How does a camera take photos?

You press a button — click! — and a moment is saved forever as a photo. How can a little box catch a picture out of thin air?

Light brings the picture

Everything you see is made of light bouncing off things and into your eyes. A camera works a bit like an eye. At the front it has a curved glass piece called a lens.

The lens bends the light coming in and squeezes it into a tiny, sharp picture inside the camera. It even flips the picture upside down — but don’t worry, the camera turns it the right way for you.

The camera catches the light

Behind the lens is a special part that catches the picture. In old cameras this was film, which changed colour where the light touched it. In new cameras it is a sensor — a flat chip covered in millions of tiny light-catchers.

Each light-catcher measures how bright and what colour its little spot of light is. Together they build up the whole picture.

Saving the moment

The camera turns all those measurements into a photo and stores it, so you can look at it again and again. Press the button a hundred times and you can keep a hundred moments!

Wonder fact: The first photo ever made took about eight hours to capture. Today your phone snaps a photo in a tiny fraction of a second!