photographing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act or process of capturing an image with a camera.

   The photographing of endangered species demands patience and respect for the animals.

   Strict rules govern the photographing of artworks inside the museum.

   Similarphotography

   Note

   Unlike the gerund, this noun can be counted and made plural: photographings. Timothy Morton's Being Ecological (2018) pairs photographings with hammerings to make a point: separate acts of recording a thing are not the thing itself. The plural treats each act as its own event. In the singular the noun usually takes the and an of-phrase, as in the photographing of artworks.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of photograph.

   The journalist was photographing the protest when the police arrived.

   He spent the morning photographing rare orchids in the greenhouse.

   Note

   Here one spelling does two grammatical jobs. After be it builds the progressive (she was photographing the protest); in subject or object position it is the gerund (photographing orchids takes patience). It can carry any sense of the verb, from the intransitive one of appearing in a photograph to the figurative fixing of a scene in memory. Where a determiner or a plural appears, the word has become the noun for the act.

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