photograph

Pluralphotographs

Formsphotographs, photographing, photographed

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An image produced when light is projected onto a light-sensitive surface such as film or a digital sensor.

   A grainy photograph of the comet appeared on the newspaper's front page.

   The archive holds thousands of photographs from the early space program.

   Similarphoto, picture, image, snapshot

   Note

   The word is built from photo- and -graph, and it has held steady while the technology beneath it changed. The same noun covers an image on a chemically treated plate, on film, or on an electronic CCD receptor. What makes something a photograph is the light-sensitive surface, not the material. That is why scientific writing can set astronomical photographs alongside geological maps and MRI images.

2. 2
   verbtransitive or intransitive

   To capture an image of someone or something using a camera.

   Wildlife teams photograph the migration each spring.

   He learned to photograph in dim conditions without a flash.

   Similarshoot, capture

   Note

   The verb works with or without an object: you can photograph a herd, or simply photograph in dim light. In the passive it often takes an -ing participle naming what the subject was caught doing, as in photographed hugging an officer. It also once served the printing trades. In Philip Gilbert Hamerton's The Graphic Arts (1891), pen drawings are "photographed on wood," meaning transferred onto the block by camera.

3. 3
   verbintransitive

   To come across in a certain way when captured in a photograph.

   Tall buildings photograph poorly without a wide lens.

   She photographs younger than her actual age.

   Note

   Here the grammar flips: the subject is the thing in front of the lens, not the person holding the camera, as it is in the ordinary verb. It almost always takes an adverb of manner, and photographs well is the stock phrase. It applies to things as readily as people: clothes, buildings and faces can all photograph well or badly.

4. 4
   verbfigurativelytransitive

   To fix something permanently in the memory, as if recording it exactly.

   He wanted to photograph the scene in his mind before leaving forever.

   She photographed his face in her memory the night they said goodbye.

   Similaretch, imprint

   Note

   A Victorian figure that treats the mind like the sensitive plate behind the noun. Kipling writes in 1888 that a scene "was photographed on my memory." The idiom favors the passive and the preposition on, picturing an image printed onto a surface. In my mind shifts the picture to something stored inside. Choose on when you want the older, more vivid sense of an impression burned in.

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