How Do Cameras Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Rebecca Guenther, with www.M5A1photography.com, and I'm going to talk to you about how cameras work. Now, the first camera was called the camera obscura. It was essentially a large room painted black, with the windows covered over and a tiny little pinhole. And what happened was the light came in; it was reflected on the other side of the room. The camera obscura was a small box that illustrators used as a camera only the film was their piece of paper. So, it was a box, which is essentially now a pinhole camera, with a tiny little hole in it that would project the light in and the image would show up where they could see it and then sketch whatever they wanted to. This evolved over time, obviously, to a point where glass was used coated with chemicals, and that was the film and the image. There was no paper involved in that, and it was a one, one, that's it; there's just one, like a Polaroid. Then, of course, there is Polaroid, and then there's SLR, which means sing single lens reflex cameras, and nowadays there's digital. Now, SLR's and the digital SLR's are essentially the same. They are, they look essentially like this; sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, and you have a lens on the front which can be focused, and you can adjust the aperture. And then, when the lens comes off as it does with digital or regular SLR's you can see the inside of the camera has a mirror. Now, this mirror, when the light comes in, bounces the light up to the eyepiece where you look through, and that's how you see what the camera is going to be taking a picture of. When you push this button this mirror flips up and exposes either the film plane or the digital sensor plane that is on the back of the camera. That is where the image is captured. After this happens the mirror flips back down and you either roll the film forward, or the camera knows to move onto the next digital image number, and you're ready to capture your next image. And that's how a camera works."