The vocabulary

Words that describe a camera

• Bokeh — the quality of the out-of-focus parts of a photograph. Asking for it means a shallow depth of field: a sharp subject against a background dissolved into soft circles of light.
• Tilt-shift — a lens movement that throws the top and bottom of the frame out of focus. The side effect is that real places look like scale models, which is why it is almost always used for exactly that.
• Long exposure — the shutter stays open, so anything that moved becomes a streak and anything still stays sharp. Water turns to mist, headlights turn to ribbons.
• Golden hour — the hour after sunrise and before sunset. Low, warm, directional light with long shadows. It is the least technical word here and the most reliable.

Words that take a thing apart

• Exploded view — the parts of an object separated along the axes they assemble on, floating apart but still in order. It shows how something is put together.
• Cutaway — the object is sliced open and you see inside, with the outer shell still present around the cut. A building cutaway keeps the walls; it just removes one of them.
• X-ray — internal structure showing through a translucent outer shell, usually cold and high-contrast. Needs a subject with layers: a boot, a controller, a shoe sole. A face gives you a skull and nothing else.
• Wireframe — the object reduced to the lines of its geometry, with no surfaces. Reads as engineering, planning, or the inside of a 3D program.
• Blueprint — a technical drawing: white lines on a blue ground, annotations, dimensions, projection views. It is a document, not a picture of a thing.

Words that set a viewpoint

• Isometric — a projection where the three axes are drawn at equal angles and nothing shrinks with distance. Parallel lines stay parallel. It is the look of strategy games and infographic cities.
• Top-down / flat lay — the camera directly above, objects arranged on a surface.
• Knolling — flat lay with a rule: every object aligned to 90 degrees and evenly spaced, arranged as if catalogued. It is the difference between a tidy desk and a museum plate.

Words that change the material

• Claymation — the subject remade in modelling clay, with visible fingerprints and soft, slightly imperfect edges. The imperfection is the signal.
• Low poly — built from a small number of flat triangles, so curves become facets. A style of scarcity that reads as deliberate.
• Diorama — a small scene in a contained space: a box, a drawer, a suitcase. The container is part of the picture and is what makes the scale legible.

The 12 style families

Every command in the catalog sits in exactly one family. The counts are the real ones, and they say something about what people actually want pictures for.

• Futuristic & fantasy — 68 commands. The largest family by a wide margin: roughly one in five of every image command anyone has collected sends the picture somewhere that does not exist.
• Product, branding & content — 51 commands. The commercial half of the catalog: packaging, mockups, advertising treatments.
• Materials & handmade — 51 commands. Remake the subject out of something else: marble, clay, paper, glass, yarn.
• Nature & places — 30 commands. Send the subject somewhere real.
• Art & illustration — 29 commands. Drawn or painted by an implied hand rather than captured.
• Interfaces & data — 22 commands. Turn the subject into a screen, a chart, a dashboard.
• Photography & film — 19 commands. Point a specific camera at it.
• Effects — 16 commands. Treatments that alter the image rather than the subject.
• Technical & structure — 14 commands. Take it apart and label it.
• Learning & diagrams — 11 commands. Explain something with a picture.
• 3D & miniatures — 5 commands. Shrink it, or rebuild it as an object.
• Architecture & spaces — 4 commands. Put it in a room.

A note on the family names

The families are filing labels, not a theory. They exist so that 320 commands can be browsed in twelve pages instead of one very long one, and so that a page about a coherent group of commands can be found by search.

The 68-command Futuristic & fantasy family is the honest weak point of that scheme: it is less a family than a drawer. Splitting it is on the list.