Please tell me, in small words, how a camera works?

Question

It just doesn't seem logical to me. How does it capture the image?

Answer 1

try this

http://www.howstuffworks.com/camera.htm

Answer 2

Ok, don't listen to any of the above responses.

What happens when you press the shutter button is that a tiny boot swings inside your camera and kicks a tiny fairy in the butt.

This wakes up the fairy who quickly grabs its pad and drawing pencils and looks out through the now open shutter in your lens.

It quickly sketches  everything it sees on its pad. Now this is where 2 different things happen depending on the type of camera you have.

If you have a film camera, it takes its picture and copies it onto the film negative by carving it with a tiny little knife.

If you have a digital camera, it sits at a tiny little computer and scans its sketch and lets the computer transfer the picture into a digital binary stream of 0's and 1's. Then is saves it to the memory card.

Now the funny thing is that depending on your fairy's mood when it wakes up, either grumpy of cheerful, means your picture is going to turn out blurry or clear.

Hope this helps.  :)

Answer 3

1.  Light goes through glass.  The glass is not flat.  The roundness makes the light focus into a picture.

2.  The light goes through the aperature.  The aperature limits the light going through.  If the aperature is big lots of light goes through, but not everything might be in focus.  If the aperature is small not much light goes through but the picture can be a lot more clear.

3.  The shutter opens.  How long the shutter is determined by how much light is getting in.  With less light, the shutter stays open longer.

4.  The focused light hits a sensor.  The sensor is a checkboard of little solar panels.  Each group of four solar panels is called a pixel.  The pixel has one red, one blue, and two green solar panels.  

5.  A computer chip measures the electricity at each solar panel and runs it through a complicated formula to make a file.  

6.  The file is saved on a memory card.