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Cameras and Lenses (2020)

Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.

Your eyelids covering some part of your iris simply act as an aperture that decreases the angle of the cone of light falling into your eyes making things sightly less blurry on your retina. While we, in our world of computer simulations on this website, can maintain the illusion of simple and perfect systems devoid of aberrations, vignetting, and lens flares, real cameras and lenses have to deal with all these problems to make the final pictures look good. The simple act of pressing the shutter button in a camera app on a smartphone or on the body of a high-end DSLR is effortless, but it’s at this moment when, through carefully guided rays hitting an array of photodetectors, we immortalize reality by painting with light.

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