How Do Cameras Even Exist???

cameras make zero sense you press a button and all of a sudden any singular moment in time at any point in space is immortalized in a mirror piece of paper legit crazy what's even crazier is they're actually pretty simple imagine you want to take a picture of a giant banana and all you have is a really big cardboard box well your cardboard box can't take a picture shocking I know this is because the light reflecting from the banana is scattering coming in from all directions but if you close your box and poke a small hole

in it something interesting happens you see your banana projected upside down in the Box what's happening well unlike the open box the scattered light from the banana is no longer coming in from all directions instead only the light that hits right in this little hole can come in and that looks like this the light from the top of the banana perfectly gets in the hole going downward and the banana Frick and the bottom perfectly gets in the hole going upward this gives you an upside down projection cool beans but how do we save that projection

as a picture well if we take some paper slather it with some chemicals that really don't like light and change brightness based on how much light it receives then tape that magic paper to your cardboard box wait a while take it out nice but this method is just a little bit outdated so how do digital cameras like a DSLR take a photo well the process is actually pretty similar only entirely different there are three big components to a DSLR camera the aperture the shutter and the black magic sensor step one the aperture this is the

stuff you find inside the lens the lens has little glass disc stuff called lenses that basically focuses the light rays into what's called a focal point remember that it's important the aperture itself is a Star Wars blast door looking thing this is similar to the hole from the cardboard box example if you make the blast door smaller less light can come in and you get a darker photo open the blast door up more light can come in and you get a brighter photo but it also controls the depth of field or in other words makes

some stuff blurry and some stuff not how the freck does that work well remember how I was talking about a focal point from earlier well if an object is in perfect Focus by the time the light from set object hits the sensor the light is singular to one point and this can depend on distance and the blast door for example say I have an ultra rare vintage attack armor Batman action figure right here and an apple 3 ft in front of it if I adjust the apperture to make it so the apple has a perfect

focal point since the Batman is further its light is going to start scattering again before it hits the sensor making it blurry now if I adjust the aperture to make it so less light can come in the Batman now reaches its focal point once it reaches the sensor but now the Apple reaches the sensor too early also making it slightly blurry but the sensor isn't just right behind the aperture because then you would have no way of getting a preview of the image so what's in between these two things step two the shutter the shutter

is right behind what's called a mirror box which is basically a scaled down super precise mirror room that you'd see at a fair when the light that you allow in from the aperture enters the mirror box it reflects from these three mirrors to enter where you put your eye but you'll notice whenever you you take a picture on a DSLR camera it goes black why does this happen this is because that first mirror is actually a trapo sort of thing so when you click the button the mirror flips up and the light is allowed through

to the shutter what the freak is a shutter the shutter is basically a curtain when you take a picture the curtain drops and allows light to pass through to the sensor but the user gets to decide how long the curtain drops for and how much light is let through this is called shutter speed because it's how fast the shutter drops for the shutter speed can be super long multiple seconds giving a long exposure photo because the sensor is getting more exposure to light or it can be a thousandths of a second by flashing one curtain

down while a second curtain from the top also comes down this allows a very little amount of Lights to get to the sensor okay that's cool all but how on Earth can a sensor sense step three the sensor kind of like a screen an image sensor is made up of pixels Millions upon millions of them but what do they do well pretty much just the exact opposite of the screen there's three layers to the sensor the micro lens the color filter and the photo diode all right let's Mis Frizzle this thing and just look at

one single Pixel this is a red pixel there are three colors of pixels being red green and blue which are three colors that can make up any color this one's red the micro lens is exactly what you'd think it is it's just a really small lens it focuses the light beams to the color filter if the pixel is a red pixel then the color filter only allows red light to pass through this is like if you were to shine a flashlight over a red window that's pretty much what the color filter does so if you

take a picture of a red apple on a green background the red pixels where the apple is are going to receive a lot of light while the blue and green pixels where the apple is will receive a very little amount of light but on the part that receives the green background the green pixels are going to receive a lot of light while the blue and red pixels will not but still even when filtering how do we record that light the photo diode this thing is basically just a mini solar panel it will generate a certain

amount of electricity depending on how much light hits it so if a lot of light hits it the photo diode is going to make a lot of electricity and if it makes a lot of electricity that pixel that's assigned to display the specific sensor is also going to get a lot of electricity and in turn be brighter so back to our example with the Apple it's going to be red because the red pixels are getting more electricity than the green or blue pixels in that area then your camera saves how much electricity should go to

each pixel by representing the voltage per pixel as ones and zeros congrats you just took a picture but that picture actually is is n free definitely not in this economy it's going to cost you one subscribe and I'll just flip the screen around there for you so yeah