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MODULE 8: Essential Parts of Camera

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LESSON PROPER

What is Camera?
A camera is a hardware device that takes photographs and consists of a lightproof box with
photosensitive film or plate in the box. When a picture is taken, the camera's shutter opens and closes,
exposing the photosensitive film with light recording the image onto the film.

PARTS OF CAMERA
Finding your way around the controls and functions on your mirrorless camera is your first step to
photography beyond simple point-and-shoot. Here’s our guide to the essential parts of the camera and
what they do.

Lens – The lens is one of the most vital parts of a

camera. The light enters through the lens, and this is
where the photo process begins. Lenses can be either
fixed permanently to the body or interchangeable. They
can also vary in focal length, aperture, and other
details.

Viewfinder – The viewfinder can be found on all

DSLRs and some models of digital compacts. On
DSLRs, it will be the main visual source for image-
taking, but many of today’s digital compacts have
replaced the typical viewfinder with an LCD screen.

Body – The body is the main portion of the camera,

and bodies can be a number of different shapes and
sizes. DSLRs tend to be larger bodied and a bit
heavier, while there are other consumer cameras that
are a conveniently smaller size and even able to fit into
a pocket.

Shutter Release - The shutter release button is the

mechanism that “releases” the shutter and therefore
enables the ability to capture the image. The length of
time the shutter is left open or “exposed” is determined
by the shutter speed.
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Aperture – The aperture affects the image’s

exposure by changing the diameter of the lens
opening, which controls the amount of light reaching
the image sensor. Some digital compacts will have a
fixed aperture lens, but most of today’s compact
cameras have at least a small aperture range.

What is Aperture?

Aperture can be defined

as the opening in a lens through
which light passes to enter the
camera. It is an easy concept to
understand if you just think about
how your eyes work. As you
move between bright and dark
environments, the iris in your
eyes either expands or shrinks,
controlling the size of your pupil.

In photography, the
“pupil” of your lens is called aperture.
You can shrink or enlarge the size of the aperture to allow more or less light to reach your camera sensor.

Aperture can add dimension to your photos by controlling depth of field. At one extreme, aperture
gives you a blurred background with a beautiful shallow focus effect. This is very popular for portrait
photography.

At the other extreme, it will give you sharp photos from the nearby foreground to the distant
horizon. Landscape photographers use this effect a lot. On top of that, the aperture you choose also alters
the exposure of your images by making them brighter or darker.

HOW APERTURE AFFECTS EXPOSURE

Aperture has several effects on your

photographs. Perhaps the most obvious is the
brightness, or exposure, of your images. As
aperture changes in size, it alters the overall
amount of light that reaches your camera sensor –
and therefore the brightness of your image.

A large aperture (a wide opening) will pass

a lot of light, resulting in a brighter photograph. A
small aperture does just the opposite, making a
photo darker. Take a look at the illustration below to
see how it affects exposure:

In a dark environment – such as indoors or at night – you will probably want to select a large
aperture to capture as much light as possible. This is the same reason why people’s pupils dilate when it
starts to get dark; pupils are the aperture of our eyes.
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HOW APERTURE AFFECTS DEPTH OF FIELD

The other critical effect of aperture is depth of

field. Depth of field is the amount of your photograph
that appears sharp from front to back. Some images
have a “thin” or “shallow” depth of field, where the
background is completely out of focus. Other images
have a “large” or “high” depth of field, where both the
foreground and background are sharp.

WHAT ARE F-STOP AND F-NUMBER?

So far, we have only discussed aperture in general terms like large and small. However, it can also
be expressed as a number known as “f-number” or “f-stop”, with the letter “f” appearing before the number,
such as f/8.

LARGE VS SMALL APERTURE

There’s a catch – one important part of

aperture that confuses beginning
photographers more than anything else. This is
something you really need to pay attention to
and get correct: Small numbers represent large
apertures, and large numbers represent small
apertures!

That’s not a typo. For example, f/2.8 is

larger than f/4 and much larger than f/11. Most
people find this awkward, since it goes against
our basic intuition. Nevertheless, this is a fact of
photography.

TYPES OF LENSES ACCORDING TO THE TYPES OF IMAGE THEY PRODUCE

CONVEX LENS – A convex lens is also called a

converging lens because it makes parallel light
rays passing through it bend in meet inward and
converge at a spot just beyond the lens known as
the focal point.

CONCAVE LENS – Also known as negative lens,

it is exactly the opposite with outer surfaces
curving inward so it makes parallel light rays
curved outward
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LENS ABERRATION
A perfect lens can produce a perfect image. But seven primary lens aberrations can blur or distort
the image instead, and they should be considered when creating an optical system. A lens collects light
from a point on an object and focuses it to a corresponding conjugate point on an image.

Types of Lens Aberration

ASTIGMATISM – Is one where rays where propagate into

perpendicular planes have different foci. When astigmatism is
present in a lens system, fans of rays of differing orientations at
the lens aperture tend to focus on differing curved surfaces.

CHROMATIC ABERRATION – It is also called achromatism,

chromatic distortion and sphero chromatism in an effect
resulting from dispersion in which there is a failure of a lens to
focus and colors to the same convergence point.

COMA – It is known as comatic aberration derive its name from the

comet like appearance of the aberrated image. Coma is an
aberration that afflicts off-axis light bundles in a manner quite similar
to the way in which spherical aberration affects axial bundles.

FIELD CURVATURE – Also known as “curvature of field or

Petzval field curvature, is a common optical problem that
causes a flat object to appear sharp only in a certain part.
Field curvature in most optical systems, the final image must
be formed on a plane or flat surface. Most optical systems
tend to form that image on a curved surface. The nominal
curvature (1/radius) of that surface is referred to as the
Petzval, or field curvature of the lens.

DISTORTION – It is a deviation from rectilinear projection, projection in which straight in an image.

Distortion is a unique aberration in that it does not affect the quality of the image in terms of sharpness or
focus. Rather, distortion affects the shape of the image, causing it to depart from a true scaled duplicate of
the object. On the other hand, if the system exhibits negative distortion, the resulting image assumes a
barrel.
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TYPES OF DISTORTION

BARREL DISTORTION – In barrel distortion, the

straight line appears to curve outward, resembling
a barrel. It is normally caused when wide-angle
lenses are used, in which the light rays from the
edges of the frame are refracted more than those
from the center.

PINCUSHION DISTORTION – In this type of

distortion, straight lines appear to be curved inward,
resembling the shape of a pincushion. It commonly
occurs in telephoto lenses, where the light rays from
the center of the frame are refracted more than those
from the edges.

Type of Lenses According to their Degree of Correction for Lens Aberration

SIMPLE MINISCUS LENS – It is usually used in inexpensive camera.

RAPID RECTILINEAR LENS – It is also known as RR lens, is symmetrical pair of cemented
achromatic doublets.
ASTIGMATIC LENS – It is also known as astigmatism lenses a photographic lens completely
corrected for spherical aberration, coma and astigmatism.
ACHROMATIC LENS – It is known as achromatic lens that is designed to limit the effects of
chromatic and spherical aberration.