The camera has a slanted mirror positioned between the shutter and the lens with a piece of translucent glass and a prism positioned above it. The process is the same for both dslrs and smartphone cameras so let s dig in.

Understanding Camera Lenses

It can see far and is small and light.

Camera lens how it works. When all of those light rays meet back together on a digital camera sensor or a piece of film they create a sharp image. Pocket lint google lens is an ai powered technology that uses your smartphone camera and deep machine learning to not only detect an object in front of the camera lens but understand this and. Understanding camera lenses can help add more creative control to digital photography.

A camera lens takes all the light rays bouncing around and uses glass to redirect them to a single point creating a sharp image. The user or smartphone focuses the lens light enters the lens the aperture determines the amount of light that. How do lenses work.

They were also competitively priced. Choosing the right lens for the task can become a complex trade off between cost size weight lens speed and image quality. A mirror lens also known as reflex or catadioptric lens was once very popular but now it has been largely forgotten.

Revisit the physics of how lenses work and how refraction spherical aberration and chromatic aberration come about. Have more questions about lenses. A lens works by refraction.

A fisheye lens can see wider than any other type of lens. This configuration works like a periscope the real image bounces off the lower mirror on to the translucent glass which serves as a projection screen. Convex lenses bulge out in the middle like lentils while concave lenses cave in in the middle and bulge out at the edges.

While they have become more advanced throughout the years lenses are basically simple objects pieces of glass that refract light and direct it toward an image plane toward the back of the camera. Depending on how the glass in the lens is shaped the amount of distance the crisscrossing light needs to converge properly on the image plane varies. Lens designers spend much of their time ensuring that the natural tendency in optical lens combinations to exhibit geometric distortion like barrel distortion where vertical and horizontal lines curve outwards or pincushion distortion where the lines curve inwards is minimised.

Popular in the 1970s and 80s telephoto mirror lenses were cool to own and use because they were much more compact than conventional telephoto lenses. It bends light rays as they pass through it so they change direction. This tutorial aims to improve understanding by providing an introductory overview of concepts relating to image quality focal length.

You can read a full explanation of why this happens in our article on light.