adams photographed the chaos, he came upon Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, national police chief, standing alongside a man named Nguyen Van Lem, who was the captain of a terrorist squad who had just killed the family of one of Loan’s friends. Adams thought he was watching the interrogation of a bound prisoner, but as he looked through his viewfinder, Loan calmly raised his .38-caliber pistol and summarily fired a bullet through Lem’s head.
PHAN THI KIM
TAKEN BY NICK UT
On June 8, 1972, South Vietnamese planes dropped a napalm bomb on Trảng Bàng, which had been attacked and occupied by North Vietnamese forces. Kim Phúc joined a group of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers who were fleeing from the Caodai Temple to the safety of South Vietnamese-held positions.
KENT STATE STUDENT KNEELING OVER A SHOOTING VICTIM
TAKEN BY JOHN FILO
The shooting at Kent State University in Ohio lasted 13 seconds. When it was over, four students were dead and nine were wounded. The demonstrators were part of a national wave of student discontent spurred by the new presence of U.S. troops in Cambodia. At the Kent State Commons, protesters assumed that the National Guard troops that had been called to contain the crowds were firing blanks. But when the shooting stopped and students lay dead, it seemed that the war in Southeast Asia had come home.