How does photography work? How do you take a moment in front of you and put it on paper and keep it forever?
In: Technology
All you need is light (which is bouncing off everything all the time), something that’s sensitive to light (such as photographic film or a digital sensor), and a way of controlling how much light falls on the sensitive thing and for how long.
A camera in it’s simplest form, is an empty box with a hole at one end and a light sensitive thing at the other end. You open the hole cover (the shutter) for a brief moment and that lets the right amount of light into the box and onto the sensor. The first cameras just had the hole covered by fabric and the photographer would uncover the hole, time how long it was open, and cover it back up again. It’s exactly the same principle in modern cameras except you’re pressing a button instead of lifting up a curtain.
Lenses help to focus the light into one place on the sensor to get a sharper image, but they’re not vital to actually capturing an image, that’s why you can make homemade “pinhole” cameras.
Your eye, though much more sophisticated than a camera, works in basically the same way. Light enters it through a hole (your pupil) that is controlled as to how open it is by a shutter (your Iris), and falls on light sensitive tissue (your retina) at the back of your eyeball. A camera is really just a man-made replica of an eye.
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