How Do Cameras Actually Work? 📸

Morning Photographers!

Cameras are kinda weird.

Think about it… You’ve got this magic box that can see a scene like this:

And MAGICALLY capture that scene forever on a piece of paper…

How is that even possible??

Well, It's actually kinda simple lol.

Fundamentally cameras do 2 things:

Focusing and capturing.

What do I mean?

First, focusing.

Let's say you’ve got a little wooden box and an apple.

(The little wooden box is your camera, bear with me)

If you cut a BIG hole into that box the light from the apple scatters too much to be useful.

So the hole has to be kinda small.

Now look, the only light that can get through is aligned with the hole.

And look inside!

The apple is being reflected… upside down!

OK now for capturing.

How do you CAPTURE that upside down apple reflection?

Simple!

Just take a piece of paper…

Then lather it with special chemicals that change brightness based on how much light they receive.

And stick it to the back of the box.

This is how OG cameras used to work.

Pretty cool.

But how does a modern camera work?

Well, fundamentally, the exact same…

Just like 1000 times more complicated lol.

Remember the whole focusing thing we did with the size of the hole in the wooden box?

Modern cameras do the same thing… using something called the aperture.

AKA these fancy spiral door lens thingies:

They can be opened or closed based on how blurry or in focus you want the image to be.

Just like the hole in the box.

Make sense?

Now, we gotta capture that image…

(This is where modern cameras get a little more complex)

Basically instead of using fancy chemicals lathered on some paper, modern cameras use an array of pixels like this:

Each pixel has a red bit, a green bit, and a blue bit.

Those 3 colors can be combined together in varying amounts to create pretty much every single color.

Now, as the light from the apple hits each pixel something called a photodiode records the specific color values for each individual pixel as a small amount of electricity.

The camera then cleverly remembers all the electrical signals for each photodiode and encodes them into a LONG string of 1s and 0s.

Which can be decoded into an image… on screen!

And TADA, you’ve just taken a photo!

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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