Hidden information in digital camera photo

What all information does my photo store?

 Have you ever thought that it is not only the colors and light that your camera captures when it takes a picture? Of course, capturing the information about colors and light intensity is the bread and butter of any camera, but a typical pocket camera captures much more information about the photo when it clicks it. The information on colors and light itself is kept in relation to each pixel with numerous attributes, but we are not talking here about the image technology – that is very complex. Camera, in addition, contains information that you can use for learning the required settings and other aspects of digital photography. For example, you would be interested in knowing which camera was used for taking that photo... what were the shutter speed and aperture... whether flash was used, and if so what was its intensity... and so on. It is easy to get this information from a digital camera photo. Let’s tell how:

What we did was to start Irfanview, a simple but very useful picture viewing software that has some editing capabilities also. You can download it for free from here.

We opened a picture taken from an ordinary digital camera. We then went to the Image menu and then information sub-menu.

The first screen that came out gave us a lot of information about the picture and when we went to the ‘EXIF info’ menu within this screen, it gave us enormous information about the camera and the numerous settings used by the camera while taking this picture!