What is photography? How exactly do cameras work? Funny you should ask such questions because I have done some research on the subject, and perhaps you may learn something very interesting in this post!
Traditional cameras, as I will call them, which are the ones that came before digital cameras, (if you can remember so very long ago) created images on photographic film.
When the light came through the lens when the trigger button was pressed, the light-sensitive surface of the film was exposed to the light and an image is created on the film.
Later, the film can be processed and chemically developed onto paper so you can cherish your memory. Nowadays, everyone from amateurs to professional paparazzi use digital cameras.
Digital cameras are truly a magnificent advance of the modern age. Digital cameras function differently from traditional cameras. They have an electronic image sensor that has an array of pixels.
When they are exposed to light, the light leaves the sensor with a charge at each pixel, and this data is collected and stored by the computer that is the digital camera.
The data can be read by a computer and display a visible image on a screen.
With traditional cameras, before there were color photos, all photos were black and white. Remarkably, we were able to create color photographs as early as 1861!
A physicist named James Clerk Maxwell created the concept of using red, green, and blue filters to create 3 different impressions with black and white photos and later a photographer could attempt to recreated the colors that were in the image at the time the photo was taken.
A photochemist named Hermann Vogel was able to add green, yellow, and red sensitivity to photo-sensitive materials using dye sensitization in 1873, which was not done up to that time.
Cameras are capable of taking pictures that are of light that is outside the range of human eye-sight! Since the 1960s we have been able to take pictures in ultraviolet or infrared.
These words are describing the light that is outside the range of visible light. Electromagnetic waves have a long range of wavelengths. Radio waves have long wavelengths, but travel at the speed of light.
Infrared waves have a smaller wavelength than microwaves, but larger than visible light. The same concept applies to ultraviolet light, except the wavelength is even smaller than that of visible light.
We can create visible images of these electromagnetic waves which is truly extraordinary. I really love science and I hope that you enjoyed this post as much as I did writing it!
Have fun photographing, and remember everything that goes into making that photo, when you push the button!