Photography vocabulary shows up in almost every image prompt, and about half of it is doing nothing. The half that works describes something you could see in the finished frame. The half that does not describes equipment. The model never held a camera; it learned from pictures and the words attached to them, so it responds to visible consequences, not to gear.

Framing and Angle Do the Heavy Lifting

The two terms worth reaching for first are how close you are and where you are standing. Close-up, medium shot, wide shot, extreme wide — these reliably change how much of the subject fills the frame, and they change it in the direction you expect. Low angle, high angle, eye level and overhead do the same for viewpoint.

Together they decide the emotional register of the picture before any style word is involved. A low-angle close-up and a high-angle wide shot of the same subject are two different statements. If a prompt is going to carry only one camera term, make it one of these.

Worth noting that framing also fixes problems. Hands going wrong in a portrait? A tighter crop removes the question. Too much random clutter in the background? A closer shot solves it more cleanly than any exclusion list.

Lens and Depth of Field Are Real, Numbers Are Not

Depth of field works because it is visible: a blurred background, a sharp subject. Say “shallow depth of field, blurred background” and you will usually get it. Say “f/1.4” and results are far less consistent — the aperture value is a cause, and the model responds to effects.

The same applies to lens choice. “Wide angle” produces recognisable wide-angle behaviour: expanded space, exaggerated perspective, curved edges. “Telephoto” compresses distance and flattens the background. Both work. Specific focal lengths in millimetres work sometimes, mostly for the very common ones, and they add nothing that plain description does not already give you.

Film stock names are a similar story. They sometimes shift colour and grain in a direction that feels right, but describing what you want — warm faded colour, visible grain, slightly crushed blacks — is more predictable and does not depend on the model having absorbed a particular photography vocabulary.

Skip the Body

Camera bodies and brand names are the clearest wasted words in image prompts. Nothing about a picture reveals which body shot it, so the term has no visual consequence to attach to. It survives in prompts because it looks knowledgeable, and it is copied forward endlessly.

Cut it, keep framing and angle, describe blur and light in plain words, and your prompts get shorter and more predictable at once.