The internal structure of a dSLR camera

     Knowing your dSLR's internal structure is not absolutely necessary. After all, anyone can take an ordinary photo without having to fill their head with all this kind of technical details, but understanding exactly how your camera works and why it behaves the way it does, will take you one step closer into taking AMAZING photographs.

     At first sight it may look like it requires a great effort to understand the ins and outs of a dSLR camera, but after you'll take a closer look you'll see that things are starting to make a lot more sense and you'll discover that in time this knowledge will come as a second nature to you when using your camera.

     Depending on which action you're performing with your camera, the light that comes from the environment will travel through two paths inside your dSLR's body:

• First, when you're viewing a scene the light enters into your lens and goes through the diaphragm
  

  

  Fig. 1- via Wikimedia Commons

  (example on fig.1), which is a mechanism that moves its blades to produces an adjustable opening of your lens and therefore controls the amount of light that passes through it. That opening is called "aperture" and it is measured in f-stops. The diaphragm helps you control the depth of field in a scene by increasing or decreasing the aperture (but more on that later). 

 After that, the light hits a mirror which reflects it into a pentaprism system that flips and turns the image coming from the mirror and from here the light enters the viewfinder, which allows you to see the actual image that your dSLR will capture.

• Now, by pressing down the button when capturing a photo will make that mirror to flip up and away, therefore the light will now pass through the lens and diaphragm and straight through the shutter

  

  Fig. 2- via Wikimedia Commons

  (example in fig. 2). Its purpose is to control the period of time in which the light exposes the sensor and its speed is measured in fractions of a second or in seconds. The shutter helps you control the sharpness of an image or lets you add a motion blur to it by increasing or decreasing the shutter speed. (in a future article we'll also explain the close relationship that exists between the shutter speed and the aperture)

By now we've got to the point when the image is actually captured by the digital image sensor which is exposed by the light that reaches it. Next, the sensor transforms the incoming stream of photons (fancy name given to tiny particles of light) into electrical signals that go through an amplifier then into an Analog to Digital Converter that transforms those signals into zeros and ones in a process called digitizing. Those digits are now sent to the camera's processor and the image is then stored in the chosen format.

     And this is the lights journey starting from your surroundings up until it reaches a digital form that you can now download into you PC, edit and print it.

     Hope you enjoyed it!