An Introduction of the Camera.

Hi all! Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but I promise (for real this time 😁 lol) that I’ll be posting at least once a week from now on.

I recently started a book called Science For The Curious Photographer : An Introduction To The Science Of Photography by Charles S. Johnson, Jr. (It looks like the below picture-) for a class and it’s really cool! But for this class, I have to write a summary/explanation of each chapter and that is graded instead of having a test or something similar. So I had a bit of a epiphany moment, and it went something like this: “ OOOOOOOH I COULD PUT EACH CHAPTER SUMMARY ON MY PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG AND THEN IF ANYONE READING IT HAS ANY OTHER QUESTIONS, THEY CAN JUST DM ME OR COMMENT THEIR QUESTIONS!!! WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS SOONER?!” So yeah lol. There is my epiphany😂

I actually do not have a chapter summary of the first two chapters as they are really just summaries of the book themselves so my teacher excused them. So here is Chapter Three summary!!

Hope you enjoy! If you have any questions, suggestions, or additions, please feel free to let me know!! You can email me directly at meghanalissasphotography@gmail.com or you can put it in the comments. Thank you!

Ps. I do occasionally add some things that I do not have on my essay for my teacher, such as in Chapter Four Summary that will be coming next Saturday, I say “Why you may ask? Well let me tell you!” Obviously, no teacher would accept that, although they might laugh before they crossed it out and took off points for it. (Trust me, I’ve tried lol)

An Introduction To The Camera: Chapter Three

A camera is essentially a box that is light proof to that contains a lens and a light sensor. Early in photography, you could buy an enlarger for photographs but the only professional way to take a large photo was to use a large camera. Most cameras nowadays are automated and are digital, not film. Even the current film cameras are just point and shoot, not adjusting a million different tiny little details to get a single picture. In fact, many people today currently only own a smartphone with a camera on it and not an actual dslr, slr, or point and shoot camera. After all, why buy a large camera when the one that mostly fits in your pocket has relatively high resolution and has many different options for settings? The lens is characterized by aperture and focal length, and it is one of the most important elements of the camera. For easiness, in Chapter 3 of this book, the author only considers a thin, simple lens. In the past, lenses were very hard to come by because they were very hard to make do to how difficult it was to get the light and colors focused on the right spot on the lens. Fortunately for us, modern technology has assisted a great deal and easily makes lens designs for camera producers now. What is F-stop? F-stop can also be written as f/N and is basically how shallow or how deep you want your picture to appear. In other words, how blurred you want the background to be. The bigger the F-stop, the less blur there is. The smaller the F-stop, the more blur there is. Why is my photo grainy sometimes but other times it’s very clear? Well it can depend on your lens, but it also comes from the pixels in your image! This is also called resolution. The more pixels you have, the higher in resolution your picture is because if you have, say, a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel image, that means there are 25,000,000 pixels so they are really small! However, the fewer pixels you have, the lower the resolution is going to be, and as such more grainy. Say, if you have a 200 x 200 pixel image, that’s only 40,000 pixels so they are going to be much bigger than a 5,000 x 5,000 pixel image. ISO can also affect the resolution of your photo, as your photo being too dark or too bright can make it blurry and grainy!