how does this work?
In: Physics
You can focus light in two ways. You can use a lens which will bend the light towards the point where you want it to be. You can also use a small hole which narrows the field of view, so that only the light from the object you want to see gets through. This works because everything reflects or emits light in all directions. Narrowing the hole makes it so that less light reflected or emitted from each point gets through.
Now put the hole at the end of a box that doesn’t let any more light in. Because there’s no other light source to overpower the image you can see it projected onto the end of the box. Think about how sunlight coming through a window or open door fills up a room despite the area of the room being much larger than the opening.
Modern cameras use both methods. Because the lens bends the light, it can magnify the image without needing all of that space for the light to spread naturally.
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