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A friend of mine, who happens to be a chef, has a favorite pastime; she sits down at a dish of food and then proceeds to tell me every amount of every ingredient that makes up said dish of food. It keeps her on her toes, so she says. She also says she had to eat a whole lot of food to get where she is.

I say it’s the same in photography; the photographer who is starting off should know all of the little parts that go into making up the image, then take a whole lot of images to experiment with that knowledge.

This article can certainly help you with that first point, but the second is up to you!

An Overview of the Camera

At a basic level, the parts of a camera include the following:

The Medium
This is a term for the object to which an image is recorded. In terms of a camera, the medium is usually a digital image sensor or film.

Lens
It is the job of the lens to get light into the camera and onto the medium so it can be recorded as an image.

Shutter
Behind the lens, but in front of the recording medium sits the camera’s shutter. Pressing the shutter release button opens the shutter, exposing light to the medium.

Flash
Most modern cameras have a built in flash. It is the job of this flash to illuminate objects in dimly-lit situations.

Mode Dial
The mode dial is a virtue of most digital cameras as well as modern film cameras and allows you to set the camera in several “modes”.

Illustration: Patrick Lydon

There are five more short articles in this series, each covering one of the above parts in more detail…

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