How ordinary film cameras works

How ordinary film cameras works?

If you have an old-style camera, you'll know that it's useless without one vital piece of equipment: a film. A film is a long spool of flexible plastic coated with special chemicals (based on compounds of silver) that are sensitive to light.

To stop light spoiling the film, it is wrapped up inside a tough, light-proof plastic cylinder—the thing you put in your camera.

When you want to take a photograph with a film camera, you have to press a button.

This operates a mechanism called the shutter, which makes a hole (the aperture) open briefly at the front of the camera, allowing light to enter through the lens (a thick piece of glass or plastic mounted on the front).

The light causes reactions to take place in the chemicals on the film, thus storing the picture in front of you.

This isn't quite the end of the process, however. When the film is full, you have to take it to a drugstore (chemist's) to have it developed.

Usually, this involves placing the film into a huge automated developing machine.

The machine opens up the film container, pulls out the film, and dips it in various other chemicals to make your photos appear.

This process turns the film into a series of "negative" pictures—ghostly reverse versions of what you actually saw. In a negative, the black areas look light and vice-versa and all the colors look weird too because the negative stores them as their opposites.

Once the machine has made the negatives, it uses them to make prints (finished versions) of your photos.

If you want to take only one or two photographs, all of this can be a bit of a nuisance. Most people have found themselves wasting photographs simply to "finish off the film." Often, you have to wait several days for your film to be developed and your prints (the finished photographs) returned to you. It's no wonder that digital photography has become very popular—because it solves all these problems at a stroke.

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