Behind the Lens

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Recommended: History of photography camera

Have you ever wondered how you can pull a phone out of your pocket and instantly snap a picture? How does the camera know, and save exactly what it is pointed at? It all started in the 9th century, when the first cameras were huge rooms with a small pinhole in one of the walls that let light through. This light projected an image on to a wall. This method was called the “camera obscura”, but the problem was that the images couldn’t be saved. Then, in the 1700s, people discovered a silver compound that reacted with light, but the images disappeared soon after taken. It was only in the 1800s, that people figured out a way to use a large box with film, and a small pinhole on one side to take and save an image. Those cameras had a tedious process of developing the film and making copies. Today, cameras are so compact that they can be stored in our pockets. We can take stunning photographs with our phones, and copy them with the click of a button. They can be shared with anyone, and don’t need a dark room to print them. The inner workings and technology put into a simple pocket camera is truly a marvel of technology.
Lens
The lens has two main purposes. The first is to determine the focal length or zoom. The focal length is the distance the lens is away from the sensor. The larger the focal length, the more zoomed in a photo is. So, a 100mm focal length is more zoomed in than a 50mm focal length. It does this by narrowing the stream of light coming into the camera. The other purpose of the lens is to focus light that bounces off other objects into the lens, onto the sensor. If a camera had no lens, all of its images would look like a blur of color mixed together. The lens focuses that light into an organized and non-blurry picture. Th...

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... and cherished for the amazing things they can do so easily. Today, cameras are so abundant and accessible, that anyone can become a photographer. Photography has even become an international sport of capturing an image in an amazing and unique way. Photographers use the settings of the camera and their own imagination to take beautiful and stunning photographs. Ernst Haas says “There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” When you learn how your camera functions and learn to adjust everything to get a great picture, that’s when the real photography starts.

Works Cited

Bellis, Mary. “History of Photography and the Camera” About.com. About.com, Unknown. Web. February 3rd, 2014
Lyon, Dick. “Camera.” wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., January 30th, 2014. Web. February 3rd, 2014

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