Photograph or Picture?

Most people use them interchangeably. But are they really one and the same thing? If you’ll look at the meaning of each word in Wikipedia, you’ll understand how one is different from the other.

• A photograph (often shortened to photo) is an image created by lightfalling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene’s visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see.

• In common usage, an image (from Latin imago) or picture is an artifact, usually two-dimensional, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person. Images may be two-dimensional, such as a photograph, screen display, and as well as a three-dimensional, such as a statue. They may be captured by optical devices—such as cameras, mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. and natural objects and phenomena, such as the human eye or water surfaces.

Or we can put it this way: Picture is something that represents something. The representation does not always have to be tangible as one can have a “mental picture” of an object. Photograph is a representation of a picture that is created specifically on a photographic media. Thus, we can say that all photographs are pictures, but not all pictures are photographs.