Learning Photography Course — 3. Every Kind of Camera

Module 3 of the Learning Photography Course. Every camera ever made has the same three parts: a hole, a shutter and a recording surface. Only four things genuinely differ between them — the size of the recording surface, whether the lens comes off, how you see the picture before you take it, and how much computation sits between the light and the file. This module works through every kind of camera against those four.

Single-use cameras and why a fixed exposure works at all; digital compacts, and the correction that the type one-inch sensor is not an inch; bridge cameras and what a sixty-times zoom actually costs in aperture; the single-lens reflex, drawn as a mechanism — the mirror, the pentaprism, the blackout and the one advantage no successor has; mirrorless, and why taking the mirror out fixed front-focus, shortened the flange distance and opened the adapter market; sensor size treated as the three separate questions it really is, because field of view, depth of field at the same framing, and noise have three different answers and the argument only gets heated when they are merged; medium and large format, leaf shutters and movements; and the phone, where a sensor that should not compete competes anyway by stacking frames.

The module closes on the industry in real numbers, read from CIPA's own statistical release rather than from reporting of it.

Figures are sourced. Where a number could not be traced to a primary source — the precise 2010 peak, and any figure for stops of stabilisation — the module says so and declines to assert it.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.