Since I really love to photograph, and like to know more about manual adjustments, so you can get special effects, I thought it was a good idea to share the information with all forum members. That's why this post is the beginning of my Photographers 101.
-Enjoy
Basics
Let's start with the basics. A camera have a few basic parts, which are all present on every camera, digital or analog, hobby or professional. You have the objective, body and film(transport).
The objective
The objective has a (series) of lenses placed in a body. The distance bitween the lenses and the body determence if subjects close to the photographer are sharp, or things far away are sharp. Some objectives have also the option to magnify subjects which are far away. This is called zoom.
A professional objective with zoom has a indication which tells you how far it can zoom. These indications are most of the time for a 35mm camera.
In example: a standard zoom lens could be 18-55mm. If you divide 55 by 18, you will get the x-amount of zoom. You often see digital camera's stating they have 4x optical zoom. This means the camera can zoom from the lowest ...mm times the ..x optical zoom.
New camera's have also a feature called autofocus. This means that a computerchip inside the camera determince if a image is sharp. If not, it will adjust the distances bitween the lens(es) and the camerabody in order to get a sharp image. Older camera's don't have this feature.
These are the very first basics of objectives, more info to come.
The view-finder
This is where we seperate the available camera's in groups. There are different ways to tell the photographer what the camera will see on his picture. One is with an alternative glass near the objective. It will show you roughly what will be on your film. This thechnique is used most of the time in compact-cameras.
Another way is via a prisma and mirror inside the camera. With this technique, the view-finder has a direct view through the objective, in order to show you what you will see on your film/picture. These are the more professional cameras, also called SLR-cameras (SingleLensReflexCamera), because the mirror will go flip up, so the light can fall on your film, instead of your view-finder. Later you will learn this mirror will flip up and down very quickly.
This is it for today folks, more to come tomorrow
-InfinityEye 2005
