ABSTRACT
In its simplest form, a camera is a device for capturing light and transmitting it to a medium that allows the photographers to fix an image of a moment in time. The first day of the author’s basic photography class in college found him making a rough "pinhole" camera from a simple, "light-proof" container with a very small hole and something to cover the hole with. The image was a simple black-and-white landscape, neither well framed nor optimally exposed, but his experience with this experiment demonstrates how ultimately simple the process of fixing an image can be. The eye has a number of very delicate structures that help to record an image. A traditional single-lens-reflex film camera has a few basic parts, including a lens with an aperture, a mirror, a prism, a viewfinder, and a shutter curtain, and film in a transport mechanism.
